TODAY'S LETTER: A California Reader Notes Meg Whitman’s Politically Correct A.K.A. Useless Immigration Position

02/05/10 - Not Your Father's Army, by Chuck Baldwin

02/05/10 - View From Lodi, CA Pittsburgh, PA: Super Bowl Income Opportunities—Proceed With Caution! by Joe Guzzardi

02/04/10 - Left Targets Kevin MacDonald Again. How About These Professors Too?, by Anonymous Attorney

02/04/10 - The Super-Sized Census Boondoggle: Shaping The Electoral Landscape, by Michelle Malkin

Steve Sailer's America's Half Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" now available in paperback - Also as PDF download. [Downloads since October 29 2008: 6461] click here!

Free PDF download of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster Now Available! [Downloads since June 1 2007: 8889]

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Peter Brimelow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in RealVideo: Is Immigration a Problem? Are the Minute Men the Answer? [Text version] [Text version of Q&A]

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02/04/10 - Will Obama Play the War Card? by Patrick J. Buchanan

02/03/10 - Why Global Democratic Revolution (And Mass Immigration) Won’t Work, by F. Roger Devlin

02/03/10 - Markets Fail When Humans Are Unregulated, by Paul Craig Roberts

02/02/10 - Sojourners And Subversives: Cataloguing the Treason Lobby, by F. Roger Devlin

02/02/10 - SEIU Fat Cats Behind First Lady's Anti-Obesity Campaign, by Michelle Malkin

02/02/10 - My Latest Suggested Reading List, by Chuck Baldwin

02/02/10 - The Crisis Is Not Over, by Paul Craig Roberts

02/01/10 - Memo From Middle America (Formerly Known As Memo From Mexico): From Conservative Radio Shock Jock To “Defensor De La Raza”—The Ben Reed Story, by Allan Wall

02/01/10 - Bring Our Marines Home, by Patrick J. Buchanan

01/31/10 - How Come Tom Edsall Can Talk About The Sailer Strategy And I Can’t? by Steve Sailer

01/30/10 - Saturday Forum: A California Reader Says Charge Immigrants For English Instruction!; etc.

01/29/10 - TPS For Haitians Will Cost Obama Florida In 2012—And The Election, by Joe Guzzardi

01/29/10 - Obama Falls To Earth—But He Still Has The GOP, by Steve Sailer

01/29/10 - View From Lodi, CA Pittsburgh, PA: The Tiger Woods Foundation—Betraying His Other Kids, by Joe Guzzardi

01/29/10 - America’s Rudderless Ship Of State, by Chuck Baldwin

01/29/10 - Crisis of the Government Party, by Patrick J. Buchanan

VDARE is a coalition. Some of us have distinguished oeuvres; some have deviant views (categories not necessarily exclusive). The satellite pages (click on name) represent our individual archives.

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01/28/10 - Democrat Prefers Another Leader's Common Sense To Obama’s SOTU Address, by Donald A. Collins

01/28/10 - Courtroom Cirque du Jihad, by Michelle Malkin

01/27/10 - It’s Happening There: Britain’s Emerging Police State, by Sean Gabb

01/27/10 - In-state Illegal Alien Tuition Challenged In Texas, by Peter Morrison

01/26/10 - Why Do Patriots Hate National Review?, by Peter Brimelow

01/26/10 - The Spender-in-Chief’s Fiscal Freeze Follies, by Michelle Malkin

01/25/10 - Advocacy By Omission: Richard E. Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It, by Professor J. Philippe Rushton

01/25/10 - Saving Professor Bernanke, by Patrick J. Buchanan

01/25/10 - Rule By The Rich, by Paul Craig Roberts

01/24/10 - Here We Go Again: US News & World Report On “Race to the Top”—Obama’s Version Of “No Child Left Behind”, by Richard Hoste

01/23/10 - Saturday Forum: A Liberal Immigration Patriot in Is Shocked By Attacks Against Him In Huffington Post; etc.

