Activists question media, government response to Cheshire murde...

Good one Did a Black or Hispanic reporter bring this on?

Sounds like the Rev. Cornell Lewis has attended the Al Sharpton school of race baiting.

If there was a crime of such horrific magnitude in Hartford, I'm sure that people would be just as outraged.

This is a disgraceful attempt to interject race where it doesn't belong.

Shame Mr. Lewis. I thought you were an honorable man. Guess I was wrong.

Disgraceful wrote:

If there was a crime of such horrific magnitude in Hartford, I'm sure that people would be just as outraged.
This is a disgraceful attempt to interject race where it doesn't belong.
Shame Mr. Lewis. I thought you were an honorable man. Guess I was wrong.

mr.lewis your a f-ing snake take your race bs and sick it somewhere !

This Cornell Lewis guy has lost all respect. He was once a community activist now he's just a racist whiner. No wonder the media and the community have lost all respect for him. He can barely scrape up 5 "activist" to stand next to him and whine.

To some extent, urban residents themselves enable the climate of violence that pervades their communities.

Black males are 7 times more likely to commit violent crimes (US Dept. of Justice). This statistic isn't "racism," it's just a fact.

When are urban leaders going to demand zero-tolerance of crime and stop making excuses? When will they stop screaming "police brutality" when the police try to do their job? When will urban communities demand that career criminals be locked up for life, as Cheshire residents are now doing?

And while many of the shooting victims are innocent, many put themselves in harm's way by their own shady activities. When are urban parents going to take responsibility to discipline their kids and shut down the hip-hop culture?

If urban communities seriously want to reducte violent crime, they can begin by addressing the insidious behaviors in their own midst that cause it.

It is clear from some of the comments that people did not read Cornell Lewis's full statement. If his critics would read the full statement, which is available on the Hartford Undercurrents blog, they might not be so quick to dismiss him.

The reason I think everyone reported the story so quickly is that everyone feels comfortable condemning the perpetrators, since they as well as the victims are white. The media doesn’t have to worry about being called a racist. Same if the victim would be a person of color and the perpetrator would be white.

Carol B wrote:

The reason I think everyone reported the story so quickly is that everyone feels comfortable condemning the perpetrators, since they as well as the victims are white. The media doesn’t have to worry about being called a racist. Same if the victim would be a person of color and the perpetrator would be white.

So the media is damned if they do, damned if they don't, however they cover the Cheshire story.

If they'd under-reported it, the racial activists would accuse them under-reporting because the CRIMINALS were white. If they over-report the Cheshire story, the media is accused of doing so because the VICTIMS were white. Either way, everything is "racist" to these activists.

Here's the real reason why the Cheshire murders received more attention than do murders in Hartford. Shootings and murders hardly ever happen in places like Cheshire, but they're the daily norm in inner-city areas like Hartford. It's only natural that most people cease to be shocked by what goes on daily in the inner city.

Listen, JM, they do go up in arms, but nothing gets done, and they still do go up in arms and they attend meetings where no police officer attends because they DON'T care what happens to the people in urban areas. If the police are scared, then they shouldn't keep their badges. None of them should if they can't attend a meeting to address the violence and to get together and figure out a strategy where the community AND the police can work together without getting some vigilante out on the street taking criminals out and endangering the rest of the community for doing good in the neighborhoods. The police don't care about those Neighborhoods and neither does to Good 'Ol Govna and her cronies

Alcoholisgood wrote:

Listen, JM, they do go up in arms, but nothing gets done, and they still do go up in arms and they attend meetings where no police officer attends because they DON'T care what happens to the people in urban areas. If the police are scared, then they shouldn't keep their badges. None of them should if they can't attend a meeting to address the violence and to get together and figure out a strategy where the community AND the police can work together without getting some vigilante out on the street taking criminals out and endangering the rest of the community for doing good in the neighborhoods. The police don't care about those Neighborhoods and neither does to Good 'Ol Govna and her cronies

Here’s a few strategies that individuals and communities can implement on their own. I offer these from my first hand experience as an inner-city teacher --

*Don't make babies you can't care for. Middle class families already do this, which is why they have more money. Women need to carefully select partners who will be real fathers to their kids.

*Take responsibility for yourself and your kids.“Government can’t raise children; only parents can raise children”(Bill Clinton).

*Supervise and discipline your kids. Be their parent, not their pal. Know what they’re doing at all times, and be firm when they cross the line. And get hip-hop culture out of your home. It’s an insidiously violent influence.

