Never too Busy to Hate: Affirmative Action Criminal Justice in Atlanta

"Never too Busy to Hate: Affirmative Action Criminal Justice in Atlanta"
By Nicholas Stix
June 3, 2012
VDARE

During the sixties, white civic leaders liked to call Atlanta “The city too busy to hate.” But it turns out that the real Atlanta always has time to hate.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, blacks flocked to Atlanta. The attendant violent crime drove out tens of thousands of whites, resulting in a black majority and the election of the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1973. Atlanta has now been under black rule for almost 40 years.

This period has seen the racial corruption of every level of law enforcement and criminal justice—from 911 dispatchers who don’t know where major landmarks are, to cops who don’t understand police “10 codes” (e.g., a “10-13”), to jailers and prosecutors who identify with black felons, to judges who repeatedly grant a persistent felon “first-time offender status,” until he murders someone.

Currently in the news: “security guard” Nkosi Thandiwe, charged with an unexplained July 15, 2011 midtown shooting spree that left white Brittney Watts, 26, dead, white-enough Lauren Garcia, 23, a paraplegic, and white Tiffany Ferenczy, 24, wounded. He has just dismissed his lawyer; his trial is currently scheduled for 2013(!) “Midtown shooting murder suspect loses lawyer,” by Marcus K. Garner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 25, 2012.

Needless to say, the Main Stream Media has not reported if Thandiwe is an immigrant—his name is Xhosa for “loving one.” [Postscript: He was born here.] But he wouldn’t qualify for VDARE.com’s Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome list anyway: only one victim died.

After I blogged on this case, some readers who claimed to be friends of Thandiwe’s insisted that the suspect was really a gentle Renaissance man.

But subsequently Watts’ grieving widower, Brian Watts, and the surviving victims, have sued Thandiwe’s employer, Allied Barton Security Services, and ManuLife Financial Corp. and John Hancock Life Insurance Co., co-owners of the Proscenium building where the suspect and the victims all worked. They allege that, while on duty a month before the shooting spree, Thandiwe had terrorized a white courier, screaming racial epithets at him, and had to be physically restrained. But, despite this and other warning signs, nothing was done. [“Suits filed in fatal Proscenium shootings,” by Greg Land, ATLAW, April 6th, 2012.]

Thandiwe has implicitly admitted to the shooting spree, while playing variations on the “crazy card,” in order to get the death penalty taken off the table—as if black Atlanta jurors would ever vote such a punishment.

In the contrast between his boosters’ idealized cover story and the violent, racial reality, Nkosi Thandiwe is Atlanta in microcosm.

Newly elected Mayor Jackson appointed the Atlanta PD’s first black public safety commissioner, A. Reginald Eaves, back in 1974. Eaves discriminated mercilessly against white cops, driving them off to the suburbs and replacing them with incompetent blacks. The Department has never recovered. In 1978, Eaves was caught giving black patrolmen the answers to the sergeant’s exam, and fired.

In a characteristic example of the new dispensation, a 1980 murder case had to be thrown out because the police had lost the case file and evidence. A prosecutor explained, with a shrug, “Keystone Kops.”

Under black rule, life became very cheap in Atlanta.

In the now-forgotten (because the perp turned out to be black) so-called Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981 (few of the victims were children and several were adult, although all were black), leading black lawmen such as Louis Graham promoted, without any supporting evidence, a conspiracy theory, where the culprit was the KKK, which was allegedly driving around in black neighborhoods, grabbing black kids off the street and killing them at will.

Federal investigators saw how ludicrous this notion was when they drove around some of the neighborhoods that had been hit. When residents saw white men, they immediately stopped what they were doing and stared.

White lawman and policing theorist Chet Dettlinger came in to solve the crimes. Dettlinger was a racial liberal, but in his 1983 book The List (ghosted by Jeff Prugh), he wrote unsparingly of the racial chaos and corruption he observed. He reported that the Atlanta PD’s negligent crime scene investigators would typically leave half of the evidence on the ground, and its officers suffered from fundamental “ignorance about valid cause-and-effect relationships” [p.159].

(DeKalb County has since also been overrun with diversity.)

In July 2002, Mayor Shirley Franklin appointed as police Chief Richard Pennington, also black, of course, who served through 2009. Pennington had supposedly turned around the country’s most corrupt police department in New Orleans.

Pennington shrewdly created a baseline that presented the department he inherited as possibly the country’s most incompetent, and Atlanta as the “most dangerous city in the country.” For example, his audit showed that, in 2002 alone, officials had lost and/or destroyed 22,000 reports from 911 calls.

