Criminology back from boredom

From the New York Times:

Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look 

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 19, 2011 

It was less than 20 years ago that the National Institutes of Health abruptly withdrew funds for a conference on genetics and crime after outraged complaints that the idea smacked of eugenics. The president of the Association of Black Psychologists at the time declared that such research was in itself  “a blatant form of stereotyping and racism.” 

The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns. Now that the human genome has been sequenced, and scientists are studying the genetics of areas as varied as alcoholism and party affiliation, criminologists are cautiously returning to the subject. A small cadre of experts is exploring how genes might heighten the risk of committing a crime and whether such a trait can be inherited.     

The turnabout will be evident on Monday at the annual National Institute of Justice conference in Arlington, Va. On the opening day criminologists from around the country can attend a panel on creating databases for information about DNA and “new genetic markers” that forensic scientists are discovering. 

“Throughout the past 30 or 40 years most criminologists couldn’t say the word ‘genetics’ without spitting,” Terrie E. Moffitt, a behavioral scientist at Duke University, said. “Today the most compelling modern theories of crime and violence weave social and biological themes together.”   

... Criminologists and sociologists have been much more skittish about genetic causes of crime than psychologists.  In 2008 a survey conducted by John Paul Wright, who heads graduate programs at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Criminal Justice, discovered that “not a single study on the biology-crime link has been published in dissertation form in the last 20 years” from a criminal justice Ph.D. program, aside from two dissertations he had personally overseen (one of which was Mr. Beaver’s). He also noted that the top four journals in the field had scarcely published any biological research in the past two decades.  

Mr. Wright said he now thinks “in criminology the tide is turning, especially among younger scholars.”

Is criminology a social science? I hadn't realized that. I thought criminology was just what people who wanted to be prison guards majored in at junior college. 

I'm sort of joking, but I'm kinda not. I am, relatively speaking, a devoted aficionado of the social sciences. If you want your field to be of interest to the intelligent layman, I'm exactly the kind of person you need to interest. Yet, there are a whole bunch of social sciences, such as criminology, that have simply faded out of interest for people like me.

Occam's Butterknife is a big reason why criminology has been so boring for so long. Obviously, the most notable fact about street crime in America is that blacks commit a disproportionate share. And, the most obvious reasons for this are the same reasons as why, say, blacks are disproportionately represented playing defense in the NFL. Here is Lawrence Taylor famously breaking quarterback Joe Thiesmann's leg. You look at L.T. and say: he's got all the tools it takes to be a really good mugger. 

Back in 1985, James Q. Wilson (political scientist) and Richard Herrnstein (psychologist) wrote Crime and Human Nature. It reviewed all the twin studies related to crime up through that point. It documented the obvious. That pretty much ruined criminology, because now the highest service any criminologist could render to the field was to not mention the elephant in the living room.

Similarly, Jonathan Haidt made waves a few months ago by making a speech at a social psychology convention, where he asked all the conservative social psychology professors to raise their hands, and he got three out of about a 1000 or so. 

My amazed response was: Social psychology is a discipline? Why hasn't anybody told me about it before? Maybe the fact that it is so ideologically homogeneous has something to do with why it's so boring and so widely ignored?

In contrast, overall psychology is doing much better at keeping the intelligent layman's attention. For example, here's a paragraph from this article:

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard whose forthcoming book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” argues that humans have become less violent over the millenniums, suggests that the way to think about genetics and crime is to start with human nature and then look at what causes the switch for a particular trait to be flipped on or off.

Let me make a prediction: Pinker's book, which is set for release on October 4, 2011, will be huge. Not necessarily in sales, but everybody will be blogging about it.

Granted, Pinker prefers to be called a "cognitive scientist" rather than a psychologist, but Harvard calls him  psychologist, so that's what the NYT calls him.

The point is that psychology, because they haven't managed to totally squeeze out the politically incorrect psychometricians and other members of the awkward squad, is a relatively happening field.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What I was trying to say

From commenter Big Bill on the amazingly well documented Vancouver riots:

The problem is cell phones with cameras.  

Remember the 16-on-one black gang rape of a 11 year old Hispanic child three months ago? 

The rapists took their own videos and emailed them to each other and their friends via cellphone to cellphone communications, just like the kiddie porn that white girls like to make in the privacy of their bathrooms and send to classmates and friends. Vancouver is merely a continuation of this trend. 

The sheer volume of Vancounver footage is amazing. I have already seen a nicely edited four-camera-shot of the entire cop car burning episode. 

The (chief of staff) surgeon dad of the arsonist apparently saw SOME of the footage of his kid, realized he would be shortly identified by others, lawyered up, and took the kid downtown. 

Dad is on record as saying his kid did not LIGHT the fire. Of course the now-assembled multi-camera shot shows the kid approaching with a lit lighter. 

Really, in any mob scene or gang violence situation from now on, one must assume that the entire event is being secretly filmed from multiple camera angles and that within days someone is going to be making courtroom quality trial graphics and posting them on the Internet for free. 

Even scarier, all the video is tagged not only with (1) the GPS location data for proving the camera location, but (2) time sync data to prove the video cuts were synchronized correctly and (3)cell phone data to permit the police to contact the videographer of the raw footage to testify as a witness. 

