NYTimes | Ali-Rashid
Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is
an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations
Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of
Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working
the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the
potential for further gunfire.
They
see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for
self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the
intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s
mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly
addresses.
“White
folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and
black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children
pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Mr. Abdullah, who is
black.
No
one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans.
Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be
crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.
Most
parents Mr. Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but
are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.”
And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying
or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.
“
‘Not my child,’ ” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive
mother. “ ‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I
raised my child.’ ”
His
reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children,
slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our
responsibility first.”
African-Americans
make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last
year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely
the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the
city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.
Nationally,
reliable racial breakdowns exist only for victims and offenders in gun
homicides, not assaults, but those show a huge disparity.
The
gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack
epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still
die from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending
on whether the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I.
statistics show that African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent
of the population, make up about half of both gun homicide victims and
their known or suspected attackers.
“Every
time we look at the numbers, we are pretty discouraged, I have to tell
you,” said Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of
Maryland.
Some
researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is
the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they
say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic
disadvantages that help breed violence.
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