White Girl Bleed a Lot (17 page)

The chief started singing a different tune, saying the members of the mob were barbarians. But by then it was too late: The people of Wisconsin and Milwaukee knew two things: One, they had a full-scale race riot; and two, the police were not capable of calling it by name, let alone do anything about it.

This attack came after the black holiday celebration in Milwaukee known as Juneteenth. News accounts are sketchy at best. But one year later, after another massive disturbance where fifty-four people were arrested as a helicopter kept tabs, witnesses recounted their experiences from 2011.

My girlfriend and I walked up to Juneteenth last year from Riverwest; we got there right at the end…. Anyways, on our
walk back home, a half a dozen squad cars rushed past us and one squad car stopped. The officers were wearing full riot gear and said something to the likes of ‘What the hell are you (white) people doing in this neighborhood? Get the out of here, don’t you know there is a riot going on a block away?
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They did not know the kind of danger they were in.

Longtime Milwaukee resident Sandra Richardson knew. When she grew up, she remembers Juneteenth as a peaceful, happy celebration. Today that is different, she told the
Journal Sentinel
: “If young African American male and female would truly know the meaning of Juneteenth, it would be less violent.”
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Not everyone is so candid. Several of the victims of the “White Girl Bleed a Lot” beat down refused to describe the attacks as racial. They said it would be too divisive.

Two local media personalities had no problem with it. They knew the divisive part was over. Now was the time for justice. Talk show host James Harris, of 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee, told a television audience the facts about the “White Girl” beat down:

It wasn’t a color-blind crime. And it’s something that’s happening all over the nation. We have this epidemic of black young teenagers that are having mob violence, mob activity from Washington DC out to Denver over in the South as well.

It is part of the perfect storm of entitlement, dependency, political correctness, and this whole idea of white guilt where we’re afraid to identify who it is that’s attacking and the reasons why they are doing it….

(The Mayor and Police Chief) were more worried about being accused of racial profiling that the fact that black mobs were roaming down the streets hurting people.

This reason why this was a PC response was because it was black mob violence. You guys (fellow panelists) are in denial … We have a real problem. A real sickness in the [black] community, that until you address it, it will continue to explode …

Milwaukee and other major metropolitan areas are facing a crisis of black teen mob violence this summer. And if the powers that be refuse to identify the problem, how in the world do they expect to combat it?
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That’s a whole lot of truth-telling in one place at one time. So now we know that even truth-telling cannot stop racial violence—at least in that dose—because just a few weeks later it all began again.

This time at the bucolic Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee.

August 5, 2011, hundreds of black people beat up white people, damaged their cars, hurled racial epithets, and caused chaos inside and outside the gates of the State Fair. Groups of black people ran down the midway, pushing and beating people, stealing from vendors. It was complete chaos for two hours. Then it continued outside, where state police directed traffic while a race riot raged yards away.

They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever.

“It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.

“I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn’t do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody’s windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it.”

Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.

“That rated right up there with it. When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.’ There’s no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.”

Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “it was like a scene you needed the National Guard to control.”

“To me, it looked like a scene out of a movie,” claimed the anonymous witness.

“I have not seen anything like this in my life. It was a huge mob, and it was a fight that maybe lasted one to two minutes.”

Norb Roffers claimed that as he left the state fair with his wife, crowds near that entrance were large. “As we got closer to the street, we looked up the road, and we saw a quite a bit of commotion going on and there was a guy laying in the road. He wasn’t even moving. Finally a car pulled up. They stopped right next to the guy, and it looked like someone was going to help him. We were kind of stuck, because we couldn’t cross. Traffic was going through. Young black men running around, beating on people, and we were like ‘Let’s get the heck out of here.’ The light turned, and I got attacked from behind. I just got hit in the back of the head real hard. I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’ I heard my bell ring.”

Roffers further described what witnesses said happened to the man who was lying in the street.