The evidence necessary for a bulletproof conviction was created by dozens of people at the very instant of the crime! 

What a strange world we live in.

Many kinds of crime are increasingly out-of-date. Hopefully, more and more would-be criminals will figure this out, too.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Popular Crime" by Bill James

For a long time, Bill James, the famous baseball statistics analyst, has been promising books on non-baseball subjects. Now, he's delivered one, Popular Crime, on the history of crime stories. I review it in my new column in Taki's Magazine.

It’s a read-250-books-and-write-another-one effort. James summarizes scores of notorious killings from Lizzie Borden through JonBenét Ramsey. He has a proven record of pattern recognition ability and solid sense, so anything he writes is of some interest. 

For example, did Bruno Hauptmann really kidnap Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932? The evidence of his guilt is overwhelming, says James. What about Dr. Sam Sheppard, whose controversial 1954 murder trial inspired The Fugitive? Guilty, although not as charged; James figures he hired a hitman to kill his wife. O.J.? Oh, c’mon … 

Read the whole thing there.

But the real reason to read Bill James is not to watch him recount single events but to watch him draw inferences from masses of data. But there's a structural problem with the whole project: popular crime stories are popular precisely because they are Man Bites Dog stories. James is perfectly aware of that (pp. 36-37), but it seems to get him down because he's always coming up with observations about crime in general that aren't true about popular crime and thus he can't use the stories about criminals in his book to illustrate his observations.

For example, he went on The Colbert Report and mentioned in passing that murderers don't tend to be good looking. A reviewer on Amazon was very offended by that: What about Ted Bundy? What about Robert Chambers, the Central Park Preppie Killer? I think this is a pretty common reaction outside of hardcore baseball statistics fans.

What James needed was to start Popular Crime with a chapter describing Unpopular Crime. He needed to synthesize typical examples of run-of-the-mill crimes that don't get books written about them. For example, the typical acquaintance killing might be a few people are drinking, one guy says something insulting to another guy, the girls laugh at him, so the humiliated guy gets so mad he goes home and gets his gun. What's his plan for getting away with premeditated murder? He kinda hopes the cops don't notice the dead body.

James needs that kind of frame for his book.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gold Chain Homicide

The LA Times has an update on a local 2009 murder that I've referenced a number of times as being characteristic of the more upscale sort of homicides in the modern San Fernando Valley. It turns out that it fits into a couple of my themes: First, that Armenians shooting each other tends to be at least more interesting than Mexicans shooting each other; and second, that social networking technology may be contributing to the decline in crime by making it easier to build a case.

The November 2009 killing that Manjikian is accused of committing drew national attention after being detailed in The Times last year. The events that led to Mike Yepremyan's death began after he sent a text message to his girlfriend, calling her friend Kat Vardanian a bitch. 

According to prosecutors, Vardanian saw the text message and, enraged, called her brother to beat up Yepremyan. Soon after, Yepremyan began receiving phone calls from a stranger who eventually told him to meet him at a Sears parking lot in North Hollywood, according to witnesses. 

There, Yepremyan and several friends encountered two men. The conversation appeared to be coming to a peaceful conclusion when, suddenly, one man struck Yepremyan. Right after that, authorities said, Manjikian brandished a gun and shot the 19-year-old in the back of his head. 

Manjikian and the other man, identified by prosecutors as Vahagn Jurian, sped off in a black BMW with no front license plate. ...

So, this is a pretty standard lunkhead killing. But, then it got interesting as the bereaved father set about data-mining social networks to figure out whodunnit.

In the months after his son's death, Art Yepremyan lost hope that police would find a suspect. He hired Nazarian, and together they began identifying individuals they believed might have been involved based on relationships with Jurian, Vardanian and others. They created a list of hundreds using online social networking sites and other sources, then began honing that list. 

Armenian Americans hail from all over world, but the construction of their last names can reflect their origins. 

Art Yepremyan, an Armenian immigrant himself, said he isolated names that could be traced to Armenia, where he believed his son's killer was from. Using connections from that country, he further narrowed the names down to families that lived in a particular neighborhood there, where he believed the killer's family had lived. 

In an interview in his backyard last year, he scrawled a haphazard web of links from one supposed suspect to another. As unconventional as his methods may have been, he identified Manjikian as the man he thought killed his son, the same man the LAPD eventually accused.

The LAPD finally tracked Manjikian down to a resort town in Puerto Rico and had him arrested, but a local judge let him out on bail and he vanished again.

But the larger point is that today's youths' urge to document every bit of their social lives in text and pictures means that they have even more incentive to behave.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James Q. Wilson on fall in crime

J.Q. Wilson reviews arguments for explaining the decline in crime in the WSJ. He gives some credence to the lead theory. It would be nice to see the lead theory both more fleshed out and more critiqued. 

What about popular culture? Are there movies today that portray criminals as sympathetic characters? The heist film -- The Town, Fast Five, Oceans 11, or Inception -- remains alive. But the heists in contemporary films are so complicated, require so much planning, training, and teamwork to pull off, that they send the message that you might as well become a second unit movie director. A lot of heist movies these days are actually metaphors about making movies -- Inception, most obviously -- and movies these days are ridiculously complicated to make. 

