Imagine you work for a major newspaper, owned by Gannett. You've been tasked with writing an important story, highlighting the most dangerous areas of the city you're employed to cover. But only a few days after the publication of this ground-breaking article, it's contents are safely secured behind a secured pay-wall, ensuring few eyes will ever see it.
If nothing changes, all of Indianapolis will resemble the six "killing zones" soon
Oh, and the city is Indianapolis, where Amos Brown III - writing for the black newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder - confirms on a yearly basis that without a black population there wouldn't be much need for a huge police force.
The above scenario did happen to Indianapolis Star writer John Tuohy, whose stunning exposé on the type of environment black people create in formerly white built/occupied parts of the city should be required reading for anyone under the impression the city of Indianapolis is destined to prosper once the white population is supplanted as the majority demographic group.
Easily, the most poignant portion of Tuohy's article is when he mentions that homes (designed in a late-Victorian, Romanesque-style tastefully imported from Europa) built by European immigrants in the mid-1880s are today listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Unfortunately, they were long abandoned by white people and are now occupied almost exclusively by blacks, who have made the Haughville neighborhood of Indianapolis one of its most deadly. [The killing zones: In 6 small spots in Indianapolis,sudden, violent death is part of everyday life, Indy Star, August 12, 2013]:
The Irish, Germans and Slavs settled Haughville in the mid-1880s, building small homes on narrow streets. Today a portion of the neighborhood is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, its 329 buildings — including some churches — built in the late-Victorian, Romanesque style imported by the European immigrants.
The neighborhood is a favorite target of urban renewal efforts. Earlier this year, plans to build a 100,000-square-foot greenhouse were announced, and it is sharing in a $10 million grant to improve parks.
Yet, Haughville has had one of the highest crime rates in the city for decades and is one of the places police constantly send saturation patrols to curb sporadic violence.
It would be a general disservice to the public to leave the contents of this article forever banished behind a pay-wall no one will ever try and scale, so luckily we at SBPDL were able to track down a cached version of the article, which is reproduced below in its entirety.
One simple question remains, which you should ask yourself upon finishing: why in the world would we subsidize the continued reproduction of this population, transferring the wealth created by the white community to ensure that in 20 years, all of Indianapolis looks like the Haughville community white immigrants built so long ago, only to abandon to the black undertow?
It's a long article, but worth reading every sentence [The killing zones: In 6 small spots in Indianapolis,sudden, violent death is part of everyday life, Indy Star, August 12, 2013]:
There is a reason residents call the four-square block area near 42nd Street and Post Road “Sudden Death.”
Murder happens here fast — and often.
Twenty people have been slain in six years in this tattered tract of land on the Northeastside, the deadliest in Indianapolis.
“My uncle was standing in this exact spot just the other day, asking someone for a cigarette and someone drove by and shot him in broad daylight,” said Donnell Armstrong, 25, as he stood in front of the former Hearts Landing apartment complex. now known as Meadowlark. “There is nowhere safe.”
His uncle lived — but Armstrong’s friend, Robert Shorter, 24, did not. Nicknamed “Bullethead,” Shorter was found shot to death on a sidewalk behind a creek in the 4200 block of Essex Avenue on July 11. A bag of suspected marijuana was next to him.
“They left his body in the street for four hours before anyone called police,” Armstrong said. “This is what the kids get to see here.”
Indianapolis Metropolitan police crime analysts, using mapping technology, have sliced and diced the city into 1,500 half-mile grids to measure violent crime over the past six years.
And they’ve found that it is remarkably concentrated, with a disproportionate percentage of violence and killings occurring repeatedly in the same neighborhood blocks.
“Sudden Death” and five other grids are especially dangerous; 65 homicides have been committed there since 2007.
Just as white people are responsible for producing the tax-revenue to pay for keeping the city afloat (and extra police), the black community has the responsibility of producing the homicide hotspots
The pockets are like violence bull’s-eyes that seem to radiate danger, police say. This year, 48 percent of all homicides have been committed within a two mile range of each of them.
“Every year, the homicides are where they’ve happened before,” said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Maj. Thomas Kern. “These are historic trends with very little change. Now we need to know why this is.”
That will include examining social and economic factors, and health, environmental, infrastructure, housing and economic shortcomings, city officials said. They will seek the community’s help in curbing what many experts fear is a culture in which violence is too casually accepted.
“Look at any of these these high-crime grids and you will see a number of systemic, quality of life issues that need to be addressed,” Public Safety Director Troy Riggs said. “We’ve identified ‘Where?’ Now we can move on to the ‘What?’ and ‘How?’ ”
In addition to 42nd and Post, the deadliest pockets are all north of Washington Street and south of 43rd Street. They are centered near Martin Luther King Jr.
Drive and 29th Street; Haughville; Michigan and Rural streets; Illinois and 37th streets; and Keystone Avenue and 33rd Street.
A common thread through them all is poverty.
Vacant or abandoned buildings checker each block. Overgrown weeds and chopped-up streets seem to be permanent landscaping features. Idle teens and unemployed adults wander their poorly lit sidewalks.