“People were saying he was on a bike. They tore him off his bike and beat on him. We were walking to the west on Schlinger. I was watching behind me a lot more diligently, making sure there wasn’t anybody coming to get us anymore.”
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The local TV had a report about the extreme violence and chaos. The attacks were “racially motivated” said witnesses.

Seven police officers were injured. Thirty-one black people were arrested. “The violence left workers and patrons of the
fair in West Allis shaken and reminded many of the mob-like disturbances that occurred over the Fourth of July weekend in Milwaukee.” Police Chief Flynn and Mayor Barrett said they were going to get tough.
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Do they get these characters out of central casting when they want to find ineffectual public servants?

Before the July 4 beat down, before the State Fair riot, before the Memorial Day melee, the people of Wisconsin had a preview of racial violence in January 2011 at a local mall.

Over a hundred black teenagers met in January 2011 at the Mayfair Mall, the nicest mall in the whole state.

“There’s kids running all over the place. They’re just screaming, running. I’ve got a customer on the floor over here. They’ve busted out a glass table. Get people over here,” a Boston Store employee told 911 dispatchers.

“We need police right away. At Boston Store. They’re taking over the store. Hurry. The kids are all over the place. All over. The top level. They’re just everywhere. Running, screaming, breaking things,” another frantic employee told 911.
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After they were done trashing several shops inside, they took the carnage outside:

The police report said dozens of kids forced their way onto a bus without paying and wouldn’t get off. While police were clearing the bus, a fight involving forty kids broke out outside McCormick and Schmick’s restaurant. The restaurant went into lockdown after diners reported hearing gunshots.
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At least the black people in Minnesota had an excuse. When they trashed Mall of America, they thought Li’l Wayne was going to be there.

A few days after the mall carnage in Milwaukee, Shelley Walcott, a black TV reporter, wrote an Open Letter to the Kids Who Tore Up Mayfair. She told them to cut it out, because if not, people would talk bad about them.

None of you seem to have any concept of what’s being said about you out here in the real world.

Look, as a working journalist I am supposed to stay neutral. But through your actions last week you are making things worse on yourself, and the entire black community.

You just reinforced that old standby stereotype that we are all nothing but uneducated troublemakers.

And they’re saying that you are just going to be a product of your environment, and will probably end up pregnant and poor … or in prison.
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Ah yes, the good old “Stop rioting or people will not say nice things about you” approach. Why not? They tried everything else. There’s no word from Shelley about her advice to the black people who tore up the State Fair and who beat those kids on the Fourth of July.

Meanwhile, one of the “teens” arrested for rioting at the state fair is keeping it real. He said he attacked white people because he could. “Police say the teen told investigators whites were chosen because he considered them ‘easy targets.’”
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One of the deniers’ favorite weapons is the crime rate and how it is going down. At the same time, what is going up is the number of stories all over the country that say police are refusing to take crime reports. The
Journal Sentinel
in Wisconsin reports
that one of the reasons that the chief of police in Milwaukee is able to say that the crime rate is going down is because the police are not reporting hundreds of crimes.
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This underreporting is also happening in Chicago, where the Second City Cop blog said on a busy night only one in ten crimes are actually showing up on the books.

In Baltimore, “St. Patrick’s Day violence exceeded initial reports. … Youths marched seemingly at will through the Inner Harbor and streets north and west, frequently clashing… Dozens of officers called in from across the city scrambled to keep up with the attacks.”
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It’s happening in Seattle too. There a local TV new station asked “Is crime going unreported in parts of Seattle?” And they talked to the friends of a murder victim who said yes. They said they stopped wasting their time reporting crime to police because they say police could not do anything about it.
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In Atlanta in 2010, hundreds of black people rioted at the Screen on Green outdoor movie festival. “There were hundreds of black teens, apparently there to fight, yelling obscenities, threatening each other, both sexes,” said a poster to the Topix news site. The next day, police said only one incident was reported.
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The Department of Justice backed up these claims. A 2012 Department of Justice study says “Nearly 3.4 million violent crimes went unreported” every year from 2006 to 2010.
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