22 November 2013

The "knockout game" and "polar bear hunting" explained as racially-motivated crimes

I've seen scattered reports of this for the past month or so.  Here are excerpts from a recent Washington Post article:
One woman was punched in the face as she crested a hill on her bicycle in Northwest Washington. Another was hit in the back of the head as she walked to a bus stop. Neither was robbed, and after one attack, the young men laughed as they made their escape.

D.C. police say the recent attacks in Columbia Heights may be part of a disturbing trend that assailants across the country call the “knockout game.” Youths challenge one another to knock out a random person with a single punch...

The Internet is giving attackers bragging rights far beyond their circle of friends or even their neighborhoods. One particularly brutal video from New Jersey showing a young man hitting a woman from behind, sending her face first to the pavement, has a half-million views on YouTube...

One 10-year-old boy said he recently punched someone on a $20 dare but failed to knock the victim to the ground. “Me and my friends were hanging out and they asked me if I had done one,” the boy said. “And I said I don’t know how to play, so [they] explained it to me.”

A 15-year-old charter school student said that in “Grand Theft Auto,” “you can just run up to people, and you can just like hit them and they’ll just like fall. It looks kind of funny in the game.” She said she wouldn’t do it in real life.
Related incidents:
In New York, a 78-year-old woman strolling in her neighborhood was punched in the head by a stranger and tumbled to the ground. In Washington, a 32-year-old woman was swarmed by teenagers on bikes, and one clocked her in the face. In Jersey City, a 46-year-old man died after someone sucker-punched him and he struck his head on an iron fence.
And some distubing comments appended to the WaPo article:
"It is amazing how the Washington Post can report about this phenomenon without the issue of racial violence coming up one into the discussion. It is a shame that honesty took a back seat to what is really going on here."

"Yep. In the hood, this is called polar bear hunting. The Post knows this but purposefully doesn't report it. Its a rapidly growing hate crime that isn't being acknowledged as such."
I found commentary on "polar bear hunting" by Thomas Sowell
The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as “hate crimes.”

Many aspects of these crimes are extremely painful to think about, including the fact that responsible authorities in New York seem to have been caught by surprise, even though this “knockout game” has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry...

The main reason for many people’s surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the “knockout game” or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified “teens” or “young people” against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims — and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own “achievement.”

Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,” the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing “knockout game,” the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, “white girl bleed a lot.”

That phrase — “White Girl Bleed A Lot” — is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.
More at the link.

15 comments:

  1. I'm a little distrusting of the opinion of Mr. Thomas Sowell as his publisher is a right wing, "repeal Obamacare", Fox like Capitalist Magazine.

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    1. Mistrust your own biases as much as you mistrust those with differing opinions. This is wisdom.

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  2. Building on the previous comment, jeepers, that effusive last excerpt was published by the eminence that is WND. Perhaps it merits a chaser: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/13/why_conservatives_obsess_over_flash_mobs_and_race_riots/

    I'd double up on this by saying, as a former resident of Columbia Heights, all of DC and that part of the NW quadrant have seen rapid and dramatic demographic changes since 1999 (and especially since about 2005). I think the temptation to infer a budding race war out of a bunch of young, high earning white people very quickly moving into and displacing the black residents of a neighborhood left fallow since the '68 *actual* riots might be a bit too much for slash journalists to resist.

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  3. This is a vicious 'game' that has been around for a while and most definitely can be, but is not always racially based (often it's who's the easiest victim)- there is no excusing it, and it should be dealt with in no uncertain terms. Instead of harassing youth with counter productive stop and frisk, instead of setting up punitive sting operations in the poorest of neighborhoods, more attention should be afforded these vicious, violent crimes.

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  4. I am skeptical about this because it fits a race-based "urban myth" pattern that has been around a long time. It is being described as happening all over the place, but no one knows about it because there is a massive conspiracy to cover it up. Right....

    Doesn't anyone remember the "if you see a car driving with its headlights off, don't flash yours - this is a gang initiation trick where the driver will then turn around, run you off the road, and kill you"?

    How about the "if you see someone lying on the side of the road, don't pull over to help them, this is an ambush where a bunch of black people will then carjack you".

