Fifteen years ago I began to publish research indicating that the primary trend in violence was toward predatory group aggression.
Martial arts people refused to listen; assuring their students that violence still consisted predominantly of one-to-one fisticuffs between same-sex, same-age combatants. This has changed. Martial arts instructors now seek this information which runs so counter to their noble traditions.
Law enforcement across the country continues to insist that the only violence trend worth noting is firearms use. However, in Baltimore, the cops are finally—thanks to social media bypassing the criminal print mouthpiece of the local criminal government [The Baltimore Sin newspaper]—beginning to admit that young unarmed men are a threat. Even after virtually the entire news apparatus of the Western World spent a year preaching that a young man smashing another less fit man’s head into the pavement does not constitute lethal force, the beleaguered Baltimore Police Department has begun warning people to be wary of aggressive approaches by athletic young men.
In case you are one of those people who seek clarity rather than fantasy, let me clue you in. Twenty years ago MacYoung and Pfouts wrote a very useful book published by Paladin Press called Safe in The City. One was from LA the other from NY, and their premise was that violence trends in America—as with most trends—begin in those two centers and spread: like organized crime for instance. If that was ever true, it is not true now. The crimescape of future Big City and Small Town, and Suburban America will follow Small City trends. Places like Detroit, Flint, Oakland, Baltimore and Camden; where the tax base and infrastructure is heavily eroded, will collapse first. You rich people in larger whiter areas can look now into a set of crystal balls to see what your future holds.
In mid-size to small cities where the ghettos have spilled out into the suburbs, you may view your future, and it is not the future that the criminal police organizations across the country warn us of. They, and their coconspirators in the press, warn us almost exclusively against individuals with firearms attacking groups of people. Meanwhile, in Harm City [one of the early trending crime models in our present dystopian society] aggression has achieved critical mass, in that what the citizens in the city have known for the past twenty years is now being confirmed by the beleaguered stooge-like apparatus of law enforcement.
If you are not a gang member or drug dealer or police officer [the only three segments of society actively protected by law enforcement], the following threats are what are most likely to come your way:
1. The most consistent and numerous, but least damaging, assailants are black females. Their targets are children, other women, and men, in that order, with weapons rarely used and charges even less rarely filed.
2. The least likely aggressor is a lone black male youth, who will generally only assail females, predominantly white [Refer to 1. above for the root of this selective choice] females. If he attacks a man it is with a weapon.
3. Groups of unarmed black youths on foot are fairly numerous, but not highly successful. They are usually unarmed and disorganized, tending to target lone youths and other vulnerable individuals for sub-lethal group-bonding assaults.
4. The most lethal assailant is the lone adult black male with a firearm or knife. Outside of gang circles this aggressor used to be rare. However, with the pervasive gang culture in Baltimore, this type of attacker is now targeting non-criminal individuals for murder. Most of those targeted are black females and alpha males, such as bouncers. This is a nasty, predictable, though not prominent, trend, which has garnered most of the press attention.
5. The single most common, most successful, least often reported, and least often arrested, assailant, is the car-mobile, cell-phone informed, group of three to four black men in their twenties, usually unarmed. These are the aggressors that are coming your way—whoever, and whatever color, you are—even as the Police State tells you that your home defense firearm is the real threat to society. That is why I defend my ghetto bunker with a meat-hook and machete. Come and get it Yo.
Note that the predominance of black violence is a function of Baltimore’s demographics. This is a cultural trend, and culture spans all racial divides given time. In your locale the threat may emerge from any racial group, most likely in imitation of the most feared, celebrated and emulated segment of American society: the black ghetto gang that is the prototype for American multicultural suburban life circa 2030. Those thirteen year old white children slinking along to gangster rap in your posh suburban enclave constitute the cultural bedrock that shall spawn the ‘urban style’ raiding parties that will scour what is now Whitebread America in your dotage. Have fun defending yourself at the mailbox against Mo, Yo, Ho and Bro when you’re seventy pops.
Look people, we now live in a police state. In a police state law enforcement is primarily concerned with suppressing weaponry and locking up non-violent ‘criminals’ [dissidents]. The violence that thus remains as a viable option outside of prison is unarmed violence. Effective unarmed violence among primates [and felines and canines too if you are a creationist] has always consisted of attacks by organized groups against individuals and against smaller and/or less organized groups.
Get used to it.
And while you are waiting for the raiding party, please, buy a copy of When You’re Food, available right here at your Harm City library!
