Gang rivals ÷ gang rivals = Victims like 7-year-old Heaven Sutton (op-ed)

Black Americans have a saying about the criminal justice system.  It goes: There’s no justice, it’s just-us.  Here’s the saying in an equation:

Double standards + racial disparities = systemic racism.
                

But gang related murders in cities like Chicago just don’t add up.  These are division problems: gang rivals ÷ gang rivals = Victims like 7-year old Heaven Sutton.

            

In 2012 Ashake Banks operated a candy stand in her front yard.  Banks’s daughter Heaven helped her mother at the stand.  Banks said, the candy stand wasn’t just a source of extra income it was a way to protect the block from street violence.  The candy stand was a magnet that kept the children in one place instead of wandering off into dangerous parts of the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, two gunmen spotted a rival gang member on the same block as the candy stand and started shooting.  When the smoke cleared Banks’s 15-year-old son found his little sister Heaven on the ground - unconscious.  

She was shot.  

Ashake Banks and her son gathered towels and tried to stop the bleeding.   Heaven Sutton was rushed to the hospital, but was pronounced dead an hour later. 

Now, the term “black-on-black crime” has become antiquated over the years because a new generation said “black-on-black crime” is a myth because other racial groups also kill their own members.  But this is a defense against conservative claims that “black-on-black crime” is a byproduct of a dysfunctional black culture.           

The problem is the new generation is defending black culture while ignoring the facts on the ground.  Comparing criminal activity between racial groups may equalize dysfunction and dilute stigma (a negative + a negative = a positive), but the term “black-on-black crime” originated during the 1960’s after statistics revealed a disparity of black victims were unassisted by the police when the perpetrator was also black.  The police didn’t want to waste resources on black crime victims. 

So, in a 21^st century “black on black” context, the saying: There’s no justice, it’s just us, applies to black victims of homicides.

According to the Washington Post over half of the homicides in America’s 50 largest cities went unsolved over the past 10 years, but in city zones where there were more than 8 homicides the arrest rate was less than 30 percent.  The Washington Post also reported an arrest was made for 63 percent of white homicide victims, but almost all the low-arrest zones were low-income areas with black residents.

In Chicago, 74 percent of homicides tracked over the past ten years went unsolved.  Between 2007 and 2017 there were 5, 534 homicides in Chicago and only 26 percent of these homicides resulted in an arrest.  In 2012 Jerrell Dorsey, one of the 26 percent actually arrested, was charged with the murder of 7-year-old Heaven Sutton.

Dorsey finally went to trial last week after seven years. (Dorsey’s first lawyer stepped away from the case which prolonged the proceedings.) Dorsey was convicted and faces a minimum of 45 years in prison.

But the prosecution almost didn’t secure the conviction.

Back in 2012 two rival gang members told the authorities, they saw Dorsey with a gun and one said they saw him fire, but both backtracked their statements during the trial.  The one that picked Dorsey out of a police line-up denied implicating Dorsey at all.

In closing, the prosecutor told the jury the witnesses backtracked to avoid retaliation for cooperating with the police.  But Dorsey’s defense attorney explained to the jury, “That’s what gangbangers do to other gangbangers.  They finger them for these crimes the other person may not have committed.  They’re not good guys on the stand.  These are bad guys.”

And these bad guys target just-us. 

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 4/24/19