These areas also share another quality; the weary tolerance with which residents deal with the constant gunfire, fights, drug dealing, police and death.
This resignation, they say, is rooted in low expectations that conditions will ever improve.
'Just a few homicides'
Sharon Griffie, 56, has lived near Martin Luther King Drive, south of 30th Street, her entire life. Police said the four-square block area is one of the most violent in the city: 10 people have been slain there in the past six years.
Griffie says she knows 15 to 20 mothers in the broader neighborhood whose children were victims of homicide. She is among them. Her son, Brian Griffie, 20, was fatally shot in 2000 in a neighborhood just northwest of hers.
“I try not to get too emotional about it,” she said. “I pray for the families of the victims and I pray for the families of the perpetrators, including the one who killed my son.”
The neighborhood is quiet, shady and sparsely populated. A post office anchors the commerce on MLK Drive.
Griffie said the neighborhood has changed. Many longtime homeowners have died off or moved out. Now, it is mostly the very old and very young who share the space. The old mostly stay in. The young, she said, roam the streets.
“They’re running from police all the time,” she said. “There’s overgrown bushes and trees and empty houses and broken streets lights here. There’s all sorts of places they ditch guns, dump trash and do whatever else kind of activity they do.”
Griffie says she seldom strays far at night from her one-story home and thriving garden because the streets are so dark.
The police, she said, respond promptly to 911 calls and do a good job sweeping in for serious crimes. But the city could do a better job making it less inviting for criminals, she said.
“There’s a lot of good people here but it looks like we don’t care and that sets it up for high crime,” Griffie said.
A few miles to the southwest, in Haughville, Israel Douglas, 73, insisted his street was safe, even though eight people have been slain in six years in the four-square-block area.
One of those victims was Jimmidell Golden, 31, on July 15, 2012.
Douglas, who lives in a one-story home at the corner of Medford Avenue and 12th Street, had noticed a maroon SUV in front of his house where cars weren’t usually parked.
It was 9:55 p.m. on a day that had reached 95 degrees. Douglas already had eaten dinner and was settled in for the evening when he heard several popping sounds in rapid succession.
“There were three shots, four shots, maybe five and I flinched,” said Douglas. “I come and look out the front door and I saw a guy sitting in his SUV, shot. I called 911.”
But Douglas says the block is mostly peaceful, even if every time he leaves his home there’s a grim reminder of the killing. In his yard stands a memorial to Golden; stuffed, animals, baseball caps, beads and other trinkets crawling 10 feet high are attached to a wooden utility pole.
“It’s real quiet here,” he said. “There’s no drug dealing on my block. I’d be the first to call 911 if there was.
No matter where you go there’s going to be violence.”\
The Irish, Germans and Slavs settled Haughville in the mid-1880s, building small homes on narrow streets. Today a portion of the neighborhood is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, its 329 buildings — including some churches — built in the late-Victorian, Romanesque style imported by the European immigrants.
The neighborhood is a favorite target of urban renewal efforts. Earlier this year, plans to build a 100,000-square-foot greenhouse were announced, and it is sharing in a $10 million grant to improve parks.
Yet, Haughville has had one of the highest crime rates in the city for decades and is one of the places police constantly send saturation patrols to curb sporadic violence
.
However, police say Douglas might not be too far off the mark in assessing his own block. The violence in the micro-hotspots is even more isolated than their maps show. A couple of troublesome houses on a well-kept, working-class block can account for a large amount of violence. As can a busy drug corner.
Some streets seem impervious through time to repeated police crackdowns or flashes of gentrification.
“Crime can become institutionalized,” IMPD’s Kern said.
Fishing for souls
Four years ago, Anthony Jordan, 52, got a taste of the violence near 34th Street and Keystone Avenue the first day he moved there. It is an area that has had 10 homicides in six years.
Jordan, a mechanic, was working on his car in his driveway in the 2100 block of East 32nd Street when a young man approached him with a gun.
But instead of handing over his wallet, Jordan pulled out his own gun.
“That changed his mind and he ran away,” Jordan said.
Jordan watched his would-be robber scuttle into the Blackburn Terrace apartments, a block away.
A few minutes later, Jordan said he heard three gunshots.
“Then I see him all shot up. He comes crawling back here and he falls down right on my lawn,” Jordan said. “I didn’t hold it against him. Crazy kid. I called 911.”
The neighborhood is just as deadly this year as it has been in the past.
• On May 6 at 9:30 p.m., Jerryn Greene, 19, was gunned down in a drug dispute at 34th Street and Brouse Avenue. No arrests have been made.
• To the north, in a crime pocket that has had five homicides in six years, Carl Gildersleeve, 29, was fatally shot on June 1.
Gildersleeve was filling up his car with gas at a station at 24th Street and Keystone Avenue at 3:30 a.m. when he got into a quarrel with Phillip Garrett, 24. The scuffle and shooting were caught on the gas station’s security camera. Garrett was charged with murder.
Jordan said gunfire regularly punctures the night quiet until about 4 a.m. He pointed to a bullet hole in the hood of his light blue mid-sized sedan. Someone had fired a gun in the air, he said, and that’s where the
bullet came down.
