87-Year-Old Korean Grandmothers - Part 1

By Patrick Hall

Ubiquitous criminal behavior that too often defines many urban and inner-city areas comes at a high cost to the vast majority of residents who attempt to conduct their lives and raise their children like many of us. Some of these costs are more discernible than others.  For example, many inner-city Dollar Stores might hire extra security to guard against theft or outright stick-ups.  The cost may also be manifested in the types of products and services available at an inner-city Safeway or Wal-Mart, juxtaposed this to these same establishments in more affluent parts of town, who don’t have such costs. The fact that suburban stores can keep thousands of low-priced and more bulky items displayed outside the store, and inner-city stores cannot, is another direct cost of criminality. Unfortunately, much of this lawlessness in urban communities is perpetrated by young (and not so young) black men. According to current FBI and DOJ statistics, they are the cohort that orchestrates much of this chaos.  

In the working-class community that my wife and I call home, residents frequently refer to the local Wal-Mart as the Ghetto-Mart. This moniker may seem unfair or systematically racist to the ears of the perpetually offended: (i.e., anyone who has recently attended a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Workshop). However, the criminality occurring inside and outside the store, coupled with roaming security vehicles and personnel, speaks to the damaged ecology of the area.  Once again, you will seldom experience this level of criminality vs. security in more minor crime-prone areas.
 
In larger urban areas such as Philadelphia, Chicago, St Louis, or Baltimore, everything must be tied down or placed behind bars or Plexiglass. Businesses out of necessity (if not survival) must hire or install costly security.

In these same communities, residents live with bars on their lower windows and doors.  They may also have guns in their homes and guard dogs. They do this as a prerequisite. The police are not the existential threat that BLM, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and politicians like Barrack Obama and Cori Bush (D-MO) say they are. The real danger comes from a pervasive criminal element in many urban areas. They are legacy blacks who commit 90% of the homicides in the inner-city, over 50% of all murders nationwide, despite only 13% of the United States population. The latter statistic is even more alarming if one considers that female legacy blacks account for less than 1.3% of the total black-on-black murders. Theft, shootings, drug trafficking, and a host of other petty and not so petty criminality poisons the urban ecology for many of its law-abiding residents.  

The police and all of us who live in these areas are acutely aware of these harsh realities. Subsequently, law enforcement "criminally profile" those individuals who are most likely involved in some form of maleficence.  So, when robbery or homicide occurs at the local MacDonald’s or CVS, the police don’t waste their time questioning or arresting 87-year-old Korean American grandmothers. They profile those individuals who are most likely involved in some form of illegal activity. And yes, all “Americans” of African descent pay for the criminality of their wayward brethren.

[Patrick Hall is a retired university library director. He is a graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he received three advance degrees. He has published in Freedom's Journal Magazine, America, Commonweal, Headway, Journal of Academic Librarianship, American Libraries and others. He currently volunteers at a local VA hospital in the town of Erie, Pa.]