Today I told my roommates about recent violence in the neighborhood so that they could adjust their habits accordingly. Then, realizing it was time to review my habitat now that the beat police have been pulled out to beef up courthouse security for the Freddie Gray Memorial Crucifixions, I decided to walk every ambush path in the neighborhood, beginning at 6:03 p.m., and ending at 8:22 p.m.
Someone gets taken down on foot, in Hamilton, every Sunday night. I had no desire to be attacked, but didn’t feel right about wrapping up The Boned Zone without at least walking my local ground. I did take my long pointy umbrella with me, so was not unarmed. I chose the umbrella over the 8 inch steel bar because I am primarily concerned about knives.
This would be a meditation on lone nocturnal vigilance, as the lone nocturnal pedestrian is the #1 prey animal in Harm City, the witless creature that is dragged into The Boned Zone with more regularity than any other type or criminal food. The hedges, vine-choked trees, untrimmed shrubs and weed-laced fences made the walk down these many side streets a spooky experience, with the autumn crickets nearly as loud as their summer predecessors.
Foot traffic was light, as was car traffic. Five different police responses could be heard, spaced evenly, with the police chopper doing four extended sweeps of the area.
Everyone on foot was black and alone, except for three pairs and two trios of young black men, and a mother and adult son who were crying about a relative being killed as they staggered down the street arm in arm.
I have just heard another police response—three cars it sounds like, and the chopper is back. I traversed Hamilton, part of Overlea, part of Gardenville, and Part of Cedonia, which scared the shit out of me. I was walking down the middle of the darkened streets overgrown with arching trees and towering weeds, past where Mike the Coke Head caught me in his 71 Super Sport in 1982, and managed to get away without his throat being cut, ten yards down the road from where four boys tried to run me down two months ago, around the corner from where Megan and I almost got swarmed by a pack of hoodrats who veered off at the last moment earlier this year.
Cedonia is terrible. I walked down the alley where Old Man Jimmy fought for his life twice—getting arrested once and KO’d the other time—where a little twerp tried to run me over in a yellow mustang in 1981, where a coworker of mine was beaten to death, where another friend was beaten up by a crack head he arrested, who then climbed the wall and ran along the roof tops of the garages, only to come out on the sidewalk were Jeremy was mugged by two bruthas, cross the street from where Old Man Jimmy’s old lady was thrown into the air by a hit and run driver, up the sidewalk past where JR disarmed his black neighbor after he stabbed his white girlfriend in the chest repeatedly on the lawn, across the street from where Big Sam was beaten to death in the church lot alley, past the scene of five pack attacks and armed robberies that is a major hoodrat attack path—seemingly engineered by the City Government to promote violent crime—and finally back up to Hamilton, where the two hoodrats that trailed me two months ago declined to cross Walther, taking me past the house where that 16-year-old black girl was raped to death with a broom stick this past summer, by, you guessed it, a group of black boys—and no one knows her name...
White Avenue has hosted a half dozen acts of violence since I moved in five years ago—home, relatively sweet, home.
In a half mile trek I went from a neighborhood where I can point to every single block and name a murder or multiple muggings and beatings, to Hamilton, where crime is steady and nasty but nothing like that.
We had one killing this year.
They had three this year.
It was creepy to walk past vehicles I have used for cover when being pursued on a similarly dark night. However, I was not gathering atmospherics for a horror story, but thinking about the attacks I have documented in this area—and those just as numerous that I have not—while getting a read on the visibility and pacing.
Things are close around here this time of year, a world of weeds and trees waving in the autumn breeze, narrow streets packed with parked cars bumper-to-bumper for blocks.
I’m not being hunted by snipers or archers, or even half-decent hand gunners, but thugs who prefer to beat, stomp and stab as a member of a cohesive pack, so I stay out in the middle of the street.
Even old men with canes are attacked by groups, with rape being about the only one-on-one crime.
Attacks by individuals are—aside from rape—unheard of.
Attacks by pairs are rare.
Attacks by trios are common.
The chopper is doing another search pass.
Attacks by groups of four or more are almost as common as trio attacks.
Shootings, though we have record numbers, are comparatively rare, and mostly involve the drug war.
One in three young black men carry a folding combat knife sold—ironically—on every third corner on the two main streets that bisect Northeast Baltimore. The Pakistani merchants who sell these knives by the case at gas stations and convenience stores price them at $1 an inch, with folders running up to $7. These knives are carried largely because black guys can’t fight as well as they used to back in the days before basketball supplanted boxing.
If you are attacked it will be by a group consisting exclusively, or primarily, of young black men, one of whom is more likely than not to be armed with a knife.
My roommate, a karate instructor, suggested dropping one and making the others scatter. There are two problems with this tactic. If the others scatter, the group was not much of a threat in the first place and criminal charges will be placed against you, with the poor oppressed child you decked having two witnesses that saw you jump out of nowhere and attack him.
Fortunately—if you hate lawyers—this is usually not the case. In case after case of attacks by packs of thugs, a pack ethic has been apparent, across the racial board. A surprising level of tenacity has been consistently demonstrated by this enemy, with dozens of men I have interviewed having to fight extended battles, knocking out multiple members of the pack, before the combination of fatigue, casualties and a closing window of opportunity convinced the attackers to retreat.
Silverback was attacked by five to ten young thugs, managed to KO three and hurt another with a shoulder punch, but still had his teeth knocked out by a steel object and had to take a terrible kicking, stomping and punching while striking back with his big hands with his back to his conversion van, kind of like Richard Roundtree as General George Armstrong Custer.
Oliver was attacked by a night club full of fools, who continued to aggress against him for the crime of walking to his car, even after he dropped a fool with a big right hand and threw another one.
When considering white attackers in rural and bar environments in urban enclaves, the individual generally has to KO the entire group—and usually does!
Do not expect your pack attacker to back off after you dropped one dude unless you are armed, and in that case they may then escalate. If one of your attackers heads for a car or building—lookout.
On how exactly lone men successfully slaughter groups of attackers read When You’re Food.
For tips on surviving combat read the ongoing serialized books Let the Weak Fall, No B.S. Boxing and Stick Fighting Basics
For now, I live in a city which is stripping deterrence levels of police coverage from residential areas in its quest to appease and put off the mob, even as a mother seeks justice for her nine-year-old son, beaten nearly to death in school, allowed to suffer seizures and slip into a coma in a school chair, only to die in the hospital five days earlier.
No outrage will well up over this crime, which was almost exactly like the death of Freddie Gray, because Black America hates its children, and only pretends to care about their young when Whitey can be taken to task for their fate. The tens of thousands of black boys in Baltimore, being whipped, beaten and punched from cradle to puberty by vicious mothers, without a father to serve as guide or example, understandably hate the world that created them and are willing to strike out at it. While, on many levels, they are pathetic combatants, in an urban environment where the population is disarmed, the packs they form can be as effective as those formed by canines in the wild.
Any attempt to negotiate will fail.
Knocking out one of them will not, in most cases, break the will of the group.
In Harm City or like environs prepare accordingly, with four factors as the pillars of your survival strategy:
1. Functional awareness
2. Behavioral deterrence
3. The ability to incapacitate
4. The tenacity to continue dropping bodies
Good luck.