01/23/10 - Haiti—The Ultimate Symbol Of Planet Earth's Headlong Plunge To Disaster, by Donald A. Collins

01/23/10 - The Truth About Abortion, by Chuck Baldwin

01/22/10 - Soledad O’Brien Wins VDARE.COM's Seventh Annual Worst Immigration Reporting Award! by Joe Guzzardi

01/22/10 - View From Lodi, CA Pittsburgh, PA: Lodi School Budget Deficit Directly Tied To Immigration, by Joe Guzzardi

01/21/10 - National Data: Haitian Immigrants Pretty Useless—But Haiti Still Needs Them More Than We Do, by Edwin S. Rubenstein

01/21/10 - Has Obama Lost White America? by Patrick J. Buchanan

01/21/10 - Conservatives: Beware of McCain Regression Syndrome, by Michelle Malkin

01/21/10 - How Wall St Destroyed Private Medicine, by Paul Craig Roberts

01/20/10 - Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Massacre: The Unspoken Race Dimension, by Washington Watcher

01/20/10 - Scott Brown’s Victory: New Englanders Love Their “Little Platoons”. Immigration Is Hurting Them, by Matthew Richer

01/20/10 - The Rule of Law Has Been Lost, by Paul Craig Roberts

01/19/10 - The Democrats’ Massachusetts Meltdown, by Michelle Malkin

01/19/10 - Why Has President Obama Established A "Council Of Governors", by Chuck Baldwin

01/18/10 - Not Supposed To Say It, But…Had It With Haiti? by Athena Kerry

01/18/10 - Joe Guzzardi’s Presentation To The Society For American Baseball Research (Video)

01/18/10 - Is America Moving Right? by Patrick J. Buchanan

01/17/10 - Why Haiti Is So Hopeless; And A Very Modest Proposal, by Steve Sailer

01/16/10 - Saturday Forum: An AZ Reader Predicts RINO Gov. Jan Brewer Will Be Replaced By Immigration Patriot Dean Martin; etc.

01/15/10 - Returning To California—And Saddened By What I Saw, by Joe Guzzardi

01/15/10 - Thank You, Governor, by Chuck Baldwin

Prior 2010 Articles...

Announcing American Renaissance’s 2010 Conference—Feb. 19-21!

02/06/10 - Saturday Forum: An Idaho Reader Says Haitians Are Welcome In Senegal; etc.

02/05/10 - By Popular Request: More On Soledad O’Brien—This Year’s VDWIRA Winner, by Joe Guzzardi

Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…Homicide-Prone Minorities In Los Angeles

By Steve Sailer

The hubbub over whether the late Michael Jackson’s personal physician will turn himself into the Los Angeles Police Department on a charge of involuntary manslaughter is reminiscent of all those celebrated L.A. homicides of fact (for example, the O.J. Simpson and Phil Spector cases) and fiction (Chinatown and The Big Sleep).

Yet the typical Los Angeles County homicide isn’t much at all like the glamorous murder mysteries seen on screen. Few killings take place in the Hollywood Hills or at the beach. Instead, homicides are concentrated in the vast urban plain south of Wilshire Boulevard.

An impressive journalistic endeavor by the Los Angeles Times to maintain a database of all 2,600+ homicide victims in L.A. County since the beginning of 2007—the Los Angeles Homicide Report—allows the public (me) to study in detail who exactly is killing and getting killed.

And that’s worth knowing because:

• L.A. County, in and of itself, is huge (with ten million residents, it’s by far the most populous county in America).
• It’s long been a forerunner of demographic and social change in the rest of America.
• Much of the recent mortgage meltdown occurred in the exurbs of Los Angeles due in part to a multiethnic version of white flight from L.A. crime.

The good news: homicides in L.A. County have been declining. The bad news: the racial disparities in homicide victimization rates remain very large, partly due to gang wars.

The Census Bureau reported that in 2006-2008 the population of L.A. County was 47 percent Hispanic, 29 percent non-Hispanic white, 13 percent Asian, and 9 percent black.

About two-fifths of the population of L.A. County lives in L.A. City, while almost six million people live in unincorporated areas or independent municipalities, ranging from Malibu in the West, to Compton and Long Beach in the south, to Pomona in the east, to exurban Lancaster and Palmdale in the High Desert of the north.

