Healing Charlottesville

Racial street violence in Charlottesville and two tips to encourage crime reporting.

The teenagers arrested recently for a string of assaults near the University over the past six months raise questions.

The alleged black assailants were in the company of men and women, black and white, groups of a half dozen or so.   The victims were strangers to the assailants.   Some of the assailants said they chose their victim if he appeared to be white.

How does beating up a white guy help a black guy?   How do black people benefit if white people are afraid of black people?   Why did these assailants think they could get away with it?   How many times have they gotten away with it before?   How many of the students have already been suspended from school for violence?

Were they trying to impress their friends or intimidate them?   Is the baggy pants urban gangster look so popular because students are trying to discourage attacks from the real thing?   Why didn't the buddies turn in their violent friends?   Why haven't the attackers been charged with hate crimes?

I don't have the answers.   But I have my experience with violence in Charlottesville.   I've been the victim of two dozen or so assaults in this town on and off school grounds.   Only a half dozen of those attackers were white.   Were the others hate crimes?

Maybe.   But no attacker made a reference to race.   Besides, I grew up in tough black neighborhoods.   If I lived in white neighborhoods, I would have been beat up by more white guys.

Was it gay-bashing?   Although I've been called a faggot on the streets of Charlottesville several times, not in connection with an assault.   My friends have not been so lucky.

Most likely it was wimp-bashing.   An easy target of opportunity.   I quit reporting the attacks after a while.   The attacker would get suspended for a few days and be right back in the same hallway as me.   I skipped school many times.   While in high school in 1981, I competed in a speech contest hosted by the ELKS Club on Second Street NW.   The topic of my speech was unprovoked violence.

Young blacks of Charlottesville are angry at whites because they learned it from their parents who are still angry about urban renewal.   The parents were children in the '60s and '70s.   Urban renewal is by any measure the most significant chapter in the history of Charlottesville.

Two tips to encourage crime reporting:

• If a little old lady calls the police to report a flower pot stolen from her front porch, please, just send an officer to take a written report.   If the officer discards the report, at least the old lady thinks she has contributed to a broader statistic to formulate better crime-fighting policy.
• Currently the city inspector drives around neighborhoods, takes a photo, and mails a digital print to the resident with warning of a possible infraction and threats of escalating legal trouble.   This case happened in November to my uncle in Belmont, a veteran local politician who has walked on crutches all his life, a senior citizen on a fixed income.   Regardless of the number of notices, he cannot transfer his leaves from brown plastic bags into approved plastic bags.

  The inspector should get out of the car, knock on people's doors and ask how the city can help.   In this case, the inspector should have called leaf collection to make a special trip and exception.

What do police and city inspector have in common?   They are both law enforcement agencies funded by city council.   City hall projects itself onto the community (or reflects the community) through its agencies.   If one department has a bad reputation, all departments suffer a loss of esteem by association.   The police take property by court order.   City inspector can take property without a court order.

In Charlottesville race and property were targets of urban renewal.   Two decades of urban renewal did more to promote resentment than a century of segregation.   Reassure blacks and whites that urban renewal will not happen again, and racial tensions will begin to subside.

Blair Hawkins

Mon 18 Feb 2002

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