According to city murder statistics for 2005, St. Louis – with approximately 12 percent of the region’s population – has a body count greater than all of the area’s other police jurisdictions combined. Moreover, almost 50 percent of the city’s homicides occurred in just two of the city’s nine police districts. The North Side’s 6th and 8th districts both had hefty increases in homicide that added to the 15 percent increase citywide.
Scott Decker, a UM-St. Louis criminologist, says, “What the public often fails to understand is how geographically concentrated violent and gun-related crime is. It’s in the neighborhoods that are most economically and socially repressed.” A police official adds, “Typical victims and their typical killers share traits: they are usually black males in their late teens or early 20s with similar lifestyles and usually acquainted” with one another.
From a diminishing low of 74 murders in the city in 2003, 2005 had 131 killings – 17 more than in 2004. Authorities cite the effectiveness of concentrated police intervention in high-crime neighborhoods to explain some of the more encouraging long-term trends. From an average of 242 killings during a five-year period in the early 1990s, the average has declined to 126 in the ensuing 10 years.
On the national level, African-American columnist Dewayne Wickham writes, “According to Tuskegee Institute data, 3,445 black Americans were lynched in this country between 1882 and 1968.” He adds that “as horrific as that Jim Crow ‘justice’ was, it pales compared with the black-on-black carnage now taking place.” Wickham laments further, “Of the 15,365 black people murdered between 2000 and 2004 whose killers are known to law-enforcement officials, 14,025 were killed by other blacks.” That’s four times as many black people killed by black people during this five-year period as were killed by marauding mobs over the 86 years of lynching.
This doesn’t absolve the terrorists who committed the lynching atrocities or the authorities who condoned and even facilitated these vicious, relentless attacks, which subverted the hopes and aspirations of millions of African Americans over the many years.
There are massive failings in this country, outside our control, that have left so many without a decent education or a job paying a living wage. But it is the African-American community’s responsibility to confront the bitter reality of the damage inflicted by this cancer. The plagues of drug trafficking and drug abuse have exacerbated an already desperate situation. As a result, we have too many people in our communities with too little regard for life. It may appear to be less urgent, for those who have escaped the most violent neighborhoods, but there is a need for all African Americans to become more engaged in efforts to stop the violence.
A scheduled national meeting next month by a group of African-American leaders is supposed to fine-tune their plan to uplift our people. It’s called the “The Covenant with Black America.” Its stated action plan intends to “make blacks healthier, improve the education of black children, reduce the high black incarceration rate, and help black Americans acquire wealth and become economically self-sufficient.” These are worthy objectives whose implementation will mean finding the requisite qualities inside ourselves.
Our response to the slaughter taking place in our communities, which touches so many lives with its menace, will be a measure of how serious we are about throwing off crippling thoughts of futility and refusing to succumb to helpless despair.