IS INABILITY TO IDENTIFY SUSPECTS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIGHER CRIME IN BLACK NEIGHBOURHOODS?

Jazmine Barnes (left) and a police picture of her supposed "White" killer (right)

As one of the few Black writers at Trad News, I have been baffled by the fact that crime continues to be much higher in our Black neighbourhoods than it is in White ones. As we are all equal and bleed red etc., this simply should not be happening, especially as racism has not existed for several generations now. 

But a recent case suggests that the reason for much higher crime in our neighbourhoods is because of an inability among Black people to correctly identify criminal suspects. 

This serious gap in Black witness reliability has been highlighted by the murder of Jazmine Barnes, a 7-year-old Black girl shot dead one week ago in an apparently motiveless crime.

Although several witnesses claimed at the time that the shooter was White, the police have now arrested a Black man in connection with the crime. 

As reported by CNN: 

After an intense, week-long manhunt, Texas police have arrested a suspect in the drive-by killing of 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes.

Eric Black Jr. faces a charge of capital murder in Jazmine's death. The second-grader was riding in a car with her mother and three sisters when she was shot in the head the morning of December 30.

Black was arrested based on a tip and has admitted to taking part in the shooting, the Harris County Sheriff's Office said overnight.

Before the arrest, police had released a sketch of the suspect compiled from descriptions from Jazmine's mother and three sisters. Authorities said the sketch depicted a white man in his 40s.

But Black, the man facing a charge of capital murder, is 20 years old and black.

So, not only did the witnesses get the race of the perpetrator wrong -- sorry White people -- but they also doubled his age. 

Eric Black

CNN tries to explain this away by saying that the witnesses were in a state of shock. While this is probably true, it is no different from cases involving non-Black victims, I guess. 

However, just the fact that people believed the killing to be interracial led to a highly successful GoFundMe campaign by the family, with 2,749 people donating $77,455 (at time of writing). If the killer had been correctly identified as Black, my guess is that this amount would probably have been a lot less.

While the police appear to have got lucky this time with the arrest of Eric Black, this apparent inability to ID criminals in the Black community is sufficient to explain the much higher crime rates in Black neighborhoods, as this would make it easier for Black criminals to escape justice and commit further crimes. 

But while Black criminals clearly benefit from this, it is also a double-edged sword because the criminals themselves, if they are Black, suffer from a similar inability to correctly identify  people -- in this case their victims. 

Police now believe that Eric Black killed Jazmine because of a case of mistaken identity similar to that of the witnesses:

"At this time, investigators do not believe Jazmine's family was the intended target of the shooting, and that they were possibly shot as a result of mistaken identity," the sheriff's office said.

It really would be helpful for the preservation of law and order in the our crime-afflicted communities if everyone could be made to wear idiot boards with their names on them or some sort of electronic tagging system. 

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