To New Orleans police, innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to victims: James Gill | NOLA.com

To New Orleans police, innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to victims: James Gill | NOLA.com:

"But it can't be true either that 128 people deserved to have their names dragged through the mud last year before their deaths had even been investigated. Many of them had not even been convicted; a lousy arrest, even an ancient one, is enough to warrant a posthumous slur from the police department. Besides inflicting further hurt on the bereaved, it serves no purpose whatsoever.

Certainly, as Serpas pointed out, "criminal records predict victimization," and the stats do not mean New Orleans is dangerous for the law-abiding. But that point can be made without dredging up every penny-ante and unrelated offense of which a murder victim was ever accused, especially if the case was nol-prossed or ended in acquittal. Roughly one third of the charges that caused murder victims to be branded criminals were dropped."

'via Blog this'

I'm really glad to see that I'm not the only person who finds it really shitty that they list the victim's priors in those crime alerts. I don't, nor should anyone else, give a damn about what a murder victim did in their past. There's a definitive lack of concern when Black people, especially men, are victimized, and whether Serpas wants to admit it or not, listing their priors in an alert about something terrible that happened to them implies that they deserved what they got, that we shouldn't feel too bad because they were just criminals themselves - the killer did us a favor, right?

You know why the murder rate is so high here? Because most of the people killed are Black men, and no one important gives a damn. If it were white people killing each other on an average of 4 times a week, the NOPD would have been completely taken over by the feds within the first quarter and people throughout the New Orleans justice system would be replaced left and right. Psychologists would be flooding to the city, trying to figure out what went wrong? How could this happen? Is it our schools? The entertainment industry? I don't even need to imagine what would happen if Black people were killing white people at that rate. They find those murderers real quick already.