    Racist people make this kind of stuff up and then put it out there to foster mistrust of minorities. It is pushed by people who believe that black people are inherently violent, that "hate crime" legislation is wrong, that it "isn't fair" when we read about a crime where a white person racially beats a black person (often calling them a slur) because hey, sometimes black people rob white people and that isn't called a hate crime. Oh, and it isn't fair that black people can use the n-word but white people can't.



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  5. Thomas Sowell is actually black (and conservative, or more accurately, generally Libertarian, for those easily confused by mainstream media political reporting). I casually read his writing, and find him to be a very fair, reasonable guy, who writes in a thoughtful manner.

    A game called "polar bear hunting" sounds like racist hate crime to me. Funny, NoPolitician's second urban legend example has him or her inserting the qualifier, "black people"; I've never heard that version before.

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    1. Sowell is a notorious quisling who's made a really nice living out of assuaging white racists. He IS the go to guy for right wing racists when it comes to demonizing blacks. Basically Sowell has is paid to be the: "Look! This black authority agrees with us white racists!" guy. He's an embarrassment.

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  6. Stan,

    I hope this isn't too self-serving, but a colleague of mine did some research on this. It isn't as racially motivated, or even apparently as prevalent, as is being reported. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/11/the-knockout-game-myth-and-its-racist-roots/

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    1. Are you black? Do you play the knockout game? On trial for playing? How exactly would playing down the racial aspects of these violent crimes be self serving? That aside, are those security video's fake? Are the racial slurs after these assaults unclear because of the participants celebratory ejaculations of triumphant celebration or perhaps it was the potato chips? In any case you better hope this game is nothing more than some mass racist hysteria because as they say "white boy bleed a lot"

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  7. I am also very skeptical. This "Knockout Game" thing has all the hallmarks of an urban legend. I am perfectly willing to accept the idea that someone somewhere has taken a bet to "knock that guy out", but the notion that this is an organized game just doesn't track. Most if not all of these so called "knockout game attacks" are just the random violence that occurs every day in a large city. Newbie muggers that loose their nerve, mentally ill people that think that guy up there is a CIA agent waiting to take them to be tortured, and just plain random assaults that occur from time to time in a large enough population.

    The only question now is will the media frenzy cause the game to spring into existence?

    At least some media outlets are skeptical - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/nyregion/knockout-game-a-spreading-menace-or-a-myth.html

    See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

    NoPolitician also reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlight_flashing#Urban_legend

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  8. This is a real problem where people are being killed. It has happened in many major cities in the past few years. If it was a crime against blacks the media would be all over it. Two black kids in Syracuse beat a man to death and they got an 18 month jail sentence. You get more time than that for killing a dog.

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    1. Was waiting for that certain someone (was betting it would be- ANONYMOUS) who would start the B&W tally sheet. Do you really want to go there? History is not on your side- not even close...

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  9. I have seen something similar to this featured on Tosh.0 - where he actually has solicited people to send him videos of them assaulting their friends (called "bitch slap, nut tap"). His target audience is primarily a white male under 25 crowd.

    I did more reading on this. It is very clearly fuel for people who believe that when a black person commits a random crime against a white person, it must obviously be racist, and is the equivalent of a white person assaulting someone while screaming racial epithets at them. It is fuel for people who don't believe that racism can exist anymore because we have a black president.

    Let me give you one example: in the Syracuse case, the defendant was asked to describe the victim. He described him as an "old white guy". This set off the people in the online comments - that made him racist because he called a white guy a white guy. In the Syracuse incident, the defendant got 18 months because the jury convicted him of manslaugher. That is a pretty common charge in a crime where someone punches someone else, that person then falls, hits his head, and dies. Near me, someone was convicted of manslaughter for shoving someone who fell and died - he got 8 years probation for it. No jail time.

    The reports all seem to be emanating from a couple of sources like World Net Daily and the aforementioned book called "White Girl Bleed". They cobble together completely separate incidents of white people being assaulted by black people - which does happen - and call it the start of a race war. No proof, just what they seem to want to believe. I would be willing to bet that the term "Polar Bear Hunting" came from WND or one of the sources looking to make this into a race thing.

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  10. Cobble together hundreds of completely separate incidents and back up the reporting with video. Its hate crime people. You can pull your heads out of the sand.

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