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Examples of the double standard are not hard to find. In Georgia, a person is eleven times as likely to receive the death penalty for killing a white as for killing a black. About 70% of the black men on death row in the U.S. killed whites. Retired Detective Paul Maurice sees the issue from a more personal perspective: "A homicide detective gets no Brownie points for solving a black-on-black killing, and no extra help." A vicious circle ensues: blacks are less likely to report crimes against them because they do not expect the police to attempt to solve them.
Programs for dealing with black-on-black violence cannot begin to cope with the problem. A few imaginative efforts are being made at the local or community level. In Oakland, officials have persuaded some youths to exchange guns and knives for brooms and brushes. Four years ago, Robert J. Shamoon, the tough-talking assistant operations manager of the East Bay Area transit system, had had enough of local gangs who defaced his buses on the outside and turned them into anxious prisons on the inside. He announced that if there was a reduction in vandalism and graffiti, he would use the money saved to create jobs for those who had been doing the damage. The community responded. The transit system is saving about $500,000 a year, and has helped create 175 jobs, many of which are held by youths who once used the buses as a mobile drug supermarket. Vernon Lewis, 22, formerly defaced the buses he now works to keep clean. Says he: "The reason we were out there destroying buses is that we didn't have nothing to do. We were the problem." In Atlanta, the police are looking to the citizens for help. George Napper, the city's black public safety commissioner, helped create Partnership Against Crime, a program in which citizens and police identify safety problems in communities and work out ways to deal with them. So far, that has involved shifting police patrol hours, setting up neighborhood-watch programs and business-watch groups.
This month in Savannah, which ranks fourth among U.S. cities in homicide rates, a 31-member, N.A.A.C.P.-sponsored citizens task force on black-vs.- black violence was created. Curtis Cooper, president of the Savannah N.A.A.C.P., noted that blacks are usually both perpetrator and victim in Chatham County. The task force, he says, was designed "to wake people up about the seriousness of this problem." Eugene H. Gadsden, a black superior court judge and a member of the task force, asserted that community involvement was essential. "We're the ones being affected most," said Gadsden, "and we ought to be able to do something about it."
In other cities, individuals, many of them wounded by violence, have tried to make a difference. Rita Smith is a Harlem legend. Her son David was shot in 1979, an act that moved her to mobilize her neighborhood to protest the violence that was undoing it. She and her neighbors lobbied for increased police protection of their area, set up neighborhood-watch groups and a special crime hot line.