Posted by
Bert Chapman on Saturday, March 31, 2012 1:56:54 PM
Last month's murder of Trayvon Martin in suburban Orlando Florida is a personal and family tragedy, but it's significance and underlying cause remain obscured and distorted by inaccurate media portraits and a rush to judgment by the scions of leftist political agitation. The fact that notorious race hustlers and consummate con artists such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have gotten involved in this controversy should arouse innate suspicion in anyone truly concerned about this case. Jackson and Sharpton don't give a rip about Martin and his family. They only care about maintaining their discredited political careers and enhancing their media visibility as a way of distracting public attention from Barack Obama's failed presidency.
The suspect in Martin's murder, George Zimmerman, has been tarred and feathered before a proper criminal investigation into this case's circumstances has occurred. Zimmerman appears to have some mental health problems and a history of run ins with authorities. Martin himself is far from an innocent victim having been suspended from school and having traces of marijuana found in his school bag. Zimmerman was involved in a neighborhood watch group which was undoubtedly created due to security concerns in his neighborhood. Unfortunately, media portrayals of this event have instinctively trotted out the race and racial profiling canard without investigating criminal activity in the Orlando area.
The FBI's authoritative Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports contains some revealing statistics about crime in the Orlando metropolitan area for 2010 and preliminary data for 2011. These include:
Violent Crime 2010 1,239
" " 2011 1,320-A 6.13% increase
Murder 2010 10
" " 2011 15-A 50% increase!
Rape 2010 49
" " 2011 50-A 2% increase
Robbery 2010 315
" " 2011 329-A 4.25% increase
Aggravated Assault 2010 865
" " 2011 926-A 6.58% increase
Property Crime 2010 7,757
" " 2011 7,931-A 2.19% increase
Burglary 2010 1,882
" " 2011 1,900-A 0.94% increase
Larceny 2010 5,287
" " 2011 5,457-A 3.07% increase
Orlando motor vehicle theft and arson incidents declined in 2010 and 2011 according to these same FBI statistics. These Orlando crime incident increases, must be contrasted with declines in some of these crime incidents in Miami, Tallahassee, and St. Petersburg for this time period. While Zimmerman may have personally been overzealous in his reaction to Martin, he was on solid ground in wanting to take no chances with his personal safety due to the increased crime in the Orlando area these statistics demonstrate.
Additional insight into youthful criminal activity his provided by the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics which is an authoritative annual statistical compendium produced by the Justice Dept's Bureau of Justice Statistics and the University of Albany. According to this work, during 2010 there were 10,177,907 nationwide arrests for criminal offenses. Whites were arrested in 69.4% of these cases; blacks in 26.0% of these cases, and other ethnic groups accounting for the remainder of these arrests. These statistics also reveal that 55% of robbery arrests; 40.1% of weapons arrests; and 48.7% of murder and non-negligent manslaughter arrests for this year were blacks. Additional revelations occur when you investigate the number of arrests for offenders under 18. In 2010, 1,281,738 arrests occurred in this age group with 66.3% of suspects arrested being white and 31.8% being black. Within this dataset, however, 56.2% of murder and non-negligent manslaughter arrests; 66.7% of robbery arrests, 42.3% of motor vehicle theft arrests; and 60.5% of violent crime involved blacks under 18.
These figures cannot be dismissed as the results of racism or racial profiling. The victims of these crimes represent all races and this criminal behavior sadly reflects a society that has embraced moral relativism and the decline of stable two parent families. These developments have accelerated since the advent of "Great Society" programs during the Johnson Administration which encouraged the breakup of the nuclear family in order to increase individuals dependence on governmental social assistance programs. It is only when we begin to reverse these policies and promote stable and functional two-parent families as part of local, state, and national social policy that these disparities in criminal arrest and incarceration rates will be reversed.
Barack Obama and his administration could have used political and moral capital to make these necessary policy changes. Unfortunately, he and his administration have decided to appeal to their leftist ideological core base and decided to promote the discredited euphemism of a national conversation about race (which actually means to promote the myth of institutionalized societal racism and the role of blacks as helpless victims dependent on governmental assistance) instead of encouraging all Americans, regardless of their race, to be responsible law-abiding citizens striving to reach their God-given potential.