*Make education your kids’#1 priority. School is not a baby sitting service; it’s the #1 key to your child’s future. And don’t assume the teacher is picking on your kid when the teacher calls about his bad behavior. Orderly behavior is the first prerequisite to learning.

*Get an education or job training yourself, and become employable. There are plenty of free and reduced-cost resources out there. Most unemployed black adults I’ve known are not unemployed because of racial discrimination, but because they don’t have the skills. Get the skills.

*Stay out of jail by not committing crimes. It’s that simple.

*Demand stiff jail time for crime and demand that politicians and judges support the same. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior. Keeping repeat violent criminals locked up will cut the crime rate by half or more.

*demand an end to the “no snitching” culture: DO SNITCH on criminals.

I can’t address myself to issues around the Hartford police, but these are just a few things that individuals and communities can do to restore order and safety to their streets.

Maybe if Cornell Lewis weren't so busy advocating drug prohibition laws that fund and employ gangs under organized crime in uregulated urban markets while cramming the courts and jails with thousands of non-violent drug consumers...then maybe REAL criminals like the Cheshire thugs and any Hartford ones too would have room to be locked up for a long time. But no, Mr Lewis has been too busy calling for more drug prohibition enforcement rather than a legally regulated age-restricted market for licensed adults, which would cut a lot of crime and improve public health and safety. Then our police and Justice resources could be more expediently applied to the REAL criminals who violate the rights, persons or property of others.

Cornell Lewis might find that the drug war he advocates amounts to the same "mass incarceration [that] has undone the small amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and '70s."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/lazare

EXCERPT

The standard account of American economic development since the 1970s, told and retold in countless undergraduate classrooms, is that economic deregulation and growth have done much to narrow the once-yawning wage gap between white and black workers. To quote the New York Times: "Unemployment rates among blacks and Hispanic people...are at or near record lows. Joblessness among high school dropouts has fallen to about half the rate in 1992. And wages for the lowest paid are rising faster than inflation for the first time in decades." A rising tide lifts all boats, whereas all that labor-market rigidity has done for "Old Europe" is to saddle it with persistently high levels of unemployment, an alienated underclass and riots in the banlieues. But as Punishment and Inequality in America points out, if US economic policies look good, it is only because the country's enormous prison population is not factored into the equation. If workers behind bars are counted, then it quickly becomes apparent "that young black men have experienced virtually no real economic gains on young whites" and that the real black unemployment rate is up to 20 percent greater than official statistics indicate. Rather than freeing up the markets, Western writes, the United States has "adopted policies that massively and coercively regulated the poor." Where the Danes provide their unemployed with up to 80 percent of their previous salary and the Germans provide them with 60 percent, America has deregulated the rich while throwing a growing portion of its working class in jail....

US prisons are not bulging with rapists and wife beaters, but they are filled with drug offenders, some 458,000 as of 2000....

American mass incarceration is not what social scientists call "evidence based." It is not a policy designed to achieve certain practical, utilitarian ends that can then be weighed and evaluated from time to time to determine if it is performing as intended. Rather, it is a moral policy whose purpose is to satisfy certain passions that have grown more and more brutal over the years. The important thing about moralism of this sort is that it is its own justification. For true believers, it is something that everyone should endorse regardless of the consequences. As right-wing political scientist James Q. Wilson once remarked, "Drug use is wrong because it is immoral," a comment that not only sums up the tautological nature of US drug policies but also shows how they are structured to render irrelevant questions about wasted dollars and blighted lives. Moralism of this sort is neither rational nor democratic, and the fact that it has triumphed so completely is an indication of how deeply the United States has sunk into authoritarianism since the 1980s.

END EXCERPT

Mr Lewis might also complain about the export of our nation's manufacturing industries and the lack of living wage jobs that the neoliberal market ideologists have promoted under the Republicrats since Reagan-Thatcher. Market ideology fundamentalism has stood in the way of more pragmatic policies like trade treaties with labor and environmental standards, or even a national job corps that offered $15/hr jobs to all who will work, and adjusting corporate tax policies to encourage companies to increase production in USA rather than move operations to China etc.

If Mr Cornell Lewis advocated for more enlightened economic and social policies in the national interest rather than only investor interests, he'd find that his self-consciously-racial-identi constituency would be better off along with the rest of us who aren't CEO's of globalized corporations or their legislative handmaidens. Real solutions will be colorblind.

Violent street crime will diminish when we 1) keep in jail the violent criminals we have (by not overloading the system with non-violent drug "offenders" who should never have been criminalized in the first place), and 2) make economic policies that give everyone the opportunity for living wages and education (legitmate avenues to success and respectability in the larger society).

