Jericho, Arkansas has 174 residents. At this level of precision, I am inclined to trust that there are exactly 174 persons living in Jericho. City-Data.com informs us that there are 7.482 white persons residing in Jericho, Arkansas, along with 4.698 Mexicans (euphemized by City-Data as “Hispanic”). You can guess the race of the other 161.82 persons. One hundred of these persons are female, seventy-four male, but let’s leave those fish in the barrel for now.
On August 27th, Anno Domini 2009, a police officer of the city of Jericho, Arkansas shot the fire chief of the city of Jericho, Arkansas in the back, in a court room, during a “scuffle” over a traffic ticket. The judge presiding, one Tonya Alexander, has since resigned. To her credit, before resigning she “voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction”.
As is the noble custom of our moribund press, they have protected the race of each player in this drama by the simple expedient of entirely failing to mention it. Race is as boring as it is irrelevant. Though I cannot find any report that baldly states the fire chief was white, and the person who shot him was black, I suspect it. Oh, how I suspect it. Listen:
Thomas Martin, the county investigator, “declined to name the officer who shot Payne. It’s unclear if the officer has been disciplined.”
“Mayor Helen Adams declined to speak about the shooting when approached outside her home, saying she had just returned from a doctor’s appointment and couldn’t talk.”
Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley ”said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot…. He didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer … [but the fire chief] could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle.”
Policedom is rife with corruption; we know this a priori and post facto and without rancor. It is a reasonable assumption that the police force in Jericho is entirely composed of black men. Fire departments are, it seems to me, less susceptible to corruption, Ricci notwithstanding. The name “Don Payne” is racially ambiguous. The names “Tonya Alexander” and “Helen Adams” aren’t. Given the present outcome – man in hospital; judge resigned; shooter uncharged and unnamed – what better explanation than that the victim was white and the aggressor was black?
Hat tip to Φ