Are Freeway Shootings Racially Motivated?

Betty Pleasant:

As an 18-year-old black woman lies in critical condition from the latest freeway shooting, activist Najee Ali termed the spate of roadway violence racially motivated and called upon the FBI to investigate the attacks in the same manner that the agency probed the killings of blacks in the Jim Crow era of the South.

Ali called a news conference Monday after two weekend freeway shootings left a teenage El Monte woman hospitalized in Lynwood’s St. Francis Medical Center in critical condition. Police, who would not identify the woman, said she had been shot three times while riding in a Nissan Altima on the Foothill (210) Freeway near Irwindale at about 10 p.m. Saturday. Two others in the vehicle were unhurt.

In an earlier Saturday morning shooting, the right front window of a tow truck carrying an adult and a child was shot out as it drove south on the Ventura (101) Freeway near Camarillo, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department reported. No one was hurt in the tow truck shooting.

The victims of both shootings described their assailants as bald Latino men riding in dark-colored Hondas. Ali described the victims of both shootings as African Americans.

“Something is definitely going on with respect to black and Latino relations, and everybody knows it and everybody’s talking about it,” Ali said. “There’s been a rash of murders and shootings of blacks by Latinos resembling gang members. And that’s troubling, because you don’t see a rash of Latino shootings by black people.”

Ali said he went to the St. Francis Medical Center Monday morning to see the woman victim and encountered the teenager’s cousin, who was in the car with her when she was shot.

“He said the shooter was definitely an Hispanic male who fits the profile of others who were shot, such as Michael Livingston, the college student killed on the Harbor Freeway in March and James Wiggins, who was killed on the freeway on his way to Bible study,” Ali said.

“I live in Baldwin Village and black people are being killed there all the time. Police have told me that there’s something going on between blacks and Latinos in the Baldwin Village area,” Ali added. “They are just indiscriminately killing black people and not just on the freeways.”

When informed of Ali’s pronouncements about the shootings, Police Chief Earl Paysinger, head of LAPD’s South Bureau, said the police department “has not been able to identify any validity to those kinds of statements.”

Paysinger said he has heard black-versus-Latino claims, such as those uttered by Ali, “but we’ve been unable to verify any of them. We’ve tried.”

Paysinger acknowledged a slight increase in Latino-on-black crime in the South Bureau, but he said “it has not been a quantum leap.”

“We are seeing a shift in demographics in the South Bureau and a resultant slight increase in a conflict of cultures,” Paysinger said. “Until recently, we’ve been plagued with only black-on-black crime, but with the increase in Hispanics in the neighborhoods, conflicts have arisen between cultures where they had not occurred before,” the chief explained.

Paysinger said Latino-on-black crime may account for about 6 percent of South Bureau’s criminal activity.

“Is that of concern to me?” Paysinger said. “Hell yeah. That 6 percent this year could turn into 40 percent next year, and if a slight increase goes unchecked, we will have a real problem.”

Paysinger said that between 1975 and the present, nearly 11,000 people were killed in the South Bureau, “and the vast majority of them involve African-American men being killed by African-American men.”

The chief said crime statistics belie rumors and suspicions of a Latino anti-black conspiracy. Even as the Latino population rises, violent crime of all sorts is dropping precipitously.

Paysinger said violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults) are down 22.7 percent in the South Bureau from last year. He said violent crimes have dropped in South L.A. from 7,804 in 2003, to 6,950 in 2004, to 5,370 so far this year.

Nevertheless, Ali is calling on Police Chief William Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca and FBI officials to meet with black community leaders about the shootings, while the county supervisors issued a $10,000 reward Monday for information leading to whoever shot the woman on the freeway Saturday night.

Activist Cites Race in Car Shootings

The State of Black Los Angeles: Dismal?