Racial differences in crime rates are one of those facts that everybody is acutely aware of when looking for a place to live, but that you aren’t supposed to discuss in print. To its great credit, the Homicide Report violates the media taboo on reporting ethnicity of victims and suspects. As its Frequently Asked Questions list states:

“… newspapers and other media outlets stopped mentioning suspects' or victims' race or ethnicity because of public criticism. Newspapers came to embrace the idea that such information is irrelevant to the reporting of crimes and may unfairly stigmatize racial groups.

“The Homicide Report departs from this rule in the interest of presenting the most complete and accurate demographic picture of who is dying in homicides in Los Angeles County.”

Homicides provide the most reliable of crime statistics because attention must be paid to a dead body. Although reporting on lesser crimes has improved due to the revolution in data-driven police department management introduced by William Bratton during his terms as chief of police in Boston, New York City, and L.A., they are still open to inconsistency and manipulation. (For a recent discussion, see New York Times article: Retired Officials Question Integrity of Crime Reports)[By William K. Rashbaum,  February 6, 2010].

Unfortunately, we can be more certain about the identities of the victims than of their killers. The Homicide Report includes information on the ethnicities of suspects, but it’s not complete or fully reliable.

The sizable age differences between populations—the median white victim in L.A. County was 40, Asian 37, black 26, and Latino 24—complicates the job of making apples-to-apples comparisons. Are apparent differences in crime rates merely the result of boys being boys? Or are there in fact large ethnic differences in crime proclivity among males of the same age?

And there are always questions about how to classify individuals of mixed heritage. For example, perhaps the most brutal leader of any L.A. street gang in recent years was Timothy McGhee, boss of the Toonerville Mexican gang, now on death row for three of the dozen or more murders attributed to him. McGhee, whose charismatic hold on his underlings was compared to Charles Manson’s, has the eagle and snake from the Mexican flag tattooed on the back of his head (the most painful spot). He is said to have killed one young man just because he felt there wasn’t room in his Atwater Village neighborhood for two people with the same nickname: "Guero" for "fair-skinned."

Generally, government agencies try to maximize the number of Latinos—except when it comes to crime statistics. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, for instance, doesn’t even report "Hispanic" as a category. (Wonder why?)

One way of getting around these various methodological problems in thinking about racial differences in crime: look closely at homicide victimization rates of 15-29 year-old males. This approach can seem unkind because it assumes there is some correlation between the odds of getting killed and the odds of causing trouble. But among young men, unfortunately, that assumption has some validity.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve read the LA Times’ write-ups on hundreds of young male victims, and tracked down additional details on many of them elsewhere on the Internet, such as from their MySpace pages. It’s depressing work, but it puts human faces on the statistics.

Many of the victims were wholly innocent, such as the Long Beach engineer who chased teenaged thieves stealing his iPod into an alley, where they shot him down. Some, such as black high school football star Jamiel Shaw Jr., were apparently murdered at random due to their race as part of the low-intensity ethnic cleansing struggle in South Central L.A.

On the other hand, more than a few of the 1,257 male 15-29-year-old homicide victims appear to have been knuckleheads shot down by cops during crimes or by rival gangs as payback, or who lost their lives in fights they started.

Most killings in L.A. County involve acquaintances rather than strangers. Perhaps due to the spread of pervasive video surveillance in stores, robbery killings are now down to a small fraction of the total number of victims, and a very small sliver of young male victims.

This means that victimization rates of young men can give us some clue about crime rates.

Among 15-29 year-old males killed since the beginning of 2007, I count:

• Hispanics: 794 victims out of 611,789 young men in the 2006-2008 Census estimates
• Blacks: 380 victims out of 96,676 young men
• Non-Hispanic Caucasians: 47 out of 247,173
• Asians: 28 out of 129,716
• Pacific Islanders: 8 out of 3,510
• American Indians: 0 out of 6,088
• Total L.A. County: 15-29 year old males: 1,257 out of 1,108,268

A few technical notes: I’m counting 22 Spanish-surnamed victims as Hispanic even though the county coroner listed them as white, plus four others where there is evidence that they identified ethnically as Latino.