Moreover, movies promote themselves with "The Making of" documentaries about how complicated they are to make. How many young people have watched The Making of Inception documentary about how many hundreds of experts had to work together to make a movie about expert criminals?

It must be quite daunting for young would-be criminals to be told over and over again by their favorite movies that only by organizing superbly can they become successful criminals.

It's like the flip side of the CIS crime shows on TV that have taught a generation that cops have giant computer monitors that will instantly display the faintest clue that will prove the perp guilty. Heist movies teach the lesson that if you want to outsmart all that CIS technology, you'd better belong to a gang of genius criminals, each of whom is the master of some arcane field of knowhow.

I can imagine that a lot of 13-year-olds would think it cool to join a gang like that, but they don't know any gangs like that. They look around at the gang members they know, like their cousin Jesus, and most of them seem like doomed idiots.

My impression is that popular culture today has gotten rather authoritarian or militaristic. Cops used to be portrayed as big dumb Irishmen, easy to outwit. But now, they're portrayed as practically Seal Team 6, with lots of cool weapons and training. Authority has most of the glamor these days, while criminals seem like losers.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Homicides down

From the LA Times:

California’s homicide rate continued to fall in 2010, reaching the lowest level since 1966, Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris announced Tuesday. 

Preliminary figures gathered by the California Department of Justice from the state's largest jurisdictions show the number of homicides reported in 2010 declined by 9.6% from 2009.
That is the fifth year of declines in killings. 

There were 1,335 homicides in 89 of the state's largest jurisdictions in 2010, according to the report, down from 1,476 in 2009. 

The continuing drop reflects a trend seen in Los Angeles, where there were 293 homicides in 2010, down from 312 the year before, according to the state report.

This is welcome news. The traditional liberal assumption that crime is driven by Les Miserables-like stealing of loaves of bread to feed starving families has been outmoded for some time.

But, what is going on? I've suggested a number of reasons over the years. Besides implementing James Q. Wilson's theory of incapacitating bad guys by long prison sentences (a system threatened by yesterday's Supreme Court ruling to release 33,000 crooks from California prisons), the payoff from crime has diminished relative to the risk of getting caught. The rise of cell phones that track exactly where you are at all times is particularly daunting to teenagers who are thinking about a life of crime but who also want to stay current on their social network. If you can't brag about your crimes on MySpace without creating a permanent record that can be used against you in court, maybe it makes more sense to stay home and play Grand Theft Auto than to go out and commit it.

A couple of suggestions that I don't think have drawn enough attention are:

- Lack of a new drug. Fortunately, nobody has invented a new super drug since crack in the mid 1980s.  Crack was just an all-around disaster: a drug aimed at poor people, which made them nastier, and which generated vast amounts of money where there wasn't much of a settled cartel to keep dealers from shooting each other.

- Rick Nevin's work on lead in the environment. In 1939, Robert A. Heinlein drew up his famous "Future History" chart showing how his early sci-fi short stories fit together chronologically. The most striking prediction he made was that the 1960s and 1970s would be the Crazy Years. Lead in the environment from gasoline, paint, and industrial air pollution might have had something to do with this. (On the other hand, you would think Japan ought to have had Crazy Years, too, but didn't.) I considered Nevin's theory here in 2007 at some length. It seems to me to deserve more investigation.

- I think we may be getting a less violent sort of Mexican illegal alien since the rise of the drug wars in Mexico over the last couple of decades. Mexico used to be a police state in which the police had such an upper hand that life was pretty calm. My father and I wandered all over Mexico on vacations in the 1960s to mid 1980s without noticing much crime other than shakedowns, or much evidence that anybody was worried about crime. To the kind of young Mexican man who liked crime, America may have seemed like a happier hunting ground.

On a 1996 trip to Ensenada, however, the number of men standing around gripping automatic weapons was not confidence inducing. The gigantic new mountaintop villas overlooking the seaside golfcourse suggested that I didn't want to know how the owners had gotten their wealth or why they felt the need to employ so many men with AK-47s to guard them.

As American police forces regained the upper hand in the 1990s by sending criminals off to prison for a long time, opportunities for dangerous young men boomed in Mexico's burgeoning crime world. I suspect that America started getting the less violent illegal immigrants on average, while their more dangerous cousins stayed home to be narcos. There may even have been some reverse migration of the craziest Mexican-Americans into Mexico to fight in the drug wars.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How much evidence is there against DSK?

Is there enough evidence to convict Dominique Strauss-Kahn in court? I can't tell. Maybe on Friday at the Grand Jury hearing more will be revealed. I expected there to be more by now, though.

From the outside, we have what looks like a He Said She Said case. The accuser is being kept anonymous, while the accused is the head of the International Monetary Fund. So, this being 2011, we naturally believe the accuser on the grounds that an anonymous person is likely more reliable than a famous international financial expert. 

In the case of this particular international financial expert, moreover, we have a long chain of rumors about him abusing women under his influence. DSK is an expert at misusing influence. On the other hand, a maid with a vacuum cleaner isn't somebody who thinks that maybe if she gives in to his advances, she'll get put in charge of the Portugal bailout. 

