Murder suspect Randy Rodriguez Santos was arraigned Sunday.
Reporting about crime is one of the most basic forms of journalism. When I was starting out in the journalism business more than 30 years ago, every daily newspaper had one reporter assigned to the “cops and courts” beat, covering arrests and trials, and the mentality of local TV news was “if it bleeds, it leads.” Every evening at dinner time, the TV news broadcast from a city of any size began with a story about murder, rape or robbery. There was no chance for bias to affect this kind of news, because the daily deadline pressure — the hurry-up to get the story finished — squeezed out any opportunity for political considerations.
Quality crime reporting is good for business. People love that stuff, and there’s a reason why A&E Network’s Live PD is consistently one of the highest-rated shows on cable TV. For some reason, however, within the world of journalism, political reporters have all the prestige, and the snobs in the D.C. press corps look down their noses at the grubby local cops-and-courts reporter. As I explained Saturday (“Who Is Murdering Whom? And How?”) decisions about what sort of crimes deserve national coverage are affected by liberal media bias in a way that local news generally is not. So even the New York Times can do a fairly straightforward murder story:
The man accused of bludgeoning four homeless men to death on Saturday had a history of violence and strange behavior leading up to the horrific attacks, which have shaken the homeless community and renewed awareness of the dangers faced by people living on the street.
The accused killer, Randy Rodriguez Santos, 24, was himself homeless, bouncing from a shelter in Brooklyn to his mother’s apartment in the Bronx and even to a squalid, abandoned building next door to her building.
Mr. Santos was formally charged with four counts of murder on Sunday, but did not speak or enter a plea. . . .
Early Saturday morning, Mr. Santos, walked through Chinatown stalking men who lay on the ground. He swung a three-foot, 15-pound metal pipe at their heads, killing four men, including 83-year-old Chuen Kwok, whose surname is sometimes spell Kok. Another man was critically injured. . . .
Two passers-by witnessed the last attack and called the police, who arrested Mr. Santos at about 2 a.m. at Canal and Mulberry Streets, still carrying a metal bar with blood and hair sticking to it.
People who knew Mr. Santos in the Bronx neighborhood where his mother lives said he appeared to be unraveling mentally in recent weeks. . . .
Mr. Santos had previously been accused in a string of violent assaults targeting random people.
Much of his record is sealed, but he had most recently been arrested in May, when he was kicked out of a men’s shelter in East Flatbush. He pummeled another 24-year-old shelter resident in the face. That case was dismissed.
A year ago, Mr. Santos choked a 55-year-old man and bit his breast at an employment agency in the garment district in Manhattan, the police said. He had leapt across the counter to attack the man. Four days later, he was on a northbound Q train, between Canal Street and Union Square stations, when he yelled out, “We need to stop it!” and punched a 33-year-man in the eye.
He was charged with both assaults.
There were more incidents this year. On Feb. 25, police officers spotted Mr. Santos enter the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in Brooklyn through an exit gate without paying and arrested him. At the precinct, he spat on the floor toward a sergeant, the police said.
Less than a week later, he was arrested on a charge of groping a 19-year-old woman at the front door of her apartment building in Jamaica, Queens.
His family in the Bronx had kicked him out. His mother, Fioraliza Rodriguez, told The Daily News she was afraid of him. “I never thought he would kill someone,” she said. “I was afraid of him, though, because he punched me. That’s when I told him to get out of my house.”
The Daily News also reported that Mr. Santos broke his grandfather’s nose in 2016, and sneaked into the family’s home last week and stole a watch, a phone and three phone chargers. . . .
Mr. Santos most recently worked in construction, a job he lost because of excessive drug use, said Nelson Reyes, also a neighbor of Ms. Rodriguez.
“He started smoking crack,” said Mr. Reyes, 39, in an interview with The Times. “Then he started losing his mind.”
If these murders had been committed by a deranged white man, the story would be getting wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, the killer portrayed as a Trump-inspired perpetrator of a “hate crime.” But the suspect is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, and so . . . crickets chirping.
Heather Mac Donald paints the larger picture:
[In September], the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
You would never know such facts from the media or from Democratic talking points.
John Derbyshire, who was purged from National Review for Thoughtcrime in 2012, calls attention to this underreported reality:
Black on white violence has always been far more common than white on black; and the disproportion is getting worse. And remember, this is by victim reports, not arrests or convictions.
As Heather says, this reality is utterly at odds with the official narrative of vicious “white supremacists” hunting down and assaulting helpless black bodies.
Does our national media establishment imagine that they can simply ignore this reality, and foist upon the American people a fraudulent narrative of black victimhood? Or do you suppose, as I do, that the media’s hostility to truth — facts are racist! — will only serve to further exacerbate the public’s already profound distrust of the news media?