These policies, though formally color-blind, would go a long way in solving problems in the black community not as a race-based reform just in the course of improving society generally, in a color-blind way that brings us closer to the ideal of forgetting about so-called racial differences that have zero scientific basis anyway.

jmKelley wrote:

<quoted text>
Here’s a few strategies that individuals and communities can implement on their own. I offer these from my first hand experience as an inner-city teacher --

I'm glad you have some suggestions, now if they were implemented by the community, it just might work. It's easier said than done, but........well, you know what, no excuses, you're right. People do have to become accountable for their actions. I just hope it's done by the community and not one person leading them, becuase he's liable to get him endangered by the criminal element. One person can only do so much.

The police aren't supposed to be role models neither, but they'll let a person go when they find an ounce of marijuana on them. I know, becuase friends have told me. That never deters criminal behavior. arrest them no matter what show them what it's like to spend a night in jail. I went to jail as a child on a school trip in Mass and that scared me into straying away from crime(does stick my hand in the cookie jar count?)

JM, you have some good suggestions and I respect someone with atleast something that might help and you've said plenty. This is better than most poster who'll rant and rant.

I have no kids yet, by the way, I can't afford them, school is enough for now, but for the most part the suggestions were very well intended.

Cornell Lewis says, "You see people with teary eyes, in the media, shaking hands and voices that seem to be wavering or quavering," Lewis said. "When the two young boys were shot in the face, it was done professionally. It was hard-hitting and then that was it."

So he is comparing innocent people, at home to kids in the streets involved with drug and/or gangs?

Mr. Lewis you are a disgraceful human being to use this for your own agenda.

Carol B wrote:

The reason I think everyone reported the story so quickly is that everyone feels comfortable condemning the perpetrators, since they as well as the victims are white. The media doesn’t have to worry about being called a racist. Same if the victim would be a person of color and the perpetrator would be white.

You have a darn good point there Carol. I know for just that reason alone, I felt a sense of relief to know that the perpetrators were white.

Whenever there is a black on white, or white on black crime, there are always those racist groups that come out of the woodwork to polarize all of us with venom and hate.

We did not have that situation here and yet certain "civil rights" spokespersons feel the need to interject race into the mix.

I'M SICK OF IT!

Please people go to the Hartford Undercurrents blog www.hartfordimc.org/blog and read what the statement says and also read the other posting for August 13. I for one sure got tired of hearing about the murders in Cheshire day after day and do know that no reporters in any media goes on like that when things like this happen in the city. Gee this does sound like a KKK forum or a neo-nazi rally. I can't believe some of you all your nasty racist feeling sure are coming out.

Richard wrote:

Please people go to the Hartford Undercurrents blog www.hartfordimc.org/blog and read what the statement says and also read the other posting for August 13. I for one sure got tired of hearing about the murders in Cheshire day after day and do know that no reporters in any media goes on like that when things like this happen in the city. Gee this does sound like a KKK forum or a neo-nazi rally. I can't believe some of you all your nasty racist feeling sure are coming out.

Ah yes, the Undercurrents blog.

The week after the Petit murders, the cadre of posters on Undercurrents addressed the massacre in terms of capitalism, the proletariat, free trade, Iraq, Bush, etc etc. And of course, anyone who disagrees with them is "RACIST".

http://hartfordimc.org/blog/2007/07/26/murder...

They're unabashedly Marxist and add nothing but left wing cliches to any discussion.

With friends like these, it's no wonder death penalty opponents have so few friends.

Richard wrote:

Please people go to the Hartford Undercurrents blog www.hartfordimc.org/blog and read what the statement says and also read the other posting for August 13. I for one sure got tired of hearing about the murders in Cheshire day after day and do know that no reporters in any media goes on like that when things like this happen in the city. Gee this does sound like a KKK forum or a neo-nazi rally. I can't believe some of you all your nasty racist feeling sure are coming out.

First of all, when did anything like Cheshire happen in the city? Please don't bother to respond unless you can answer that question.

Three innocent women minding their own business in their peaceful home, beaten, tortured, raped, tied to the bed and BURNED ALIVE!

WHEN HAS SOMETHING LIKE THAT HAPPENED IN HARTFORD???

A KKK forum or neo-nazi rally? That's imaginative. Must you malign people when you disagree with their point of view? You are no better than the media because they use the VERY SAME TACTICS.

I think using the murder of three innocent people to advance anyones personal agenda is sickening. You obviously disagree. But the difference between you and me is that I won't call you a racist.