Black and White, What Draws the Line?

By: Madison Ford-McKnight

A woman on a crime scene showing grief after losing someone

The biggest problems in our nation has been an excessive amount of violence. Research shows that the murder rates for black men are consistently higher than the rate for men of all other racial ethnic groups. White victims tend to get close attention, while black men are always left in the dark with no justice served. Many of these rates come from the acts being done with guns. In 2015, 522 people were firearm homicide victims. But another question that many will ask is, where are these deaths occurring the most at? It is shown that most homicide rates or anything involving some sort of violence falls on communities facing structural disadvantages. They are most common in racially segregated neighborhoods with high rates of poverty and low education, which also shows that homicide rates affect people of color. Half of the more than 13,000 gun homicides took place in just 127 cities .

But what are the deepest roots of these problems and who gets affected the most? Baltimore has been shown to have the highest homicide rates of U.S. big cities. Luke Broadwater and Ian Duncan published an article explaining how "Neighborhoods are crying out" in changing the statistics in this city. The two closely focus on the fact that there were 342 homicides in Baltimore the prior year, 56 per 100,000 people who live in the city. They also state that the Mayor has attempted to curb the killings by attacking the root causes of poverty and lack of opportunities that fuel the violent drug trade. The city's numbers have gone down by 15% but they are still not satisfied and will put any programs in place and make sentences for gun crimes harsher if that's what they have to do. But how do we solve these problems? How do we stop one minority group from being targeted, or even any race to be targeted. Our nation has been struggling with the tragedies of guns and violence as a whole. What draws the line, what brings more awareness, what do we have to do to get a complete change?

Philadelphia vs. Baltimore: whats the difference?

In 2014 in Philadelphia’s safest police district, which is approximately 85% White, no one was reported killed by gun violence. In the most violent district, with a roughly 90% Black population, there were 189 shooting victims and 40 deaths. Philadelphia has been shown to be extremely worse when it comes to violence, especially homicides, versus any other large city. All this city has so far is a citywide multi-agency task force which is set to issue an report and set recommendations. We are not doing as much as Baltimore is doing, but we are increasingly getting worse with our rates of death. I believe to try and make this city better we need to also start locating the pinpoints of the violence, such as reaching the roots of poverty and giving more opportunities. We need to be more efficient and realize that we can't build a city stronger if the people in it are dying too quickly without attention.