Politics and Culture

I was enjoying my Frantone's Lasagna and reading the Los Angeles Times when I came upon an article entitled Murder Stalks Minorities by Jill Leovy:

First the excerpt:

Continue below:

Follow up:

Homicide is not fair, hitting hardest among Latinos and especially among blacks. Latinos are killed at more than three times the rate of whites, while blacks succumb to homicide at three times the rate of Latinos, the Times analysis shows.

Adult males are the eye of the storm. The national homicide rate is about six deaths per 100,000 people each year. But for Latino men in their 20s in Los Angeles County, the rate is 52 deaths, and for black men, 176 deaths. In human terms, that means that losing a son to homicide, a remote possibility in some neighborhoods, looms as a daily threat in others.

In South Los Angeles and Athens this year, for example, there have been at least 20 homicides within a single ZIP Code in just seven months. A few miles away, in the Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Brentwood ZIP Codes, months go by without any....

...But no matter how they work to avoid it, the demographics of homicide ruthlessly pursues its targets. In parts of South Los Angeles, for example, there are people who have lost not one, but two or more family members. Michael Presley, 19, killed in the Los Angeles Police Department's Southwest Division, was buried in the same grave as his father, also a murder victim.

Ms. Leovy writes as if murder were a disease that attacks people of a certain genetic disposition like Sickle Cell Anemia or Tay Sachs. Murder is a behavior. The reason that some neighborhoods or races kill less than others is that they choose alternative activities like studying or working. If people in high crime areas followed the example of those in Woodland Hills and stopped killing each other, the murder rate would fall dramatically (I wish they'd try and see).

It's not like a hurricane or earthquake either. In other words, many of those victims aren't minding their own business and then, all of a sudden, they're consumed in a twister; they involve themselves in things that increase their chance of dying like gangs. God bless the innocent, though.