Pennington changed Atlanta from America’s third-most violent city, to number 18. (It was never most violent—that honor goes to Flint, Michigan.) His methods included computerized statistical analysis and humiliating commanders at meetings, i.e., methods William Bratton made famous in “disappearing” crime in New York. [“Ex-APD Chief Richard Pennington has a stroke,” by Rhonda Cook, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 17, 2010.]

However, Pennington continued hiring based on race, rather than ability.

This problem became apparent during Brian Nichols’ March 11, 2005 courtroom breakout, in which he murdered four people, a one-man race war.

Nichols’ attack could easily have been prevented by following basic rules. But the Fulton County Jail, under black Sheriff Myron Freeman, was as badly run as other black Atlanta institutions.

One black supervisor violated rules by entering a jail cell to pray with Nichols. The deputy assigned to escort the buff, 6’1,” 210-pound bodybuilder alone to court, black 5’1” grandmother Cynthia Ann Hall, had maternal feelings for him and refused reinforcements. He returned her kindness by beating her almost to death, leaving her with permanent brain damage, and seizing her weapon.

Nichols still should have been caught before being able to kill anyone. But the deputies who were supposed to be monitoring the cell area via closed-circuit TV were instead off, fetching breakfast for their supervisor. (Postscript, May 19, 2024: The phrase you’re looking for is “cascading failures.”)

Nichols had previously been caught seeking to smuggle homemade knives (“shanks”) into court. White presiding Judge Rowland Barnes had requested that Fulton County’s black DA Paul Howard provide increased security. (Postscript, May 19, 2024: Judge Barnes was worried about the safety of Nichols’ defense attorney.) Howard ignored the request. Nichols’ first victim: Judge Barnes.

Some black officers let Nichols escape via a parking garage, due to their incomprehension of the simplest instructions. Others who had photographs of him walked right by him in a mall. [See report, Brian Nichols in Atlanta: PC Kills … Again, A Different Drummer, March 16, 2005; updated on March 20, 2005.]

Fulton County’s black DA Howard also ran his office based on racial favoritism. As white former ADA Denise Sorino reported to me in 2005, Howard fired most of the experienced white ADAs he inherited, replacing most of them with less competent blacks. Sorino also observed that Howard was particularly biased in favor of black suspects who were preachers and athletes. Brian Nichols was a former college linebacker. [“A Veteran Prosecutor Blows the Whistle on How Fulton County DA Paul Howard’s Racism and Corruption Facilitated the Brian Nichols Massacre in Atlanta,” NicholasStixUncensored, January 29, 2012]

The City of Atlanta ended up paying millions of dollars in settlements to the families of Nichols’ victims. Black Atlanta voters, however, stood by DA Howard and Sheriff Freeman. And in Nichols’ 2008 murder trial, black jurors refused to sentence him to the death penalty.

Chief Pennington’s response to his department’s screw-ups: to call for more intense dumbing-down. He wanted to drop the “10 codes” that had for generations been one of the signatures of the modern police department, in favor of words—because his officers could not understand the codes.

In 2009, Jamal aka Shamal Thompson, 22, murdered world-famous cancer researcher Eugenia “Jeanne” Calle, 57, in her apartment by bludgeoning her to death.

Thompson had encountered Calle in her building’s lobby, where he posed as a potential apartment buyer. Despite his being too young to have the requisite money, and the obvious danger of taking a strange black man unescorted to her apartment, Calle refused the security guard’s offer to accompany her. Doubtless, she was afraid of appearing “racist” and of hurting her killer’s feelings. Calle’s fiancé found her corpse.

As usual in such cases, the MSM were uninterested in unearthing too many unpleasant facts. Thus, it took the “amateur” blogger, Tina Trent at Crime Victims Media Report, to do the sort of digging that used to result in Pulitzer Prizes.

Trent determined that Jamal Thompson was a one-man crime wave. He had been arrested so many times prior to murdering Jeanne Calle that it was impossible to keep track. In many cases, the DA would simply decline to prosecute Thompson. In others, Thompson would repeatedly be granted first-time offender status, and get his sentence reduced to nothing, or virtually nothing.

He told white Judge Cynthia J. Becker that he was a web designer (he wasn’t) who had a page of bridal fashions (he didn’t). The judge swooned over his supposed abilities, granted the previously convicted felon “first-time offender” status, and reduced a 10-year sentence for burglary to time served (two months). [“The Anatomy of Yet Another Unnecessary Murder: How the Justice System Failed Eugenia Calle and is Failing Us All,” by Tina Trent, Crime Victims Media Report, February 21, 2009.]

From a judicial standpoint it shouldn’t have mattered if Thompson had designed Web pages, since he was still a felon.

But under the mind-set of “diversity,” we must always engage in Bizarro World reverse profiling, thinking the best of every black male—facts, law, and morality be damned.

Apparently, Atlanta is too busy to think straight, too.

Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, the New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored