Street violence and Special Order 40

Many black community members believe they suffer because of illegal immigration.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

When Jamiel Shaw Sr. stood up last week to call for a change in Special Order 40, it touched an already raw nerve in the black community. Shaw’s son, 17-year-old star football player Jamiel Shaw II, was gunned down within shouting distance of his house. The suspect, 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza, is an alleged gang member and an illegal immigrant. Special Order 40 has prevented law enforcement from probing the immigration status of some suspects and deporting criminals with dispatch. Even if Special Order 40 were modified, there’s no guarantee that Jamiel would still be alive, but to a community convinced that Latino-on-black racial violence is on the upswing, it’s still a matter of simple justice.

And that’s true despite the statistics Police Chief William Bratton (seconded by the Los Angeles Times) piled on the public table in recent weeks, numbers that back up the claim that, with the exception of young Shaw and a handful of other cases, the majority of the killings of blacks are by other blacks, not Latinos. That won’t ease black fears that some Latino gangs are bent on wiping them out.

This is not racial paranoia run amok. There’s too much bad and violent racial history behind their fears. In years past, African Americans have been lynched, shot, beaten and mobbed solely because of race. The memory of that violence is still too fresh for it to be casually dismissed.

It makes no difference whether the perpetrators are Klan or Aryan Nation gangsters or Latino gang bangers. It certainly makes no difference that so few blacks are killed by non-blacks. In the South at the height of Jim Crow mob violence, only a tiny number of blacks were physically assaulted by white mobs. The overwhelming majority of blacks who were killed were murdered by other blacks. But then, as now, no matter how infrequent the killings of blacks by others, hate attacks stir fear, rage and panic, and they deepen racial divisions.

This is part of the reason Bratton got slammed in recent weeks; he was reflexively and too defensively digging in his heels and dismissing talk of a racial motive in any of the shootings as inflammatory. The other reason he got slammed is the underlying fear of many blacks that illegal immigration is way out of control and that they are bearing the brunt of that legal laxity.

Bratton, at a public meeting April 6, wisely got the drift and backed off on his position on the crime statistics. He admitted that “just the factsâ€