Stereotypes killed Robert Butts

The State of Georgia executed Robert Butts, Friday night, May 4, 2018 at 9:58 EDT. But the real killer was a lethal injection of stereotypes by prosecutors, callously upheld by the courts.  I have a long history with Robert and his co-defendant,  Marion Wilson.  Since 2005 I've testified in various hearings about the pernicious use of gang stereotypes which frightened their juries into returning a death sentence.  For Robert,  my best efforts failed.

Robert Butts

No case in my twenty three years of expert witness work has been characterized by so many inflammatory and false claims about gangs as this one.
 
   I've previously written about this case.  Prosecutors went to extreme lengths to label a robbery gone wrong as a gang-related crime.  Baldwin County Sheriff Howard Sils had testified the absurd claim that since the bullet type was "F shot" surely the"F" must have stood for Folks? Read that again. "F for Folks."  But that was not the worst gang "evidence" at the trial.

   
 District Attorney Fred Bright put Milledgeville Deputy Ricky Horn on the stand. Horn was qualified as an "expert" on gangs despite his sworn testimony that most of what he knows about gangs he learned from "TV and the movies." Horn testified to an all white jury in a town that he admitted was "very religious" that "FOLKS" stood for...wait for it....Followers of Our Lord King Satan. So Mr. Butts was a young black male gang member, convicted of murder and a devil worshipper as well.  Death qualified juries,  Fleury-Steiner finds,  can justify sentencing someone to death if they can dehumanize the defendant,  to see him as "the other," as something less than human.  Devil worshippers by any measure surely qualify as "them."

     I testified in earlier hearings that I had even consulted with Chicago Police Gang Squad officers and none of us had ever heard such ridiculous meaning for "Folks."  That term,  of course,  is the name of a now defunct coalition of Chicago gangs, the opposite of "People." As in, "your people, my folks." 

     But frightening the jury with the specter of devil worshipping black gang members in Baldwin County was only the fuse to set off a time bomb in DA Fred Bright's closing argument in Robert's trial.  The jury was told that Baldwin County was being held hostage by the "carnage" of a violent crime wave by vicious gangs.  Interviews with jurors uncovered that the jury was unaware of such a threat to their lives and the allegations of a gang crime wave was among the most decisive arguments in the jury arriving at a sentence of death. They were even sequestered, it was thought,  to protect them against gang retaliation.

No Crime wave in the 1990s
in Baldwin County

     Except the crime wave was wholly imaginary.  In previous testimony I had pointed out that the homicide rate in Baldwin County, where Milledgeville is located, actually declined in the 1990s after gangs had formed. While the nineties saw a surge in gang homicides in most large cities, Baldwin County had a 33% decrease in homicides over the previous decade. There was also no change in the number of assaults between the 1980s and 1990s. The formation of gangs was related to a decline in violence, not an increase.
   
 When we form stereotypes, or frames, unless we think about it,  we shape any new facts to fit the frame.  Thus being told of a devil-worshipping gang and a murder case,  and given unrebutted dangerous stereotypes of gangs,  the jury accepted the "fake news" that Milledgeville was in the midst of the "carnage" of a gang crime wave — despite the fact that no such crime wave existed.  Frames trump facts. Stereotypes can kill. And do. And did.

     Juries in murder cases are especially vulnerable to relying on stereotypes.  Terror Management Theory explains when we are confronted with images or evidence of our own mortality we tend to unconsciously rely on familiar folk wisdom, what Kahneman calls "thinking fast" rather than utilizing critical thought. Robert's jury was frightened to death, or rather frightened into rendering a death sentence.

   Gang allegations hover like a phantom over a jury's subconscious or in this case the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole,  who briefly considered commuting his death sentence.  Like any demon, gang stereotypes need to be continually cast out until they are chased away.  Prosecutors are advised to always use gang allegations when available because the very mention of gangs is effective. Such evidence is "prejudicial" and "that's the point!" exclaims a prosecutors' manual.   Think about that word: "pre-judicial."  This means prosecutors rely on pre-existing stereotypes, not evidence,  to get a conviction or harsh sentence.  This is no less than a threat to basic principles of justice.  This is why I do this work. 

     I think of Donovan Parks, the innocent murdered victim in this case. I don't blame his father for saying Robert's execution was "good news."  Our criminal justice system is not about fairness, deterrence, and by no means rehabilitation. It is too often a system of revenge, of "just deserts," lashing out at those who offend the sacred standards of an imagined community.  Juries don't need to think what is right or just. They are urged by prosecutors to act on their rawest feelings. They dehumanize, or in this case, demonize the offender so they can more easily allow him to be killed. 