Not surprisingly to anybody who follows the local police blotter, 14 of the 47 Caucasian victims were of West Asian descent, and nine of those 14 Armenians. Only 1.7 percent of the population of Los Angeles County is Armenian, but some of them are a bit lively, rather like Sicilians in a Scorsese movie: enterprising and affluent, but with an Old World code of honor. Suspects in killings of Armenians are often described as vanishing into the night in BMWs or Lexuses. Judging by the Old Country first names of the Armenian victims, most were immigrants or the children of immigrants rather than from the pre-1924 wave of Armenian immigrants.

Using the Census Bureau’s estimates of the numbers of 15-29-year-old males in L.A. County in 2006-2008, we can calculate—relative to non-Hispanic whites—the homicide victimization rates among young men:

• Whites: 1.0 times the white rate (by Census definition)
• Asians: 1.1x the white rate
• Latinos: 6.8x
• Pacific Islanders: 12.0x
• African-American: 20.7x
• Total L.A. County: 6.0x

These are also large racial gaps in homicide victimization.

The disparities in homicide offence rates in L.A. County might well be even worse. Of the 33 European whites who died, 5 are reported to have been killed by cops, 9 by Latinos, 5.5 by other whites, 2.5 by blacks, and 2 by Asians. (Fractions represent multiple suspects of different races). Still, in nine of the 33 cases there is no identified suspect, so it’s difficult to generalize confidently from the Homicide Report about offending rates.

Nationally, the ethnic gaps in crime probably aren’t as huge as they are in L.A. County. The Color of Crime 2005 [PDF] report from American Renaissance looked at national incarceration figures and came up with (for all ages):

"In total, blacks had the highest incarceration rate at 7.2 times the [nonHispanic] white rate, followed by Hispanics, at 2.9 times the white rate. [American] Indians and Pacific Islanders were imprisoned at about twice the white rate, and Asians at only 22 percent of the white rate."

Why are the racial disparities so bad in Southern California?

• First, L.A. County has particularly law-abiding young white men.

The high cost of living, the poor public schools, and the low wages have driven out much of the white working class. The per capita income of white households in L.A. County is more than twice that of Hispanic households.

• Second, L.A. County has a notorious street gang culture that is endemic among the lower ranks of all ethnic groups in Los Angeles, except European-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and American Indians.

For example, one industrious researcher claims there are 137 Asian street gangs in L.A. County. The Homicide Report map shows the largest concentration of gang-related Asian deaths (typically Southeast Asians) on the East Side of Long Beach, just north of where the highest density of Samoans and other Pacific Islanders were killed.

The density of diversity in L.A. County provides a critical mass that allows the bad apples to find each other. In most of the U.S., for instance, Armenians are well-behaved. In Southern California, however, there are 170,000 Armenians, enough to furnish an Armenian street gang, Armenian Power, as well as transnational mafias with roots in the old Soviet Union.

In contrast, a review of the Homicide Report suggests that there are virtually no white youth gangs seriously active in Los Angeles County, even though the county extends well up into biker and meth lab territory in the High Desert.

I could only find reports of one white victim of a gang slaying who had white prison gang tattoos. And even he was strenuously defended in the Homicide Report’s comments against posthumous imputations of racism by a black friend, who pointed out in his defense that he had half-Latino and half-black children. Indeed, victims listed as white in the Homicide Report appear to be more likely to be involved with Latino gangs than with white gangs.

Will L.A.’s street gang culture take root in more recently diversifying regions of the country as American-born sons of immigrants grow up on the mean streets?

That’s hard to say. It’s possible that street gangs will become passé as young males spend less time out on the streets engaging in Grand Theft Auto and more time indoors playing Grand Theft Auto.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to bet the country on that without being allowed to talk it over in public first.

Moreover, in assessing the recent drop in homicides in LA County, it should be noted that parents took huge financial risks to get their sons farther away from the killing fields of South Central—risks that we’re all paying off.

The rational urge to move contributed to a centrifugal movement outward into the Southern California exurbs (which then spilled over into Nevada and Arizona) that was central to the Housing Bubble of the last decade. By 2006, a large majority of mortgage dollars in the Southern California exurbs were going to minorities.

White flight was not just for whites anymore.

Murder, however, is for whites, and for anyone else who gets in the way of minorities that are clearly systematically prone to criminality.

One of the many advantages of an immigration moratorium is that fewer Americans will have to face the risk that has become a fact of life in my hometown.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

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