[cw: crime]

Reminder: there's no such thing as a "high crime neighborhood." The whole concept is entirely made up based on our notion of what we consider a crime.

You may be thinking: Not true! A high crime neighborhood has more drug use and sales, theft, and even murder!

But let's dig into that and unpack the racism a little.

Drugs are easiest to understand. At this point everyone should know that white Americans do more drugs than Black Americans. They also do more hard drugs. We don't consider Drs. offices to be high crime, and yet, opioids.

Black neighborhoods only seem like they have more drug use, because of how we've decided to define crimes around drug use, and how we choose to enforce.

The war on drugs allows micro-dosing and dispensaries, but criminalizes possession for poor Black folk.

But what about theft? If you park your car in a high crime area, you're likely to get your windows smashed.

But, most theft in this country, is wage theft. Mostly rich white business owners, stealing wages from poor Black and brown service workers. Between $8B and $15B a year.

But we don't define wage theft as a crime the same way as we define an employer stealing from the cash register, or a homeless person smashing a window. You don't go to jail for wage theft.

Again, this is an arbitrary decision around how we choose to define crime.

Civil asset forfeiture is cops taking cash and other property from folk who are too poor to mount a defense against the theft. Most victims are never charged with a crime. Victims of this theft are disproportionately Black. ~$2B in 2016.

Civil asset forfeiture is not a crime.

Cops stole more stuff from citizens in 2015, than all burglaries in the US combined.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/

So the 2 forms of theft with mostly Black victims, that make up the vast majority of theft, are not even considered crimes.

Our definition of theft is arbitrary.

OK, but what about murder? Clearly there are more murders committed in "high crime" areas?

Again, it depends on our definition of murder and even our definition of location. If I stand on block A, and shoot someone across the street on block B, where did the crime occur? A or B?

Do we define murder as where the body fell? Or where the shooter pulled the trigger? Victim focused? Or killer focused?

This distinction becomes important once we explore how we have arbitrarily decided to define murder.

Shooting folk? Murder!
Operating unsafe factory? Maybe?

Lying about public health data during a pandemic? Not murder!

Grifting supplies needed by FEMA? Not murder!

Cops shooting unarmed folk in the back? Not murder!

So the forms of victimization disproportionately suffered by poor Black folk, don't even register as murder.

Even in the highest gun crime cities in the US, there are a *very* small number of shooters doing most of the killing. Typically fewer than 50 killers in a city of millions.

But we consider entire cities high crime because of them, because they rack up *astronomical* bodycounts.

But... By astronomical we mean 500 to 1000 murders a year, 80% of which will likely be committed by this pod of killers, most of the victims young, Black, male.

But we don't consider *intentional* negligence leading to 10K or 100K deaths, as creating a high crime neighborhood.

Of all the things that police do with their billions of dollars of budget, the one thing they don't do well at all, and the one thing that some residents of supposedly high crime communities (AKA, Black communities) would actually want them to do, is stop these pods.

Dallas PD has a budget of ~$500 MM, and has 3,000 officers and around 500 civilian workers. They only have ~15 homicide detectives.

The other 2,985 officers do a lot of policing of "high crime" neighborhoods. Arresting lots of poor Black folk for drugs and other minor crimes.

[cw:assault]

I'm not going into assault, other than to say: If in 2020 your definition of assault is "Men beating up men that they don't know," then I don't know what to tell you.

If you know that most assault is "Men harming women that they do know," then no explanation needed