Pastor Kim Graves, at New Vision Ministries, 2056 E. 32nd St., said many of the younger people in the neighborhood see little hope for improvement and have “lost any reverence for the church.”
“Therefore, our approach to them has to be different than it used to be,” she said. “We have to got to where they are because they won’t be walking through that door. We have to be talking their language, reaching out. Fishing for souls.”
Graves said few jobs in the neighborhood and young people with idle time create a volatile mix. Many lack the resources and background to get jobs.
“There are obstacles that have to do with money,” she said. “Transportation is a big one. People don’t have the means to go to the library to get on a computer and apply for jobs. Many of them have criminal backgrounds, so they can’t get a lot of jobs.”
For the past six years, black men age 18 to 24 years old have been slain in larger numbers than any other age group — about one in four homicides. This year in Indianapolis, the number is running about twice that rate.
The onslaught has helped drive down the average age of victims this year to 28 —significantly below age 32, where it has stood for several years.
“You can’t have fun anymore,” said Christopher Brown, a 17-year-old who attended a Young Men, Inc., summer camp which provides black male youth positive interactions and role models. “You can’t go to a party anymore without a fight or a shooting.”
Brown said bad behavior among young men his age is driven by peer pressure. The actions of a few, he said, pervade the entire neighborhood.
“It’s all about fitting in,” he said. “Everyone is trying to be ‘hard.’ They are influenced by rappers they see on TV, talking tough. They learn that it is cool to carry a gun and shoot people.”
"Sudden Death"
No patch of the city has been bloodier this year than the areaeast and south of Post Road and 43rd Street.
Within the half-mile area are several housing complexes with rows of small apartments and one-story homes spread across a series of short, dead-end courts, drives and lanes.
“The bullets fly night and day,” said Shamonte Love, 30, who has lived there all her life. “This is not a desirable place to live. It is a destination of last resort.”
In addition to “Bullethead”Shorter,
• Dominique Jenkins, 21;
• Charles Nelson, 25;
• Christina Elridge, 36;
• Osiel Rangel, 27;
• Bryan Scott, 37, all have been slain there this year — within a couple of hundreds yards each other.
And despite its location in one of the more congested parts of the city, many residents in “Sudden Death” said they live in isolation.
Families with young children are apt to spend almost all their time indoors, especially in the summer, because of the danger in the streets. There are few recreational activities for children and the nearest grocery store is a mile away.
“We don’t go outside much, or really at all” said Sh’may Posey, 37, as she waited for her 9-year-old son to get off a school bus last week.
Posey, who also has a 4-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter, let the children run around in front of the apartment for a few minutes after the bus arrived. She sat by the front door, never letting them get more than a few feet away.
“I think everyone should be able to go outside and play whenever they want to, but that’s not the reality here,” Posey said before shuttling the children inside and locking the door. “I know it’s not good for the kids and they know it, too. It’s not living, just existing.”
Donnell Armstrong, a self-employed mechanic, likes to fix up bicycles for young children and sell them for $20. He said sometimes he doesn’t know why he bothers.
“It’s nice to bring a smile to a little one’s face when they set their eyes on a new bike,” he said. “But then you realize that there’s nowhere safe for them to ride them, so what’s the point?”
Most residents don’t expect the area to ever receive much attention from any city agency — besides police.
“If you don’t live here you don’t care about it,” Love said. “And most people don’t have the resources to go anywhere else. When you don’t have anything, this is what you have left.”
Which makes her relish tranquility.
“If there is a day without gunfire around here that is considered a real good day,” Love said. “But I don’t remember very many of those.”
Nothing in this article is the fault of either white people or white racism; it's entirely the fault of individual black people, who collectively participate in negatively impacting their communities in every possible way sociologists/economist/realtors/investors can devise measures for accessing a communities viability
Poverty? It's the result of individual actions/decisions, or, properly named, black dysfunction.
Violence? It's the result of individual actions/decision, or, properly named, poor future time-orientation, low impulse control, and lower IQ.
You see, Disingenuous White Liberals believe if black people weren't living in segregated communities, they'd magically abide by the law and produce the type of community good, upstanding white people create.
But even when dwelling in homes/communities built by white people in the 1880s, the only type of community black people can collectively create is exactly the same as found in the ghettos of Newark, Chicago, Milwaukee, and New Orleans.
Worse, it's the same found in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
There are plenty of safe areas in Indianapolis, it's just they happen to be completely devoid of black people; in these residential areas, white children are free to roam without any fear of being the victim of a random bullet, fired with malicious intent by a black trigger-man.
These areas also happen to be free of 'Martin Luther King Dr. or Martin Luther King Boulevards'.
In the story, "Public Safety Director Troy Riggs is quoted as saying, “We’ve identified ‘Where?’ Now we can move on to the ‘What?’ and ‘How?'"
'What' is simply black people; how, is because the white community continues to subsidize the poor life-choices of black individuals, which collectively add up to turning even the most productive city in the world (Detroit: "The Paris of the West") into... 2013 Detroit.
America's future, as is currently projected, is simply Port-au-Prince, Haiti, only without foreign aid and white do-gooders to keep the island nation artificially propped-up.