What facts have been revealed might be consistent with a variety of scenarios, none of which would reflect well on DSK. But not all of them would be consistent with outright stranger rape. For example, say he lays a few Benjamin Franklins on the table. Needing cash, the maid accepts them. A few minutes later, out in the corridor, she runs into her boss, who asks why her lipstick is a mess. Panicking about losing her job, she makes up a story about a naked presidential candidate jumping her and forcing her to make a mess of her lipstick. 

Well, maybe. And, keep in mind, that's probably the scenario that makes DSK look best (short of a gigantic movie-style conspiracy), which isn't very good. It's easy to make up scenarios more plausible than the official one where DSK is still criminally guilty of some version of rape. But, I'll skip the graphic details of those scenarios.

Yet, what strikes me as most telling against DSK is that the management of the Sofitel, a French-owned hotel, apparently spent some time thinking about what to do before deciding to call the cops. Hotel managers generally don't like having potential presidents arrested for scandalous events inside their hotels. That they eventually decided to trust their poorly paid employee over their VIP guest suggests they had good reasons (hallway video?) to believe her. 

But, despite the millions of words published on this story, I don't exactly know what those reasons were.

P.S. There's also the weirdness about the maid living in a charitable complex for AIDS sufferers. She was given "asylum" in the U.S. 7 years ago, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Can foreigners get asylum in the U.S. for having AIDS? Of course they can.

Political Asylum for People with HIV
By Rosa Bramble Weed, L.C.S.W.
From AIDS Community Research Initiative of America
Fall 2006 

There are significant numbers of immigrants living with HIV in New York, receiving medical treatment and other services important to a healthy quality of life. Some arrived as refugees seeking asylum. Others, however, are not aware that in their native countries they lived under circumstances that make them eligible for political asylum.

So, what's the story with this?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Nich set me up!"

Okay, that reference to the Marion Barry oldie-but-goodie is a stretch, but it appears the French believe:

- Socialist party candidate for president Dominique Strauss-Kahn is assuredly guilty; and

- President Nikolas Sarkozy had to have set him up.

The more you hear about these two guys, the more you start to wonder: Why couldn't both be true?

You know, both were true for Mayor Barry ...

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Omar Thornton's victims exonerated of racism

Remember last August when Omar Thornton murdered eight white men, then called them racist? At the behest of a vigilant press, government officials have been diligently investigating the late Omar's charges ever since. In a shocking revelation last Friday, police reported that the victims of the thieving mass murderer didn't deserve to be murdered.

From Reuters via WHNT:

No proof of racism at site of 2010 shooting rampage: police
Zach Howard
Reuters
May 13, 2011 

CONWAY, Mass (Reuters) - There is no proof of systemic racism at a Connecticut beer distributor where a gunman shot dead eight people last year because he said African-Americans were treated badly, a police probe concluded. 

Omar Thornton, 34, a driver at Hartford Distributors, a family-owned beer wholesaler 10 miles east of the state capital in Manchester, shot eight people before killing himself in August 2010. 

Minutes before the frenzy took place, Thornton, who was black, was fired at a disciplinary meeting for having stolen beer and empty kegs from the company. 

Manchester police on Thursday released a 543-page report on its investigation into the killing ... 

Police Chief Marc Montminy told a press conference that there had been allegations that Thornton had photographic evidence of racial slurs against him on his cell phone. But Montminy said forensic analysis of the phone showed that "that is not true." 

"We also interviewed the other minorities that worked at the facility to see if there was systemic racism within the building, and not only did they not agree with Omar's position but they found quite the contrary," Montminy said. ... 

"You probably want to know why I shot this place up. This place is a racist place. They treat me bad over here," Thornton said in a recording of the 911 call. "They treat all the other black employees bad over here too. So, I took it into my own hands and handled the problem. I wish I (could have) got more of the people."

Clearly, our society needs a 543-page report on whether or not Matthew Yglesias was only getting what he deserved.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Thinking about hate crimes

The apparent random racial beating over the weekend of Matthew Yglesias, perhaps the most influential political blogger of his generation, raises questions about what ought to be considered a hate crime.

There's a vast amount of confusion in our society because the megaphone is routinely seized by hate-filled pundits who denounce everybody they hate as being driven by hate. So, the concept of a "hate crime" is murky, to say the least.

But, society does have an interest in deterring through harsher penalties crimes not of passion but of premeditated malice, cold-blooded crimes that occur only because of animus toward groups. Quite possibly, "hate crimes" is the wrong term completely for these types of actions, but that seems to be what we are stuck with.

My view is that motivation for a crime should matter some in punishing the crime.

For example, by way of analogy, I particularly loathe witness-murdering.

Consider two homicides:

- A man comes home and finds another man in bed with his wife. In a jealous rage, he strikes the man with a blunt object. He immediately calls 9-11 and asks for an ambulance for his victim.

- Two men are robbing a liquor store with a confederate. One robber realizes that the lone customer in the store went to school with him and could identify him. He tells his colleague (in a conversation recorded on a hidden security camera's microphone) that because he already has two strikes against him, if that customer testifies, he'll go to jail for life. So, he then shoots the customer and the clerk to silence them. There are no other motives for the murders.

