Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Who Cares of the Blacks and Immigrants Murdered in Boston?

  The thought, "If you don't have police, you have crime," is hanging in my head, and I am wondering about Chicago and whether parts of that city are not adequately patrolled, when I hear a statistic from another large city: 1,000 murders remain unsolved in certain sections of Boston.
  Now, having 1,000 unsolved murders is a different thing than having 1,000 murders. One possible reason for so many unsolved murders is that there hasn't been enough effort to solve them. The Boston statistic churns through my head, and I wonder if these sections of town are black sections of town, and the murders are not high priority because they are murders of poor blacks.
  This, too, would be one of the social injustices Colin Kaepernick considers. This could be one of the things the NFL players consider as injustices when they kneel during the playing of the National Anthem.
  I call up a story, "Three Boston neighborhoods, 925 unsolved killings," says the Boston Herald headline from October, 2015. I am stunned at the picture at the top of the article, because it immediately begins to validate my theory.  It shows Mary Ann Davis holding a picture of her grandson, Jordan Miller, who was killed in 2013, and whose murder remains unsolved.
  They are black. Mary Ann Davis and her grandson are black.
  The three sections of town are Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester. Could they be poor black neighborhoods? Looking in wikipedia, I find that Roxbury served as "the heart of Black culture in Boston." Mattapan? As of 2010, the majority of its residents were immigrants. Dorchester? It has a diverse population, with a lot of immigrants and a large concentration of African Americans.
   As I excitedly read the news story, I learned that the files the Boston Police turned over were incomplete, with 299 of them not even identifying the race of the victims, and some of them listing the victim simply as Jane Doe or John Doe.
   How serious can you be about searching for records when they are listed as Jane Doe or John Doe?
   I do wonder if many of the murders remain unsolved due to lack of effort to solve them. Who cares about the immigrants and the Blacks in these sections of town, that their murders should even be investigated?

No comments:

Post a Comment