A month ago, to much fanfare, the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Missouri. The threat, NAACP members were told to believe, came from Senate Bill 43, a piece of legislation signed by Republican Gov. Eric Greitens that makes it more difficult for former employees to sue businesses for discrimination.
Kansas City NAACP branch president, Rev. Rodney Williams, endorsed the delusional travel advisory. Said he, “We have to stand up against this blatant rejection of equal protection under the law in the state of Missouri.” The equal protection his members need in Kansas City is not from legislation but from their fellow citizens.
Missouri is the perennial leader in black homicide deaths per capita. This year, Kansas City is making sure no other state challenges that distinction. On Friday, two women of unspecified race were murdered in separate incidents bringing this year’s total to 100. On Saturday, a black man was found murdered in a business in Kansas City North, making him the city’s 101st first victim in 2017.
Kansas City set its record for homicides in the crack-infested year of 1993 with 153. This year, the city is on pace to break that record. While the city nabobs are trying to sell a new airport and extended light rail, its citizens are killing themselves at a staggering rate.
As of this week, by comparison, New York City has recorded 173 homicides. The math has a frightening symmetry to it. Presuming New York City has had a few homicides since the report was released six days ago, the city is averaging one homicide this year for every 48,000 residents. Kansas City is averaging roughly one homicide for every 4800 residents.
In another words, it is 10 times more dangerous to live in Kansas City than in New York City.
For African Americans, who comprise the majority of homicide victims, the numbers are more chilling still. And we are all supposed to worry about Senate Bill 43? Or extended light rail? That is madness.
Political scientist Dr. Ernest Evans has made a specialty of tracking crime and drawing conclusions. Although a Democrat himself, Evans comes down hard on his colleagues. “I think that the situation is clear,” Evans writes. “Clinton and her allies in the media and the Democratic Party and the liberal-left seized on the Ferguson tragedy of August 9, 2014 to create a wedge issue that they hoped would energize the black vote for her in 2016.”
Evans continues,”The Republicans and the conservatives knew perfectly well what Clinton et. al were doing–but they were too afraid of being accused of being racists to say anything. Well, the black vote did not turn out for Clinton in 2016 in anything near like the numbers they turned out for Obama–what this cynical, self-serving exploitation of the Ferguson and related tragedies did was set off a crime disaster in virtually every black neighborhood in America. When the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2016 comes out soon, it will show unmistakably that the “Ferguson Syndrome” has gotten several thousand innocent black people killed in the past three years.”
For a variety of reasons, New York City is an exception to many rules, including Evans’s thesis. Chicago is not. Baltimore is not. St. Louis is not. And Kansas City, most certainly is not.