I think that in an era of long sentences, the death penalty can play a useful role in stigmatizing and deterring cold-blooded witness-murdering, but it wouldn't be right in the first case, a classic crime of passion.

Similarly, consider two crimes that might be subject to additional hate crime penalties:

- A man comes home and finds another man in bed with his wife. In a jealous rage, he calls her a "bitch" and punches her. 

- Two men are sitting around bored and decide to go "polar bear hunting," planning to punch any random white man they see walking through their neighborhood in the back of the head, then kicking him. 

Now, it's not uncommon for prosecutors to attempt to pile on hate crime penalties in cases where a member of a less legally privileged group uses, during a fit of rage, an epithet for a member of a more legally privileged group. But, clearly, the cuckolded man didn't sock his cheating wife because she was a woman, but because she was cheating. Punishing him extra for saying the epithet "bitch" is severely confusing cause and effect for no good purpose in deterring future violence.

In contrast, the second case is one that the law might well use additional penalties to deter because, like witness-murdering, it's rational and malign. There's no other motive for attacking a random white man other than the satisfactions of attacking a random white man.

Or consider, these two cases:

- Two men are sitting around talking angrily about their neighbor who dissed them yesterday and might be making time with one of the guys' woman. Then they see a man who kind of looks like the neighbor walking by in the dark. Enraged, and under incorrect apprehension of his identity, they punch random passerby Matthew Yglesias in the back of the head.

- Two men are sitting around bored and decide to go "polar bear hunting" and thus punch in the back of the head the first white guy they happen to see walking by, who happens to be Matthew Yglesias.

The first case seems to me like a pretty average screwed-up crime among the screwed-up classes, which should be punished in a pretty average fashion -- fairly harshly, according to my views, but there's no obvious reason for incremental penalties. It wouldn't be the kind of crime that strikes other as worth imitating.

The second case, however, seems like a classic racist hate crime. There was no motivation whatsoever for this violence to occur other than boredom and racial animus. Society has an interest in punishing more heavily in the name of deterrence otherwise pointless crimes carried out not in the heat of passion but with malice aforethought.

At minimum, society has an interest in keeping stuff like this from becoming fashionable. Say, or example, a third person videoed the attack on Yglesias, and the whole point of the attack was to have something cool to post on YouTube. 

Granted, proving in court the lack of any other motive is often difficult, and so be it. Better ten guilty men go free and all that. But, it is reasonable to have the threat of additional penalties for violence carried out for rational but malign reasons, such as witness-murdering or polar bear hunting.

Of course, all this logic chopping isn't very relevant to how most people think about hate crimes, which is in Who-Whom terms. Matthew Yglesias is extremely well-plugged into the world of Washington punditry, but it doesn't occur to his peers that this attack on him could possibly be a hate crime ... because he's white.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Was the beating of Matthew Yglesias a hate crime?

Prominent Washington blogger Matthew Yglesias writes:

So . . . I was walking back from the home of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman and instead of doing the normal thing and taking Q Street west to 5th and then walking south, I wanted to take a shortcut by walking south on North Capitol to then cut southwest on New York. But then lo and behold right by Catania Bakery [i.e., a little over a mile due north of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.] a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the head, then kicked me a couple of times before running off. Once, years ago, in Amsterdam a guy threatened me with a knife and took my money. These guys took nothing, and just inflicted a bit of pain. All things considered the threaten/rob model of crime seems a lot more beneficial to both parties than the punch-and-run model. But I guess it takes all kinds.

I'm terribly sorry to hear about this crime. Yglesias should make sure to take it easy for a few days after being punched in the head in case there is some delayed reaction affecting his balance -- e.g., don't ride a bicycle in traffic.

Beyond physical injuries, well, I've never been the victim of street violence, but judging from the psychological trauma I've felt merely from being the victim of burglars -- the reminder of one's own insecurity, the insult to one's self-respect -- that aspect of crime shouldn't be overlooked. And being punched and kicked by strangers is far worse.

Like me, Yglesias greatly enjoys walking, and being mugged while out walking can ruin a wonderful hobby.

No details on the attackers, but, with no apparent monetary motive, this might have been a racial hate crime.

It will be interesting to see whether this despicable violence against perhaps the leading opinion journalist of his young generation creates much media attention, or whether it's dropped down the memory hole as too uncomfortable to think about. Yglesias, with his enthusiasm for promoting urban living and walkability, is a leading spokesman for a broad movement I feel warmly toward -- well-educated younger people who are attempting to reclaim urban areas for the urbane. But this crime against a public face of the movement -- while he was walking through an urban space, no less -- demonstrates the risks involved.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A Dog Bites Man Story

From the AP:

A murder charge against the woman who falsely accused three Duke lacrosse players of raping her is but the latest problem for a woman friends say is still haunted by the stigma of the lacrosse case. 

Crystal Mangum, 32, was indicted Monday on a charge of first-degree murder and two counts of larceny. She has been in jail since April 3, when police charged her with assault in the stabbing of her boyfriend Reginald Daye, 46. He died after nearly two weeks at a hospital. 

