LESS CRIME, MORE COPS, MORE SURVEILLANCE, MORE GOVERNMENT POWER TO CONTROL BLACK PEOPLE. From [KBLA] St. Louis’ police chief says his strategy of focusing more resources on violent areas of the city has led to a nearly six-percent drop in crime compared to this time last year.

Chief John Hayden presented the 2018 crime statistics Wednesday night at a town hall at Forest Park Community College. Every category except rape and vehicle thefts has dropped compared to November of 2017.

Citywide, homicides have dropped 13 percent, from 191 to 166. But rape increased seven percent, from 260 to 279, and vehicles thefts were up slightly. Vehicle thefts do not include carjackings, which are being counted as a separate category for the first time in 2018. So far, there have been more than 300 carjackings in the city this year.

[According to the index crime rate, since 1990 there has been a gradual decline in St. Louis’ crime rates. However, its murder rate (while decreasing) remained higher than the national metropolitan area average. [MORE] The Brennan Center’s new report, Crime and Murder in 2018: A Preliminary Analysis, has concluded that crime and murder in 2018 are again declining nationwide, continuing the historic downward trend. [MORE]]

When he became chief at the beginning of 2018, Hayden announced a plan to send more police and social services to an area bounded by Goodfellow, West Florissant, Martin Luther King and Vandeventer. The rectangle contains some of the highest-crime neighborhoods, including Wells-Goodfellow, Walnut Park East and West, and Penrose.

The increased police attention included everything from extra traffic patrols to agents from several federal law-enforcement agencies. Better Family Life opened centers where teenagers in the neighborhoods who were feuding could come and work out their disputes without guns. The Urban League invested in job training.

Hayden said the statistics show the strategy worked. Violent crime in the zone dropped 20 percent.

“There’s 23 less homicides that didn’t happen this year,” he said. “There’s 70 less robberies that didn’t happen. And then there are 128 less assaults with guns.”

Crime statistics show the Walnut Park neighborhoods had seen 10 fewer homicides at the end of this November compared to last year. Kingsway West, which borders St. Louis County, had five fewer killings.

Hayden said adding license-plate readers and high-quality cameras inside the rectangle played a role in getting the numbers down, as well. The cameras meant officers had better information available to them.

“When we talk about how many arrests were able to be affected due to the fact that we were able to see the car that had just been carjacked, we were able to see the car that had just been stolen, we were able to see the people that had just committed the shooting, those resulted in 228 arrests, 128 stolen vehicles recovered and 38 firearms recovered,” he said.

Hayden says he plans to add two more rectangles next year – one covering a large portion of the Downtown and Downtown West neighborhoods, and another in south St. Louis. He said the specialized units like SWAT and traffic enforcement will rotate through the different rectangles as crime spikes, but there are enough officers in those units to handle multiple increases at a time.

YOU CAN’T FIRE THEM & THEY ARE NOT HERE TO PROTECT AND SERVE YOU. A necessary & comforting illusion in a police state is that police are here to protect us and are primarily engaged in “police work.” As Dr. Blynd observes, "people who are awake see cops as mercenary guards that remind us daily through acts of force, that we are simultaneously both enemies and slaves of the Corporate State - colonized, surveilled and patrolled by the desensitized and lobotomized drones of the colonizers."

Would an armed, private security force be more accountable to Blacks & Latinos?

Research and data continues to debunk false narratives about crime in the United States. Contrary to racist propaganda, the Brennan Center at the NYU School of Law 2018 analyses have consistently shown that overall crime rates in America’s 30 largest cities remain at or near historic lows. [MORE]

Alleged Black criminality plays a very important role in defining the collective White American ego and personality. [MORE] Racists project criminality upon Blacks in order to treat Blacks criminally and to simultaneously empower themselves. Dr. Amos Wilson states, such maneuvers are necessary in order to justify racist White American community's repression of African Americans and psychodynamically defend the collective White American ego complex. [MORE]

Wilson explains, "Alleged Black criminality, while evoking White American fear and loathing, reassures them of their vaunted self-worth, their assumed innately superior moral standing, of their self-congratulatory self-constraint in contrast with presumed Black American unworthiness, innate inferior moral standing, inherent criminality, lack of self-constraint and self-control.

Black criminals function as a negative reference group vital to maintaining the White American self-image. The Black criminal is used to support the White American community's self-serving, self-justifying judgments of itself. White America's preoccupation with Black criminality betrays its own need for reassurance; betrays its own basic insecurity regarding its projected moral purity. Consequently, the higher the incidence of reported Black criminality, the more exceptionally righteous White America feels itself to be. The more righteous it feels itself to be the more intensely and guiltlessly it promulgates and justifies its domination and exploitation of African peoples at home and abroad. [MORE]