They're Eating the Pets? (Ohio, Trump)

In the 2024 Presidential Debate, Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, said, "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs — the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating — they're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame." When ABC anchor David Muir responded that city officials disputed that, Trump insisted he had seen people saying so on television.

The people who are accused of eating pets are immigrants of color, Haitians. Why is this important? Because crime and fear are tools used against people of color and immigrants. People forget, American history has criminals who have eaten PEOPLE. These killers are best known as serial killers and have something in common. They are white. Some murderers, such as Boone Helm, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, and Jeffery Dahmer, are known to have eaten parts of their victims after killing them.

Why are some crimes, including mass shootings, not as feared as other crimes? RACE plays an interesting factor. People are more outraged on social media about the possibility of a pet being eaten than schools being shot up. REALLY?

Why do White women clutch their purses and/or cross the street when encountering a Black male in public? Can it be because the news outlets reporting on Black crime is done with a 'be afraid' of them because they ALL have a violent nature? But are Black or brown people the ONLY or MOST extreme violent people? Of course, criminals come in all different colors, but there is not a FEAR factor engrained with white people committing crimes as with other ethnicities.

White people report on crime as if they do not commit crimes. Donald Trump's campaign centers around, "Immigrants are killing good White people." During the debate he just sounded crazy to most, but not to his fearful White base. They continue to promote the fear of a beloved pet being eaten, not "OUR CHILDREN ARE BEING SLAUGHTERED."

On average, research on racial differences in the criminal justice system indicates that Black people are, indeed, overrepresented at every decision point (e.g., arrest, sentencing). At the front end of the criminal justice process, Black individuals are arrested at rates that far exceed those of Whites. What If They Were White? The Differential Arrest Consequences of Victim Characteristics for Black and White Co-offenders - PMC (nih.gov). Black people are not the only ones committing crimes.

The Violence Policy Center (VPC) released When Men Murder Women: A Review of 25 Years of Female Homicide Victimization in the United States, analyzes 25 years of data, from 1996 to 2020, from the VPC’s annual report, When Men Murder Women. Here are a few of the results. A high number of White women are murdered by their intimate partner, who in most cases, are White. Not the stranger or immigrant.

• A total of 45,817 females were murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents between 1996 and 2020 as reported to the FBI UCR’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). Of these, 29,503 victims were white (64 percent), 14,038 were Black (31 percent), 1,216 were Asian or Pacific Islander (three percent), and 522 were American Indian/Alaska Native (one percent). Information about race was missing for 538 victims (one percent).
• Most women killed by men knew their killers. Over the past 25 years, 92 percent of female victims knew their male killers.
• Among female victims who knew their male killers, 61 percent were murdered by an intimate partner.

I'm sure there is a tendency to believe ALL of these women were assaulted by a Black person. This would be a wrong assumption. There is evidence Black people are not the only people who commit crimes.

• In 2019, 69.4 percent of all individuals arrested were White, 26.6 percent were Black or African American, and 4.0 percent were of other races. FBI — Table 43
• White individuals were arrested more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race and accounted for 59.1 percent of those arrests.
• White juveniles comprised 56.4 percent of juveniles arrested for aggravated assault and 55.4 percent of juveniles arrested for larceny-theft.

We live in an age where it is a race to be the first to report the news. Social media has become a key player in getting the latest news out the fastest. But social media is not known to be a factual source of news. It also picks and chooses what will be the most accepted report when it comes to headlines relying on shock value and what people want to hear as truth. As of late, social media wants to report immigrants are the cause of increased crime. It's what a certain demographic wants to hear to give validity to their displeasure not wanting the country to become filled with immigrants. The fear of violence is an effective tool in the anti-immigrant argument. But there are other FACTS which should cause fear.

According to Hunting Humans: An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers, 82% of American serial killers are white, while 15% are Black and 2.5% are Hispanic. In the US alone, the FBI estimates there are between 25-50 active serial killers at any given time, despite the authorities not being aware of them or connecting the killings together. On a worldwide scale, this estimate is certainly larger, but only a handful of serial killer cases are confirmed to be unsolved. 

Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University have a jointly operated database that keeps track of serial killers, their years of operation, their victims, and their methods of execution. Each year, the team behind the database releases an annual report on serial killer data. The database tracks serial killings all the way back to 1900 and includes serial killers from over 115 countries. The U.S. leads the rest of the world in documented serial killers, with a whopping 3,613 serial killers as of 2020 (England is not-so-close second, with known 176 serial killers as of 2020). The data tracks the number of serial killers that have been active each year too, with 1986 being the peak in the U.S. Generally, murders by serial killers in the U.S. was at its highest between 1970 and 1990, which is when some of the most sensationalized killers were active (think Bundy, Dahmer, Ramirez, Gacy, and Kemper, among many more). 

Between 1982 and December 2023, 80 out of the 149 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by White shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 26 mass shootings, and Latino in 12. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent, and eight percent respectively. Since 2015, over 19,000 people have been shot and wounded or killed in a mass shooting. In 2022 alone, over 600 people were killed, with over 2,700 wounded. Both the number of mass shooting incidents and the number of people shot in them have increased since 2015, reaching a high of 686 mass shooting incidents in 2021.

When it comes to hate crimes, 

• 48.6 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Black or African American bias.
• In 2021, there were 3,906 victims of anti-Black or African American hate crimes in the United States, making it the racially motivated hate crime with the most victims in that year. 
• The second most common racially motivated hate crime, anti-White crimes, had 1,341 victims in that year.

The lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama on March 21, 1981, is considered one of the last reported lynchings in the United States. Donald, a 19-year-old African American, was beaten and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and his body was hung from a tree. Four men were involved in the lynching, with one being executed in 1997 and another sentenced to life in prison. The third man was also sentenced to life in prison, and the fourth was indicted but died before his trial could be completed.

What the news media does report about White criminals is White collar crime which in essence is viewed as harmless and not really criminal. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) offers a simplified definition of white-collar crime: “lying, cheating, and stealing.” According to FBI data from 2020, white males commit the majority of white-collar crimes. White-collar crimes are crimes committed by people of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation for financial gain. Examples of white-collar crimes include fraud, bribery, embezzlement, insider trading, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery. However, white-collar crime offenders also tend to have other characteristics, including:

• Being in their late 30s to 40s
• Having a middle-class background
• Having at least some higher education
• Being employed
• Being married
• Having religious and community affiliations
• Owning homes
• Having less prior criminal justice involvement.

White collar crime has all but been glamorized as for rich people, so it must not be as bad as murder and rape. Some criminologists argue that White males who are class-advantaged are uniquely positioned to commit white-collar crime because they may have stronger deviant motivations, greater deviant opportunities, and weaker social controls. The majority of white-collar crime offenders are white males.

Victims of White-collar crimes tend to be those in lower income bracket or with little education.

When it comes to rape, reports have claimed nearly 90% of those convicted of wider child abuse offenses and on sex offenders register are White men. There isn’t much publicly available information on this. The data does show a large majority of those convicted of sexual offences (no matter the age of the victim) are White.

The Black male is often stereotyped as a drug user and drug dealer. White Americans are people who have ancestry from Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. According to one study by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), in 2017, about 38.2% of young White adults aged 18 to 25 reported that they were current illicit drug users. In terms of drug use by race, White Americans have the highest rates of drug use and abuse. This is likely due to a variety of factors, including socio-economic status, access to drugs, and cultural factors. African Americans have the second highest rates of drug use and abuse. Examining Drug Use by Race - Free by the Sea - Washington. 

In 2021, White people were more likely than people in all other racial or ethnic groups to be past month alcohol users. More than half of White people (52.2%) were past month alcohol users. In 2021, underage White people aged 12 to 20 were more likely to be past month alcohol users (18.1%) compared with underage Hispanic or Latino (14.5%), Multiracial (13.2%), Black or African American (9.4%), or Asian people (6.4%). Underage White people were also more likely to be past month binge drinkers (10.1%) compared with underage Hispanic or Latino (7.3%), Black or African American (5.5%), or Asian people (2.5%). 

The spotlight has always been on people of color as criminals. The nightly news if filled with accounts of Black crime. It is more than evident that ALL races are capable of being perpetrators of horrendous crimes. Clearly, the REACTION to a criminal is what fuels our beliefs about criminals. White people loudly proclaim their aversion to crime ignoring the statistics regarding crimes and criminal act committed by White people. Crime is not dictated by the color of a person's skin but by the content of their heart.

What if Black women started clinching their purses or running for cover when they encountered a White male who is statistically known to abuse drugs, commit rape, be a mass shooter, serial killer, lies, cheat, embezzle, and commit fraud? What would that America look like?