As for the poor bastard Ms. Mangum is alleged to have stabbed to death this month, well, his problems are over, so let's get right back to Crystal's troubles.

Friends said Mangum has never recovered from the stigma brought by the lacrosse case and has been involved in a string of questionable relationships in an attempt to provide stability for her children. 

Mangum, who is black, falsely accused the white lacrosse players of raping her at a 2006 party for which she was hired to perform as a stripper. The case heightened long-standing tensions in Durham about race, class and the privileged status of college athletes. ...

Okay, most of this article sounds like it was written by Oprah's friend Gayle, but the last line almost makes up for the rest:

Even when Daye's nephew talked to a 911 dispatcher after the stabbing, he referenced the notoriety Mangum still carries. 

"It's Crystal Mangum. THE Crystal Mangum," said the nephew, whose name was removed from a publicly-released version of the emergency call. "I told him she was trouble from the damn beginning."

I think the AP Style Guide should recommend that all news stories try to end with a quote from somebody who sounds like Chris Rock's grandfather. Maybe the NYT should have talked to the nephew before running two dozen stories based on the assumption that Crystal Mangum was obviously telling the truth about the Great White Defendants.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A prediction

Over the last few decades, our society has made impressive progress on solving one of the two main hurdles -- crime and schools -- to raising a middle class family in dense urban neighborhood. We reduced the crime rate through a variety of means, the most obvious of which has been by throwing a huge number of guys in jail, most of them minorities. 

In 1974, Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson published a little book called Thinking About Crime in which he said that the best way to fight crime is lock more criminals up for longer periods. You see, he explained, when they're in prison, they can't victimize people who aren't in prison. This concept was very controversial at the time. Wilson's plan to fight crime by locking up criminals would obviously inflict disparate impact discrimination upon minorities, and that was just inconceivable to most advanced thinkers in 1974. 

Eventually, however, that's exactly what we started doing. And, in the long run, it worked. 

Today, you aren't supposed to remember this or think about it, but very few people are much bothered by it. Between 1981 and the early 1990s, I had my car windows smashed four or five times by criminals. I bought a new car in 1988 without a radio so that the bastards wouldn't smash my windows to steal it. So my wife bought a $10 transistor radio so she could listen to tinny-sounding music while she was driving. And they smashed my window and stole her radio and fenced it for about a buck. 

But I haven't had that happen to me since the mid-1990s. Why not? Well, for one reason is that a lot of these bastards got caught and locked up. Some of the criminals who did this to me may well be still in prison for other stuff they did.

Guess what? I sure don't miss that aspect of The Old Days: walking to my car and finding its windows smashed. Most people don't.

What about schools? How will today's well-educated young white urbanites figure out a way to educate their kids in public schools in urban neighborhoods? 

I don't know, but I suspect the SWPLs will eventually solve this problem. There is simply too much talent that wants to live downtown and, eventually, raise their kids there for this problem to go unsolved forever. I suspect the solutions will turn out to be about as racially insensitive as the solutions for crime turned out to be. 

My guess is that smart white urbanites will figure out ways to keep most non-Asian minority children out of their own kids' urban public schools. Sure, it sounds inconceivable today, but the real estate is so valuable that tomorrow's SWPLs will figure out ways to do it. 

And, at some point, they'll just do it. 

After it's done, it will be considered in as bad taste for any uncouth person to point out that the reason Ansel Jr.'s public high school school in the city in 2031 is almost all white or Asian is because white people pushed through reforms that had massive disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics as it is considered uncouth today to point out that Park Slope or Silver Lake or wherever is now full of white people because white people a few decades ago pushed through reforms that locked up lots of black and Hispanic people. 

But, it will happen.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama Administration: New Orleans PD not shooting enough whites

From WWLTV:

The [Department of Justice Civil Rights Division's] report found from 2009 to 2010 all 27 incidents of NOPD deadly force were against African Americans, and in 2009  the department arrested 500 black and 8 white males under age of 17, which diverges "severely" from national data.

Disparate impact, I tell you!

In 2000 (the most recent data I can find), the NOPD was 51% black. I can't find anything in the Obama Administration's report on the racial identity of these NOPD police officers they are criticizing. That seems like a bit of an omission for a Civil Rights Division report, no? How often does that division forget to mention the racial makeup of an organization they are criticizing?

What former Mayor Ray Nagin called "Chocolate City" had its first African American mayor in 1978 and its first black police chief about a quarter of a century ago. A residency requirement for cops worked to discourage working class whites from joining the NOPD.The NOPD, which had always been shady, became notoriously gangsta in the late 20th Century.

This part of the Civil Rights Divisions' report on the New Orleans' Police Department report makes interesting reading in light of the Civil Right Division's requirement that the Dayton Police Department hire more marginal applicants(see below):

NOPD hired hundreds of officers during a relatively short time period; one estimate is that 400 officers were hired during the three year period following Katrina. In its press to hire these officers, NOPD reportedly lowered its recruiting standards, essentially removing the physical agility requirement and asking the Civil Service Commission to score the written portion of the application less vigorously.