    I've realized the jury didn't sentence a human being, "Robert Butts," to death. They sentenced a caricature of a gang member, a dehumanized monster of the jury’s darkest nightmares. The DA could have recalled the elements of malice murder and made his case for death to the jury without recourse to any mention of gangs.  But instead he chose to visit the nether world of demonization where an offender is so unalterably evil there is literally no choice to the jury but to sentence him to death. 

    As Robert's execution date arrived May 4th I unconsciously watched the clock: 10:02am....1:47pm .....5:32pm.  Then the US Supreme Court's brief stay of execution followed immediately by a terse text that the court would not consider his case. Then 9:58pm.  I thought back over the phone conversations I had over the years with this bright, creative man,  Robert E. Butts. His deep feelings of responsibility for his family and remorse for his actions.  His playful FaceBook messages to me under a pseudonym, daring me to guess who he was. His calls to me from his "cell phone." His joy.

 

    Robert wrote this stanza in a book he published of his poems and drawings from Death Row. The poem is entitled "Tomorrow."

Never will I stop seeking you,

From this I'll never sway...

I know that we'll meet eventually,

That tomorrow will come one day...

Until it won't. Good bye Robert. Your death by stereotype made me cry... made me angry... made me shiver to my very soul.  But it also motivates me to use my experience and abilities to confront the unjust and unjustifiable uses of gang stereotypes.  I won't forget you.

Berreby, David. 2005. Us and Them: The Science of identity. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Butts, Robert E. 2013. A Portrait of My Journey: Memoirs from Death Row. Lexington, KY.

Devine, Dennis J. 2012. Jury Decision Making; The State of the Science. New York and London: New York University Press.

Fleury-Steiner, Benjamin. 2004. Jurors' stories of death : how America's death penalty invests in inequality. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Greenberg, Jeff, Sheldon Solomon, Mitchell Veeder, Tom Pyszczynski, Abram Rosenblatt, Shari Kirkland, Deborah Lyon. 1990. "Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58(2):308-18.

Jackson, Alan. 2004. "Prosecuting gang cases: What local prosecutors need to know." Alexandria, VA: American Prosecutors Research Institute.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Think Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Chicago: gangs, homicide, and housing

The high homicide rate in Chicago today is no mystery.  But understanding it requires courage to look bravely at Chicago’s past and confront the Windy City’s historic structures of racism.

I’ve been studying gangs and violence in Chicago for more than 20 years. I’ve concluded three factors underlay Chicago’s high homicide rate.

First, 2016 did not represent a spike, but more of a return to Chicago’s historic level of homicide.  Homicide rates jumped from 17/100,000 in 2015 to about 29/100,000 in 2016. This "spike" brought us to rates that were considerably higher than rates over the past decade.   But this near-sighted focus omits this city’s persistently high rates of homicide before 2004.  Chicago’s average homicide rate from 1970 to 2016 is 24.3.  Our 600 plus homicides so far in 2017 put us squarely at the average homicide rate of the past half century.  

Second, Chicago’s homicide rate is very similar to other rustbelt cities, e.g. Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Memphis.  In the early 1990s, homicide rates of all US cities soared with the crack wars. Like other rustbelt cities, as well as big cities like Philadelphia, Chicago’s rate fell moderately. Cities like New York and Los Angeles saw their homicide rate plummet while high homicide cities like Baltimore, New Orleans St. Louis and Detroit stayed high.  We should realize that Chicago's murder rate today is 5-6 times higher than New York City’s and shows no sign of breaking away from other rustbelt cities.

What rustbelt cities have in common are severely distressed areas with many unemployed and desperate young black men — and high homicide rates.  While New York City has only 15% of its population in what Richard Florida calls “distressed” zip codes, Chicago has almost 40% of its citizens living in such areas, about the same as Philadelphia, whose homicide rate is identical with ours. Detroit, with its even higher homicide rates, has an astounding 99% of its citizens living in such distressed areas.

The high homicide areas in Chicago on the west and south sides are the areas of the greatest distress and extreme poverty, with youth unemployment rates exceeding 90% according to a UIC Great Cities study. These are not coincidentally areas of concentrated black poverty. The key to understanding homicide in Chicago is race, not gangs.  There are likely as many Latino as black gang members, but African Americans account for 78% of all homicide victims and Latinos 16%. 

