By Chris Powell
Most serious crime in Connecticut occurs in the cities and most of its victims are members of racial and ethnic minorities. Last week in Hartford two men were shot on Buckingham Street and survived, but two other men, young brothers, were shot and killed in an apartment on Barker Street.
So Connecticut chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued urgent statements. They demanded a vigorous police investigation — not of the shootings but of the noose that had just been found in the boys’ locker room at RHAM High School in rural Hebron.
Willimantic-Windham NAACP Chapter President Leah Ralls declared: “We are tired of things like this being dismissed as child’s play. This is not child’s play. This is a serious, life-threatening episode. A noose is a weapon just like a gun.”
Connecticut NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile agreed. “The Black community has to take this seriously,” Esdaile said. “We’re not going to wait until a person is hanging from one of those nooses.”
But it is hard to find even one wrongful death by noose in Connecticut in many decades, and many more decades may pass in the state before a noose turns out to be used here as “a weapon just like a gun.”
A year ago some nooses were found at the site of a warehouse being built in Windsor. Nobody was killed or injured by them, but at the insistence of the NAACP and other race fanatics, investigations were undertaken not just by the local and the state police but even the FBI.
Nothing criminal was uncovered. Indeed, it’s not illegal to make a noose in Connecticut, though placing one on public or private property with intent to intimidate or harass is a misdemeanor.
Yes, threatening is a crime, but no one in particular had been threatened by the nooses. While some people contend that [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] noose is a threat against [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] Black people, if the nooses in the Windsor warehouse and the high school in Hebron were threats, they were empty ones, and without proof of intent to intimidate or harass, the First Amendment protects even hateful expression.
Besides, as a practical matter, what can be done about what well may have been stupid juvenile pranks?
Indeed, after reviewing surveillance video at RHAM High, the state police arrested a 17-year-old student from Willimantic for the noose at the school. (The murderer of the Hartford brothers, like many other murderers in Connecticut, remains at large.)
What do the people who purport to be terrified want done with the kid charged with the noose? Should he be hanged with it?
Connecticut’s policy toward nearly all juvenile offenders is to give them mere counseling in secret rather than punishment — which may be why there are so many chronic juvenile offenders just as there are so many chronic adult ones.
So why bother investigating and prosecuting a mere annoyance when nothing will come of it with juveniles and even adult perpetrators can just laugh it off, routinely obtaining special probations like accelerated rehabilitation?
The hysteria generated about mere nooses while murder and mayhem are accepted as the natural order of things in Connecticut seems to be how the NAACP and other race fanatics strive to conceal their irrelevance to the big problems that disproportionately affect members of racial minorities.
The race fanatics have nothing useful to say about crime, educational and parental failure, welfare dependence, poverty, and the ever-rising cost of self-sufficiency, which is increasingly out of reach for people whose lack of education and job skills qualifies them only for menial work.
Of course any suggestions that could diminish those problems might be politically impossible to implement, since they would offend one interest group or another, but some organization like the NAACP should try anyway.
Instead the race fanatics may keep selecting nooses as the target of their mock outrage precisely because nothing practical or meaningful can be done about them and because the authorities responding to them often can be made to appear ineffectual or wrongly indifferent, being able to do little more than kowtow and sympathize, knowing that if they talk back to the hysteria and try to put things in perspective they’ll be called nasty names.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 