... At the time of our review, the attrition rate for the latest recruit class was nearly sixty percent. Of the sixty-six recruits that successfully completed the recruitment and background investigation, thirty-nine were eliminated from the training class. NOPD expended thousands of dollars to test, train, and conduct background checks on what were clearly marginal applicants, a waste of funds that NOPD could have better used in a more targeted recruiting process. Nonetheless, NOPD’s decision to eject unqualified candidates before they became officers was the appropriate one. In interviews with NOPD officers at all ranks, we heard the consistent complaint that the Training Academy routinely graduated police recruits who were sub-par and not fit for duty.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is working to New Orleansize the Dayton Police Department.

Prediction: Nobody in the Obama DOJ will ever notice the contradiction between their complaints about New Orleans police applicants being scored less vigorously on the written test and their simultaneous demands that Dayton police applicants be scored less vigorously.

That would be HateLogic!

Let me add that the politics of this appear a little byzantine. Federal intervention in the police force was demanded by the new mayor, the first white mayor in 32 years, who was elected after lots of poor black voters were flooded out of the Lower 9th Ward. My guess is that the white mayor's intention is to bring the feds in to stage a quiet coup against a black-dominated institution, but to do it in the name of Civil Rights.

Very clever ... but can this kind of double bankshot maneuver be executed adroitly when nobody is allowed to mention in public what the problem is and only vaguely hint at what the solution is? After all, the Civil Rights Division doesn't have much practice at requiring organizations to grade hiring tests more vigorously. Are Obama's DOJ minions  going to be able to remember that the point of this exercise is to hire smarter, less criminal cops -- i.e., whiter cops? That's not exactly what Civil Rights Division lawyers are trained to do, as Dayton shows. From the report, it looks like the best they'll be able to do is force the NOPD to hire lots of Hispanic and Vietnamese cops. As I said, a double bankshot.

We shall see.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Can you guess the real story behind the story?

Arthur Brisbane, the "Public Editor" of the New York Times, chastises an earlier NYT story:

Gang Rape Story Lacked Balance

The story quickly climbed The Times’s “most emailed” list but not just because of the sensational facts of the crime involved. “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” published on Tuesday, reported the gang rape by 18 boys and men of an 11-year-old girl in the East Texas town of Cleveland.

The viral distribution of the story was, at least in part, because of the intense outrage it inspired among readers who thought the piece pilloried the victim.

My assessment is that the outrage is understandable. The story dealt with a hideous crime but addressed concerns about the ruined lives of the perpetrators without acknowledging the obvious: concern for the victim.

While the story appeared to focus on the community’s reaction to the crime, it was not enough to simply report that the community is principally concerned about the boys and men involved – as this story seems to do. If indeed that is the only sentiment to be found in this community – and I find that very hard to believe – it becomes important to report on that as well by seeking out voices of professional authorities or dissenting community members who will at least address, and not ignore, the plight of the young girl involved.

Let’s consider the particulars:

The story by James C. McKinley Jr. reported that residents of the town noted the girl dressed “older than her age,” wore makeup and fashions “more appropriate to a woman in her 20s” and hung out with older boys at the playground.

The story also quoted one resident, saying, “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?”

Referring to some of the defendants in the case, the same resident was quoted saying, “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
The fourth paragraph of the story laid out the basic themes of the story:

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?

These elements, creating an impression of concern for the perpetrators and an impression of a provocative victim, led many readers to interpret the subtext of the story to be: she had it coming.

What in the world was going on with the initial story? Talking about the clothes the female was wearing and so forth has been a huge feminist no-no in reporting on rape (regular or statutory) cases for a generation or more. Why would the NYT violate feminist shibboleths in initially reporting this story? What facts are crucial to understanding the original NYT story's remarkable concern for the males involved, yet aren't mentioned in either the original story or the ombudsman's critique?

Could it have anything to do with the unmentionable demographics of the accused rapists in this "working-class neighborhood" in Texas? (Judging from the NYT's comments, I'd guess a lot of the emailing of the original article by NYT readers was of the "Look at what those vicious Red State Republicans do to little girls" variety.)

As commenters have pointed out, the NYT's sympathetic coverage of the Cleveland 18 is reminiscent of its sympathetic coverage of the Jena 6, the high school football stars with long records of violent behavior, who stomped an unconscious high school student. In contrast, the NYT's intensive coverage of the Duke Lacrosse 25 who were falsely accused of rape, was unsympathetic in the extreme.

What could possibly explain this pattern? 

Fortunately, we can go to a foreign country to find out what is happening in America and why it's tying the NYT in knots.

The London tabloid The Daily Mail conveniently lists the NYT's omitted facts in its headlines:

Horrific gang rape of 11-year-old girl sparks racial tension as all the accused are black and the victim Hispanic

- Activist claims arrests show 'selective prosecution' of African-American community

-Meeting planned to discuss arrests receives 'death threats'

- Outrage over newspaper report that claimed victim 'dressed older than her age, wearing make-up'

- Defence attorney slammed for suggesting girl was a 'willing participant'

In other words, this is another Jena 6 story -- a bunch of young black guys in a southern small town do something bad to somebody nonblack and then the national press turns it into a story about how these young fellows are, when you stop to think about it, the real victims.