Finally, why didn’t Chicago’s rate fall to single digits like New York and LA?  Observers point to out of control violence due to the "fracturing" of Chicago's gangs. But why did gangs fracture?  The crucial factor appears to be the impact of the demolition of the Chicago Housing Authority projects which were originally built to keep Chicago segregated.  CHA projects had become fortresses for the gangs and treasure chests for their drug businesses. Gang wars waged in the 1990s between CHA towers.   Faced with similar problems at that time New York invested more than $5 billion dollars in repairing their low income housing projects and stabilizing neighborhoods.  In contrast Chicago diverted renovation money to law enforcement, then tore down the projects, scattering tens of thousands of residents.

In the early 2000s, gang members forced out of public housing migrated to areas already home to traditional gangs. These gangs had been weakened by their leaders isolated in maximum security cells, declining crack markets, and exhaustion after years of war. The massive influx of CHA gang members into south and west side neighborhoods caused youth to reorganize into local cliques, often named after fallen homeboys or rappers as Robert Aspholm has brilliantly described.  Cliques today contain members of many different traditional gangs and their allegiance is to one another not the old hierarchically organized gangs.  The years of 2004-2015 were years of reorganization and brand new rivalries were heating up. Violence today is more spontaneous and looks nothing like the organized wars of the 1990s.  The release of the video of LaQuan McDonald’s murder and a long history of police abuse set off a contagious plague of violence.

It is the large pool of angry, unemployed, young black men in a segregated rustbelt city along with the history of racism in Chicago that explains our high homicide levels.  Investment in neighborhoods of concentrated black poverty is an obvious remedy. Less obvious, but just as important, is for youth organizers and social movements to provide a positive outlet for the new, alienated and largely leaderless new gangs.  This is the glimmer of hope in a story of racism and despair.

Aspholm, Robert. 2015. "It Ain't the Nineties Anymore." in Social Work. Chicago University of Illinois-Chicago.

Hagedorn, John M. and Brigid Rauch. 2007. "Housing, Gangs, and Homicide: What We can Learn from Chicago." Urban Affairs Review 42(4):435-56.

Popkin, Susan J. 2000. The hidden war : crime and the tragedy of public housing in Chicago. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Lynching, Gangs, and the Courts

…the prosecutor’s remarks were designed to humanize the victim, demonize the defendant and his alibi witnesses, and remind jurors of the brutality of the crime. His intentions were to give the trial one last heavy dose of emotionalism. 

This quote could describe prosecutors' rhetoric in every gang-related legal case I’ve worked.  Emotional appeals to racial stereotypes and the routine demonization of gang members is “expected behavior” for states attorneys. As a manual on gang prosecution argues,  when the defense objects to gang evidence as "prejudicial" prosecutors should respond:  “Of course it is. That’s the point! “   Offering research to combat stereotypes is why I consult on gang related legal cases. 

The trial the first quote comes from, however, was from 110 years ago in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In his final appeal to the all-white male jury,  prosecutor Matt Whitaker raised his voice and thundered:

Send that black brute to the gallows and prove to the world that in Chattanooga and Hamilton County the laws of the country does not countenance such terrible crimes, has not ceased to mete out the proper punishment for such horrible outrages. 

Contempt of Court  tells the story of Ed Johnson, accused of the rape of a white woman. Likely innocent with multiple alibi witnesses,  Johnson was hurriedly tried and convicted in an emotionally charged city.  Attempts to change venue were denied because the judge and sheriff stated the mob would lynch him before letting him leave Chattanooga. During final arguments, one of the jurors tried to jump out of the jury box and threatened to tear out the defendant’s heart.

Two black attorneys made an unprecedented legal journey to the US Supreme Court in 1906.  When Justice John Marshall Harlan granted a stay of execution, an angry white mob of hundreds of locals, aided and abetted by Sheriff Joseph Shipp, broke Johnson out of the jail, lynched him and filled his still-shaking body with bullets.

The story of the book is that this event caused the Supreme Court for the first time to apply the 14th amendment to state criminal courts, with a particular concern with the lynchings that were terrorizing black people in the south.  The Supremes were split about whether to interfere in criminal matters traditionally left to the states. They had decided less than ten years previously in Plessy vs Ferguson that “separate was equal” and had given free reign to Jim Crow.  Justice  Harlan, who dissented in Plessy, argued not only that ignoring the Supreme Court’s habeas order was a direct insult to the Court, but Johnson’s unfair trial and subsequent lynching violated the basic rights of black people to equal protection under the law. 

