THE COLOR OF CRIME
By the most conservative estimates, minorities in this country commit crime more than the rate of whites
BY KEN WARD

Ken Ward is opinion page editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla. A Las Vegas resident from 1990-2002, he was a freelance columnist with the R-J and assistant managing editor at the Sun. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com  Other stories by Ken Ward

Is America whitewashing its crime statistics? Recent developments in law enforcement and the media point to a racial cover-up. Want proof? Check the arrest record of your garden-variety Mexican and you'll find he (or she) listed as "white."

Then check reports on victims. Here, you'll see full disclosure, listing them as Hispanic, black, Asian or any number of other minority affiliations. All the better to catalog an increase in hate crimes.

Political correctness was on display recently in a case involving an attempted murder suspect wanted in a series of armed robberies in central Florida. Cires Gomes, born in Brazil, was nonetheless labeled "white." The man he's charged with shooting was black, and was categorized accordingly.

Pile up enough of these bogus statistics and you have a veritable "white"-on-black crime wave.

The media facilitate this folly by witlessly regurgitating what the cops report. Some newsroom policies even prohibit the use of the term "Hispanic" in identifying criminal suspects. At one Florida newspaper, reporters are instructed to call them something absurd like "white or dark complected" men.

Such Orwellian nonsense is compounded when news outlets fail to publish pictures of minority suspects who remain at large. In former days, this kind of information was provided as a public service.

Now, handcuffed by racially sensitive directives, newspapers and TV only tell part of the story (while quickly plastering the photos and ethnicity of white suspects, occasionally described as supremacists or members of hate groups by the ever-helpful Southern Poverty Law Center).

Selective, color-coded reporting strains credibility and retards law enforcement. Remember the white man in the white van who was profiled and sketched by the experts as the Beltway sniper outside Washington, D.C. a few years ago? As police rousted random Caucasians on roadsides, the black gunmen continued to shoot and kill. (Was it mere coincidence that the police chief who ran this feckless operation was black?)

The feds resemble The Keystone Kops, too. To this day, the FBI stubbornly dismisses any Muslim/al-Qaida connection to the post-9/11 anthrax mail attacks while myopically focusing on a Ted Kaczynski copycat or some mad scientist (white, naturally). Not surprisingly, this case is no closer to being solved than it was five years ago. 

Just as one of the Beltway gunmen turned out to be an illegal alien from Jamaica, Senor Gomes was in Florida illegally - for the second time. He had been deported in 2003, but returned to the Sunshine State and was arrested for cocaine possession two years later. After serving a portion of his sentence, he was free to resume his criminal ways.

In fact, U.S. authorities have no idea how exactly many illegal aliens reside in our jails or prisons. Local law enforcement says immigration isn't their job either, so everyone just shrugs and shovels more meaningless paperwork.

Likewise, reporters rarely ask about a perpetrator's immigration status. When they do, it can take days to get an answer, and by then, it's considered old news.

Of course, when ethnic minorities are victims of crime -and they often are, at the hands of their own countrymen - it's Page One stuff. So, too, is the silly spin that high minority incarceration rates are proof of a racist society.

Exhuming buried racial identifiers like Hispanic, Human Rights Watch says that 63 percent of imprisoned individuals are black or Latino. Considering that incarceration rates ought to mirror the population at large, and noting that minorities are jailed at more than double their proportionate share, Human Rights Watch deduces that something is wrong.

Indeed, something is terribly wrong. By the most conservative estimates, minorities in this country commit crime at six, eight or 10 times the rate of whites. Ninety-five percent of all outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens. Back in 1988, before statistics were sanitized the way they are today, the FBI Uniform Crime Report totaled 9,405 cases of blacks raping white women, compared with 10 cases of whites raping black females.

And no one in the media or law enforcement will call a spade a spade. That's criminal stupidity. LW