In this case, however, the victim was not a 17-year-old white guy, but an 11-year-old Hispanic girl, so the NYT is getting called out on it, although in an extremely gingerly fashion. In contrast, the ludicrous coverage of the Jena 6 went on and on.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A certain lack of self-awareness

It was only natural during the early hours of Saturday for liberals to hope that the Arizona shooter would turn out to be their Marinus van der Lubbe. Yet, within a few hours, it was obvious that the killer was a long-term loon who didn't fit into the usual political categories. (VDARE has the facts. Link fixed.)

Those facts dissuaded quite a number of commentators, who have since moved on to gun control as their salient for squeezing some advantage out of the massacre. (Of course, in a country with 200,000,000 or so existing guns, gun control is hardly much of a deterrent to this kind of -- fortunately, quite rare -- homicidal maniac. Gun control can play a role in dissuading criminals who don't want to get caught, but not much of one in slowing down the few who have thought things through and don't care about consequences.) 

But, the editorial board of the New York Times, which led a campaign of opprobrium against the voters of Arizona for most of 2010 over SB1070, is trying to rewrite history through sheer control of the bullhorn. From the Monday edition, long after the facts were out:

Shooting in Arizona
Editorial: Bloodshed and Invective

Arizona should take the lead in quieting the voices of intolerance and imposing sensible gun control laws.

In  other words, No Tolerance for anybody we can't tolerate.

... It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. 

But ... we don't care, so we're going to do it anyway:

But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman is, not surprisingly, enraged about what he sees as a climate of hate.

Climate of Hate
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Who cares about facts? What is important is how Paul feels about things. Because Paul is such an even-tempered individual who always has a kind word for everybody, Paul is just furious -- furious -- about hate. Paul hates hate. Paul smash hate!

(By the way, it's instructive to compare press coverage of this massacre to that of the Omar Thornton massacre last August.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How can one story get so many points?

'Do your job, you b#&*h!' slap at cop, New York Post

According to the press accounts, from his car, Wayne Mahlkeshouted at a police office "Do your job you fat bitch".

Here is how I score it:

• The story only is a story because the b-word was used. 1 pt.
  
• The utter pointlessness of it all. 1 pt.
  
• Non-lethal confrontation with a police officer. 1 pt.
  
• One person white, one person black. 1 pt.
  
• Fat person calling person fat. 1 pt.
  
• Very familiar location: Bridge Plaza North at the Queensboro Br. 1 pt.
  
• False claims to work for Bloomberg, Brown. 1 pt.
  
• A gay angle which I don't understand. 1 pt.
  
• The arrogance of being a former staffer for a New York State senator (or two). 1 pt.
  
• Producing two phony parking placards. 1 pt.
  
• Not producing a valid driver's license. 1 pt.
  
• "Don't you know who I am?" 1 pt.
  
• The officer, Denise McDonald, refusing comment to the media. 2 pts.
  
• The great understatement that "this former public servant should have known better" 2 pts.
  
• The revealing insight into how the politically powerful regard themselves and how they regard the police: arrogance. 3 pts.
  

Elsewhere, some comment boxers who have looked at the story that "reasonable suspicion" does not proceed from merely yelling an insult at a cop, so everything that followed the cop's approach to Mahlke's Honda Civic is going to be thrown out, since the stop wasn't constitutional.

I wonder how much time elapsed between his arrest and when he was released on his own recognizance. It might have been a hour. It might have been 24 hours.

This fat lip thing reminds me of Patton's slap

Navy Seals Face Court Martial for Alleged Terrorist Bloody Lip?, CBS News

General George S. Patton was reprimanded and nearly was taken out of the war for slapping two soldiers whom he thought were malingerers. The great movie '''Patton''' blends the two incidents into one.

The Seals deny that they had injured their target. They are not claiming that one of them hit Ahmed Hashim Abed and it was justified.

Patton justified his slapping of these two soldiers as a way to restore their self-confidence. One soldier last admitted that it did. It was wrong then, and today, it is inconceivable that a general would slap a soldier not showing a visible wound.

Violence in the Catholic faith, is limited to self-defense, and in the larger context, internal order (i.e. police) and external threat (i.e. military).

I can't prejudge this case, but I will be paying careful attention.

Did the FBI immediately deny the Fort Hood Shooting was terrorist?

These blogs seem to have thought so.


North Star National. Mark Wilson

North Start National, Andy Hefty

Examiner, Larry Amon

The only official comment I was able to find was that the question of it being a terrorist attack or motivated by terrorism is not yet known. Mark Steyn remarked that if one applies the FBI's narrow definition of terrorism, it only applies to those carrying a Al Queda membership card.

The killing of George Tiller

Like Fr. Frank Pavone, and other Catholic pro-life leaders, I am saddened by the murder of George Tiller (AP News).

The assistance this gives pro-abortion advocates and the damage this does to pro-life advocates is incalculable.

The mainstream media will seek out the fringe of the pro-life movement to attempt to link this unknown killer to the movement should any intemperate comments be made. My prayer is that they come up empty-handed.

We don't know the identity of the killer or his motives. As I am writing this, officials have announced they have a suspect in custody. It was a violation of the principles of non-violence to kill Tiller. Killing Tiller was an evil act. I state that without equivocation or qualification.