Harlan’s argument was buttressed when a deliberating court heard about of another lynching in Oxford Mississippi. That mob was brazenly led by a US Senator, W.V. Sullivan,  who boasted to the press:  

I directed every movement of the mob. I wanted him lynched. I saw his body dangling from a tree this morning and I am glad of it. I aroused the mob and directed them to storm to jail.

This was too much and the court unanimously found Sheriff Shipp and others in contempt bringing them to trial. While Shipp and the others got off with light sentences the Fourteenth Amendment would from then on be applied to state criminal proceedings and actions. Federal courts would be used to bring civil rights suits against local authorities and to challenge egregious violations of justice in local courts.

The last two lynchings in the US took place in 1944.  That is progress. But this does not mean that black people receive equal protection of the laws. Like Ed Johnson, black males — in my work this means gang members — are still considered guilty unless proven innocent by extraordinary efforts of defense attorneys.

So while we celebrate progress, we must note mass incarceration is a Mark of Cain on our nation, persuasive evidence of the permanent nature of racism. Remarks by prosecutors still seethe of racial resentment and routinely spout out “alternative facts.” For example in one case in Georgia where I consulted, the prosecutor, Fred Bright, claimed that a gang related homicide was an example of a “the carnage” gangs had brought to Milledgeville, Georgia in recent years. His theatrics led to death sentences for the two defendants, Robert Butts and Marion Wilson.

I was retained by counsel for both defendants in appeals. The habeas hearings where I testified had been made possible by US vs. Shipp a century before.  On the stand I pointed out that with the advent of gangs in the late 1980s, the homicide rate in Milledgeville had actually declined, not spiked. Gangs in that city, the former capitol of the Confederacy, were in neighborhoods that were far apart and conflict between them was held to a minimum. 

We don’t know if Ed Johnson was innocent of rape, though after Contempt of Court  was published his conviction was set aside 94 years later.  Butts and Wilson, however, likely participated in the homicide on Donovan Parks.  Does their guilt make the unbridled demonizing rhetoric of prosecutors acceptable?

Gang neighborhoods in Milledgeville
 were not adjacent to one another

Bright grandstanded in his opening statement that the murder was a gang related crime. Despite offering not a shred of evidence of gang involvement he kept hammering his “alternative facts” into the heads and hearts of the all-white jury, stoking their fears.  He knew gang evidence is prejudicial and he kept riding that bucking bronco in rodeo-like proceedings.  In closing he evoked images of Muslims and terrorism as well as continuing his “Satanic” version of gang rituals of murder.  The appointed defense attorneys offered few objections at the original trial — they were indeed “friends of the court.” 

Like in the Johnson case, the prosecutor got his death penalty. Unlike Chattanooga in 1906, the convicted defendants were not lynched.  Times have changed and fortunately America is still not “great again” as in the good old days of vigilante justice. But despite years of hard work by the Georgia Resource Center and two high power private law firms working pro bono, both Butts and Wilson remain on death row.  

I think the use of “alternative facts,” demonizing defendants, and evoking strong emotions to cloud judgement violates the spirit of what we mean by justice.   A cynic might call what happened to the two Folks gang members a “legal lynching.”

Curriden Mark and Leroy Phillips, Jr. 2001. Contempt of Court: The turn-of-the-century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism. New York City: Anchor Books.

Jackson, Alan. 2004. "Prosecuting gang cases: What local prosecutors need to know." Alexandria, VA: American Prosecutors Research Institute.

Talking Common Sense About Gangs and Violence

The violence problem in Chicago is mainly about race, not gangs, guns, laws, or cartels.  

That’s what I’ve learned from two decades of gang research in Chicago.  Today there are more Latino than African American gang members and gangs in Chicago.  Yet nearly 80% of homicide victims and offenders are African American.  Despite this, CPD Superintendent McCarthy and Mayor Emanuel continue to blame “gangs" and avoid linking homicide to Chicago’ history of racial oppression.

Other conventional explanations for homicide also fall flat.  There is no evidence that homicide fluctuates with a rise or fall in the number of guns, which have plagued our streets for decades.  The  Chicago Reporter recently pointed out harsher penalties for gun laws are also uncorrelated with homicide drops.

The notion that our homicide rate is a product of drug cartel rivalries is similarly specious.  The cartels are Mexican and their local distribution thrives on kinship connections. The cartels have been at war in Mexico for nearly a decade yet their violence has not spilled over even to the other side of the border, much less Chicago.  El Paso, only a bridge away from violence-plagued Juarez,  is statistically one of the safest cities in America. The DEA may claim violence in Spike Lee’s “Chiraq” is about drug cartel rivalries, but their self-serving proclamations stretch credulity. 

