Bratton Tells it Like it is

There is a refreshingly frank interview with L.A. police chief Bratton here. A Canadian journalist is asking how he would fix the spiralling rate of violent crime in Toronto. I am just going to reproduce a few pointed excerpts below:

"Bratton: Tell me, the gang violence that you are experiencing, what is the racial or ethnic background of the gangs?

Journalist: That's a refreshingly blunt question. Some say it may be as high as 80 per cent Jamaican. But no one knows for sure, because people here don't like to talk about that.

Bratton: You need to talk about it. It's all part of the issue. If it's Jamaican gangs that are committing the crimes, well then, go after the Jamaican gangs. And don't be afraid to go after them because they're black. That's the last thing you need to be concerned with.

Journalist: Oh boy, I can see the complaints coming in already. You have to understand the climate here. The major local daily in Toronto, the Toronto Star, says it doesn't believe in "gratuitously" labelling people by ethnic origin.

Bratton: Well, that really helps identify who they are, doesn't it? The next step will be to refuse to allow the police to identify people by their race or ethnic origin. That type of societal consciousness really goes to extremes.

Journalist: I'm sure you heard that Toronto's mayor and our prime minister blame the Boxing Day shooting on you Americans....

Bratton: Mm-hmm, yes. They talked about the problem of guns coming in from the United States. But whose hands are the guns in? You have to look at all sources of the problem. It is a combination of lax gun laws, which certainly contributes to our problem here in the United States, but ultimately the responsibility is on the individual who pulls the trigger....

Journalist: NDP Leader Jack Layton has pointed to "despair" and "poverty" as the root causes of crime.

Bratton: When you put too much emphasis on the idea of poverty being the cause of crime, you're as much as saying that just because you are poor or disadvantaged, you are going to resort to crime to get by. And that's a phenomenally racist and insensitive attitude. The vast majority of people who are poor do not resort to crime".







Germans Ban Wikipedia Site

Access to the German version of Wikipedia has been banned by a German court. But there are of course still ways of gaining access. See here for details. This is of course an intolerable attack on free speech which I am sure all libertarians will do their best to defeat. You can see that the forbidden information which caused the site to be taken down -- the information that the real name of a German/Yugoslav hacker known as "Tron" was in fact Boris Floricic -- cannot be found via a search of the German site but the information IS still freely available on the U.S. site. To do my bit towards spreading the forbidden information, I will repeat the core of it here in my rough German: Hacker Tron heisst im Tatsache Boris Floricic. "Tron" is ein Beiname. Weiter hier. And my comment to the German court concerned: "Heil Hitler"!

Update:

A German reader writes as follows:

The info on your site about Tron and the Wikipedia is incorrect. The full name was never banned from the German site but the German Wikipedia association was forbidden to redirect www.wikipedia.de to de.wikipedia.org for a few days. The name is still mentioned on http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_%28Hacker%29 . The German sentence you have in your entry should be "Hacker Tron hei~t mit b_rgerlichem Namen Boris Floricic. Tron ist nur ein Pseudonym."

And if you want to be taken seriously then you should probably not comment on the whole issue with "Heil Hitler!". The ban was never a permanent thing and the court has still to decide about the whole issue.