The Economist
Race and crime
Trayvon’s legacy When is it legal to shoot an unarmed black teenager?
Jul 20th 2013 | LOS ANGELES AND SANFORD, FLORIDA | From the print edition “WHAT happened to Trayvon Martin,” thundered a speaker at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in Orlando this week, to rousing chords from an electronic organ, “was nothing more than a modern-day lynching”. The six jurors who decided the fate of Mr Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, disagreed. On July 13th they found him not guilty of murder or manslaughter. Mr Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, chose to stalk Mr Martin, an unarmed black teenager, through the subdivision where they both were staying. In the altercation that ensued, he shot him dead. But the jurors—none of whom was black—accepted his claim that he was acting in self-defence. Mr Zimmerman is now free and can reclaim his gun. African-Americans greeted the verdict with outrage. Spontaneous protests erupted within hours in several cities. The following day a series of co-ordinated rallies took place in many more. The participants complained of racism in many aspects of the tragedy, from Mr Zimmerman’s groundless assumption that Mr Martin was up to no good, to the local police’s initial refusal to arrest Mr Zimmerman, to the jurors’ belief that Mr Martin, who had just been to a shop to buy sweets, posed so grave a threat to Mr Zimmerman that he was justified in killing him. At a rain-spattered vigil in Tampa a weeping woman holding a guttering candle complained that America deems black lives worthless. Others worried that their children might meet a similar fate to Mr Martin. One participant wore a T-shirt with a picture of Mr Zimmerman above the caption “guiltyasamuthafucka”. “Make no mistake,” intoned another, “we are at war.” Odell Watson, a pastor who lives in Sanford, says he finds it hard to comfort his parishioners, since he shares their shock and dismay. Rage and restraint On July 15th around 150 people looted shops, mugged bystanders and vandalised property in Crenshaw, a largely black district of Los Angeles. But elsewhere protests have been remarkably peaceful. Nothing has happened like the Los Angeles riots of 1992, when four police officers were acquitted after badly beating Rodney King, a black suspect in a car chase. Then, 53 people were killed, 2,000 were injured and $1 billion-worth of property was destroyed.
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In Sanford itself, all is quiet. Shops and restaurants are open as usual in the pleasant downtown commercial district. Black and white children run shrieking together through a leafy playground. At a service to pray for unity after the verdict, the (white) mayor and the (black) chief of police note with pride how calm the city has remained. When one of the dozen local religious leaders presiding says a prayer for Mr Zimmerman, the largely black congregation delivers a resounding “Amen”. Mr Zimmerman may yet be in need of intercession. The Justice Department says it is still mulling whether to file civil-rights charges against him. An online petition backing the idea, sponsored by the NAACP, has already garnered 1m signatures. The Justice Department successfully pursued a similar strategy against two of Mr King’s assailants. But proving that Mr Zimmerman was racially motivated will be hard. His supporters pointed out during the trial that he took a black date to his high-school prom and befriended a black neighbour. Eric Holder, the attorney-general, also criticised the “stand your ground” laws adopted by roughly half the states including Florida, which absolve those who fear grave injury or death from any obligation to retreat before shooting someone in self-defence. Although Mr Zimmerman did not invoke certain rights under Florida’s law, the judge did explain its basic outline to the jury. The law does not allow the instigator of a violent confrontation to claim self-defence, but Mr Zimmerman maintained that it was Mr Martin who had attacked him, not the other way around, and there were no witnesses to contradict him. One study has found that the sort of crimes that “stand your ground” laws are intended to deter, such as robbery, burglary and assault, have not fallen in the states that have adopted them, whereas homicide and manslaughter rates have risen. Florida’s law, a study by a local paper concluded, has been applied inconsistently and in odd ways: to exonerate gang members involved in a deadly shoot-out with an AK47, for example. The success rate of those who invoke the law is greater if the victim is black than if he is white. Meanwhile, several people who have fired warning shots, rather than shooting to kill, have received 20-year prison terms, as a result of Florida’s fierce sentencing rules. Happily, incidents such as Mr Martin’s death are becoming rarer. The number of killings in which “stand your ground” is invoked in Florida has fallen in recent years. Although blacks are more likely to be attacked by strangers (of any race) than whites, they are less than half as likely to be attacked as they were 20 years ago. The odds of being attacked correlate more with age and income than race. And only 10% of violent confrontations involve a gun. That is little consolation to Mr Martin’s family, or the many frightened black parents in America. Mr Watson, the pastor from Sanford, says he would not have thought twice about whether it was safe for his children to walk to the store alone before the shooting. Now, he says with a sigh, he would never let them.
From the print edition: United States
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