Our homicide rate, with two small spikes and dips, has stayed constant for more than a decade. With an alarming number of gunshot wounds, it makes sense that random fluctuations in the number of people dying of gun injuries account for occasional increases and drops in deaths. Our homicide rate has settled in at about four times higher than New York City and half of Detroit’s. There is no evidence law enforcement tactics or interventions by groups such as CureViolence have had any measurable impact on our city’s homicide rate since its 50% decline from 1992 to 2004.

Superintendent McCarthy blames the gangs for violence but maybe he doesn’t understand that gangs in Chicago are radically different than in the 1990s. My book, The In$ane Chicago Way, explains how organized wars,  led by incarcerated gang chiefs,  brought homicide levels in the 1990s to twice as high as they are today.  Those wars didn’t end because of any new police tactics, but rather exhausted and fractured the gangs, breaking the hold of the old gang leaders. Today’s black gang members particularly are rebellious even against their old gang chiefs. 

Current research by Robert Aspholm and others finds violence is driven by spontaneous,  local incidents, sometimes gang related, sometimes not.  Drill raps on YouTube often replace memorized gang “laws and prayers” as motivations for violence.  What underlies the shootings in black communities are the same factors that for a century have produced higher rates of African American violence:  the daily humiliations of powerless, desperate, unemployed black men.  

From the 1919 race riots to the years of restrictive covenants and “hidden violence” to the building and then destruction of CHA housing projects there has been an unbroken line of oppressive conditions in Chicago’s black communities.  Have things gotten better?  Despite a growing middle class, the black poverty rate has increased since 1960 to reach one third of all African Americans. Indices of segregation have remained unchanged since the 1960s and the black unemployment rate has doubled. The pool of young, poor, unemployed black men are still on street corners and they are killing each other as this 2012 Chicago Reader graphic shows.

The attempt to blame the gangs fundamentally diverts attention from  the fact that to McCarthy’s police — and the Emanuel machine to which he owes allegiance — black lives don’t really matter. In the 1990s CPD clearance rates for homicide ranged from 64% to 69%. The Superintendent admitted that by September 2015, only 23% of all homicides were cleared. Read that again: less than one in four homicides resulted in an arrest.   When the gangs were at war in the 1990s it was relatively easy to figure out who was doing the shooting.  Despite gang claims they don’t snitch to police, court records show they did, pointing their fingers at rival gang shooters. Today, shootings are more spontaneous, and less controlled, making them in a way more dangerous. Young men hand out violent street justice as retaliation since police can’t seem to find the actual offenders.

This means McCarthy should stop his out of date tactics of threatening old gang leaders to control youthful members over which they no longer exercise control. His “Call Ins” claimed their first death October 13 when Tracey Morgan was gunned down after a meeting with CPD officers. While there have been persistent attempts by gangs to minimize their own violence, from the People & Folks coalitions to Spanish Growth & Development,  gang leaders today simply do not have the legitimacy, organization, or authority to stop the shootings.

Blaming the gangs also diverts attention away from police brutality and corruption. Jon Burge’s legacy has not been forgotten and serious attempts to bring real accountability to McCarthy’s CPD have been largely frustrated. My book demonstrated how police corruption helps gangs thrive. While good police work is part of the solution, bad police work is part of the problem.

All violence is paid for, the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu said. Chicago’s “structural violence” of racism and poverty is coming back to haunt us in many ways, including the hostility of poor young black men.  The rebellion that has been going on in Ferguson for the past year may be a portent of the fire next time in Chicago. 

Here is the uncomfortable truth: There is no easy answer to violence in Chicago.  Our city has to soberly confront its legacy of racism in employment, housing, education, and policing. McCarthy and Emanuel should stop blaming the gangs and calling for new repressive legislation. If the mayor is serious about reducing violence he needs to steeply increase investment in black communities. The best way to prevent violence is to provide hope to the desperate underclass of African Americans in our city. 

Gangs, Juggalos, and the FBI's Crooked Frames

There it is, right in the FBI's list of Haitian and Somalian and other scary gangs,  the "Juggalos!" Yeah, the Insane Clown Posse's groupie group has made the FBIs most dangerous gangs list. You gotta be kidding. 

