Hwww.dakotavoice.com/2007/04/more-societal-decay.htmlC:/Documents and Settings/Bob Ellis/My Documents/Websites/Dakota Voice Blog 20081230/www.dakotavoice.com/2007/04/more-societal-decay.htmldelayedwww.dakotavoice.com/\sck.svex\Iy GOKtext/htmlUTF-8gzipGJ}/yWed, 31 Dec 2008 22:49:25 GMT"a5db0704-bddd-435c-94b8-20d6f86f7df6"yMozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 3.0x; Windows 98)en, en, *\I Dakota Voice: More Societal Decay

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

More Societal Decay


From Drudge today, about rap star Cam'ron who told "60 Minutes" he wouldn't help police catch a serial killer.

Far more disturbing is this from Geoffrey Canada, an anti-violence advocate from Harlem:

Canada says in the poor New York City neighborhood he grew up in, only the criminals didn't talk to the police, but within today's hip-hop culture, that's changed. "It is now a cultural norm that is being preached in poor communities....It's like you can't be a black person if you have a set of values that say 'I will not watch a crime happen in my community without getting involved to stop it,'" Canada tells Cooper.

Young people from some of New York's toughest neighborhoods echo Canada's assessment, calling the message not to help police "the rules" and helping the police "a crime" in their neighborhoods. These "rules" are contributing to a much lower percentage of arrests in homicide cases -- a statistic known as the "clearance rate" -- in largely poor, minority neighborhoods throughout the country, according to Prof. David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "I work in communities where the clearance rate for homicides has gone into the single digits," says Kennedy. The national rate for homicide clearance is 60 percent. "In these neighborhoods, we are on the verge of -- or maybe we have already lost -- the rule of law," he tells Cooper.

Says Canada, "It's like we're saying to the criminals, 'You can have our community....Do anything you want and we will either deal with it ourselves or we'll simply ignore it.'"

So when we hear of conflicts between minorities and the legal system, is there a genuine problem of racism, or is it this lawless attitude manifesting itself?

Posted by Bob Ellis at 5:21 PM

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