Friday, January 1, 2016

Who's Running the Show?

It is regularly said that Republican are racists and that's why blacks aren't doing as well as white in America.  The Democrats offer dog whistles, code language, and opposition to race-based admissions at colleges as clear evidence of Republican racism.  Sounds like the bar has been set fairly low to level the racism charge.  But here is a question: where are these hotbeds of Republican racism?  Where are blacks being treated unfairly, where cops are shooting them, where the murder rates among blacks are particularly high?

In an October story, St. Louis was listed as having the highest per capita murder rate in the US, having 50 murders for every 100 thousand residents.  The last Republican mayor of St. Louis was elected in 1943.  Okay, that's probably just a fluke, an outlier.  What city is number 2?

In that same story, Detroit was listed with 44 per 100K.  The last Republican mayor was elected in 1957.  All right, another oddball.  Let's continue.

New Orleans ranks 3rd, with 38 murders per 100K.  The last Republican mayor was Benjamin Flanders, who served from April 1872 to November of that same year.  Wow, that a long time of one party rule.

According to the FBI, the 4th city on the list is Jackson, Mississippi, with 35 murders per 100K.  Searching the records, I could not find the last Republican though everyone since the late 40s has been a Democrat.  Fine, next city.

The 5th city is Baltimore and it last elected an evil racist Republican in 1963.  Hmm.  This is starting to look less like a fluke and more like a pattern.  Too soon to tell.  Let's move on.

Newark, New Jersey had 33 murders per 100K.  The last Republican mayor was elected in 1949.  Just because the top 6 have been run by Democrats for decades doesn't absolve Republicans!

Birmingham is 7th and George Siebels was the last, and also first, Republican elected in 1967.  Buffalo, NY had the last Republican mayor elected in 1950.

Baton Rouge had a Republican mayor elected in 2000!  There it is!  The city with the 9th highest murder rate in the nation had a Republican mayor as recently as 2004!    Clearly, his racist four years led to the high murder rate of today.

Pittsburgh (22 murders per 100k) elected a Republican mayor in 1933 and thus rounds out the top 10 highest murder rate cities in the country.  Of course, the current mayor in all 10 is a Democrat.

The national average per capita murder rate is 4.5.  Only one of the nation's largest cities comes in under that number: New York City.  Yes, NYC had only 3.9 murders per 100k.  Interestingly, NYC had 8 years of Republican Rudy Giuliani followed by 7 years of Republican Michael Bloomberg and 5 more years of Independent Michael Bloomberg.  Bloomberg generally left Giuliani's crime prevention policies in place but added nanny-statism to the mix.  In 1990, under Mayor David Dinkins, there were 2,262 murders in NYC.  By 2001, Giuliani's last year in office, there were 639.  In 2015, there were 333 murders.  This is a massive success but, for some reason, these other cities - run by Democrats - are not implementing the policies that made it happen.
 
Who is running the cities where police shoot young black men?  Who is running the cities where gangbangers are slaughtering each other and random - usually black - bystanders?  Democrats are running these cities and have done so for decades.  If it has stayed this way for so long, whoever is in charge must like the status quo.

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