But lets leave to one side too-easy-to-make comments about FBI paranoia or tactics to scare lawmakers and get more funding.  Rather, let's look more carefully at what the FBI says about the overall US gang problem.  How are gangs being "framed" by the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency?

First, all sorts of gangs are lumped together in their report "2011 National Gang Threat Assessment." Fair enough, the FBI is charged with investigating "threats," as in the mafia, communists, terrorists, gangs, or now, eeek!,  Juggalos.  The "frame" provided by their report means some aspects — gangs as threats — are given more prominence than others.  As in a picture frame: you are directed to look inside the frame and end up not looking outside it.  

Gangs as threats may be a justified target of the FBI,  but aren't gangs more than threats?  We may not like it, but gangs, for example,  provide emotional support for troubled kids.  They are signs that not all is right with our schools and become a refuge for drop outs.  [note: according to a recent report only 47% of high school age black males actually graduated].  They provide jobs, even if from vice industries, for youth in minority neighborhoods where unemployment is staggeringly high.  They bring money into poor minority neighborhoods when gangs sell drugs to a richer white clientele  [evenso, white kids are more likely to use and sell drugs than black kids].  Yes, gangs do more harm than good, but we need to recognize that gangs (including Juggalos) are more than one thing.  Come to think of it,  just like the FBI, as those who've had experience with their investigations will attest. 

But FBI "framing," double entendre intended, is not on the up and up.  Let's look at what their report did not say or what we can find buried in their text.  For example, their report claims there are now 1.4 million gang members, a "40 percent increase from 2009."  Huh? Forty percent, actually a reported 500,000 more gang members over 2 years?  How did they arrive at this number ?  Read the small print: 

Better reporting and collection has contributed greatly to the increased documentation and reporting of gang members and gang trends. 

Uh, huh. They got these numbers by asking law enforcement agencies to estimate how many gang members in their jurisdiction and this year there was "better reporting" meaning the cops found more gangs. Do locales have a common methodology in estimating gang membership? Nope. Any checks on validity? Nope. Any reason to think a jurisdiction might exaggerate their findings? Well, if you got a bigger gang problem you will certainly need more funds to fight them. How many local estimates did the FBI reject because they were suspect? We don't know but I'll take a guess: None. So how do they know how many gangs and gang members there are? Do they count them? Nah, they ask the local cops to do what amounts to a "guess-timate."  So why do the FBI think this massive increase occurred?  Read and weep:

Law enforcement in several jurisdictions also attribute the increase in gang membership in their region to the gangster rap culture, the facilitation of communication and recruitment through the Internet and social media, the proliferation of generational gang members, and a shortage of resources to combat gangs.

Ah,  gangsta rap and Facebook are to blame. Really.  But there is more.  In 2010 the FBI tells us 

Gangs are becoming more violent.....

But Director Mueller, we have a problem here. USA Today reported that in 2010.  

Across the nation, homicide rates have dropped to their lowest levels in nearly a generation. And overall violent crime has sunk to its lowest level since 1973, Justice Department statistics show.

In fact, the murder rate in 2010 of 4.8 per 100,000 was less than HALF that in 1991 (9.8) or 1980 (10.2).  In fact, the absolute number of homicides in 2010 (14,748) is almost exactly the same as 1969 (14,760) when there were 100,000,000 fewer people in the US!   Rape, robbery, and assault are also all sharply down.

The report goes on to say other silly things, for example linking gangs to the computer game Second Life, because gang members "could potentially use Second Life to recruit, spread propaganda, commit other crimes such as drug trafficking, and receive training for real-world criminal organizations." "Potentially?" Is this a feeler for the FBI to investigate the 21.3 million Second Life accounts registered in 2010?

Now the problem with such "crooked frames" is that there is a real threat from gangs, but it becomes lost in rhetoric that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. In many cities gangs are not becoming more sophisticated and organized but fragmented with fewer controls from powerful city leaders. This has both good and bad aspects. Less organization often means more violence.  At the same time, the reach of Mexican cartels and prison gangs has influenced gangs in many areas, and this deserves more than cursory attention. We also are not informed of increasing penetration of Latino gangs into politics, following the well trod Irish and Italian paths.  Gangs and politics have always been closely knit, but the FBI apparently doesn't think corruption is a threat worth mentioning.  I wonder why?  FBI gang reports like this are meant for cheap headlines and little else. 

Now I have to admit that I have mingled with Juggalos and watched the Insane Clown Posse perform in person. They are outrageous. But no more so than the FBI's "Threat Assessment."