Alpha News just got called racist by the far left City Pages because Alpha News has a series of “Minnesota Crime” articles, which started in 2019 and disproportionately features crimes committed by black Americans.
To prove their contention once and for all, City Pages notes how the most-recent Alpha News “Minnesota Crime” article, which ran on September 2, features a black man named Abdifetah Ali Kalif who punched and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old.
But, says City Pages, there is a story in the St. Cloud Times, from July 31, of a 19-year-old white male in St. Cloud who repeatedly sexually abused a 12-year-old girl, which Alpha News is not covering. City Pages also found a story from August 7, where a white man in his 50s broke into a young woman’s apartment, located by the University of Minnesota, and sexually assaulted her. Alpha News didn’t cover that either, which proves Alpha News is racist, says City Pages.
First off, all these stories are terrible. Nobody should have to go through any of this, and it doesn’t help anyone to politicize crime.
But what could help victims is bringing attention to unreported crimes, and to Minnesota’s lax sentencing system for certain things such as sex crimes, and even sex crimes against children. And that’s precisely what Alpha News set out to do with its “Minnesota Crime” articles.
Here are the facts:
Minneapolis Crime Watch is a group of citizens who listen to police scanners and report on crime in Minneapolis that media outlets don’t cover. Earlier in 2019, to draw attention to unreported crimes, Alpha News agreed to republish all stories submitted by Minneapolis Crime Watch that are particularly egregious, as long as the stories are factual and use only publicly available data.
That means that verifying what they hear on the scanners requires this group of concerned citizens to get more information from the local county attorney. At this junction, the watchers are entirely at the mercy of what the county attorney chooses to release. For example, one such person informs Alpha News that the Hennepin County Attorneys office is slow-walking the release of several of requested criminal complaints, many of which involve white people.
That’s why City Pages using the Google-machine to find two sexual assaults committed by whites, and saying that because Alpha News didn’t cover these stories Alpha News is racist, is particularly silly. Alpha News didn’t cover them precisely because they are covered elsewhere—which is why City Pages could find them on Google. Alpha News also doesn’t cover stories that weren’t picked up by the Minneapolis Crime Watch, as is certainly the case with the awful St. Cloud story.
Aside from how these cases make it to Alpha News via the Minneapolis Crime Watch, the other fact explaining the disproportionate representation of blacks is that black Americans commit a disproportionate number of crimes in large urban areas.
In America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, for example, black Americans represented 62 percent of all robbery defendants, 57 percent of all murder defendants, and 45 percent of all assault defendants. In New York in 2014, blacks made up 23 percent of the population but committed three-quarters of all reported shootings and 70 percent of all robberies.
It isn’t racist to point this out. In fact, it is racist to ignore it. That’s because the vast majority of the victims of urban crime are innocent blacks. And this black on black crime has a very apparent cause: family breakdown, fatherlessness, bad schools, and the systemic poverty that results.
The only group that benefits from ignoring these problems are the well-off white liberals—like the people who write for City Pages—who still largely run these urban areas, and who’s predecessors in the false religion of “progressivism” created the policies that led to these conditions in the first place.
We should do something about these problems. But sweeping them under the rug will only make them worse, and poor black Americans will continue to be the biggest victim.
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Willis Krumholz
Willis L. Krumholz is a fellow at Defense Priorities. He holds a JD and MBA degree from the University of St. Thomas, and works in the financial services industry. The views expressed are those of the author only. You can follow Willis on Twitter @WillKrumholz.
