While Blacks Prepare to Riot in 35% White Sacramento Over Police Shooting of Black Career Criminal, City Has Program Paying Black/Brown People $9,000 Not to Shoot Each Other

Let's keep it simple. 

Shot. [Stephon Clark: Surrounded by love, trouble and tragedy, and now a rallying cry for justice after police shooting, Los Angeles Times, 3-29-18]:

Stephon Clark has become a social media hashtag, the latest inspiration for a national movement and the subject of numerous protests that have shut down freeways and interrupted NBA games.

The image of the handsome 22-year-old African American man, wearing a broad smile next to his young sons and their mother in a formal family photo, has become a rallying cry for justice.

In 35% white Sacramento, California, the city government admits black and brown commit all the nonfatal shootings and homicide. They've decided paying black and brown criminals $9,000 not to shoot or kill each other

But in the days since 20 shots were fired at Clark in the backyard of his grandmother's house by Sacramento police searching for a burglary suspect, only fragments of Clark's life have surfaced.

Clark's family has mostly shunned the media spotlight following the death, providing scant details about Clark's life before his killing. He was the father of two boys, ages 1 and 3. Friends and family have described him as fun-loving, devoted to his family. He loved football, video games, shoes and was trying to turn his life around, they said.

"He would never want to leave his kids. He always wanted to make sure his kids were good," their mother, Salena Manni, told ABC 10.

Family tragedy, criminal record

A Sacramento native, he lived in a rough neighborhood known not only for crime but also for tense relations with police, said residents and civil rights leaders.

Clark endured personal tragedy within his family. A sister died at birth. A 16-year-old brother was killed in a shooting in 2006. A representative with the county coroner said De'Markus McKinnie died from what was ruled an accidental shotgun wound to the abdomen.

And Clark had a criminal history, four cases in four years that included charges of robbery, pimping, and domestic abuse. Sacramento County court files show he pleaded no contest to reduced charges, spent time on a sheriff's work detail and was on probation for the 2014 robbery when he was killed.

Community leaders were adamant that Clark's criminal record was immaterial to how he died, and said the officers who killed him are the ones who ought to be scrutinized.

"What matters is he was a father of two, he had his family, he was an unarmed black man that was going to his grandparent's house, and got assassinated," said Berry Accius, a black community leader. "Nothing else matters at that point.

"The fact is that black people are criminalized when anything happens," he added. "It already gives sympathy to the police and it criminalizes the victim and it makes the victim look like they're the predator."

Open wide. Here's the chaser. [Fifty men commit most gun crimes in Sacramento. Could money, mentoring get them to stop?, Sacramento Bee, 8-8-17]:

When someone is shot in Sacramento, it’s a good bet that one of about 50 mostly black or Latino young men pulled the trigger. 

Police know it. The figure comes in part from a city analysis of five years of homicide data and intelligence, said Khaalid Muttaqi, director of the city’s gang prevention and intervention task force. 

Community members know it. The men are often well-established troublemakers in their neighborhoods, said activists who gathered recently in south Sacramento to discuss the problem. 

DeVone Boggan knows it, too. In Richmond, where he runs an anti-gun violence program called Advance Peace, he has befriended 84 men considered most likely to kill with a gun there. 

The truth about gun crimes, said Boggan, is that a small number of known shooters cause an outsize amount of trauma. They can be hard to catch, he said, and few have tried to reach them with anything but enforcement. 

Boggan has taken a different approach. His Advance Peace initiative, backed by philanthropic and government funding, identified Richmond’s most active firearm-wielding criminals and tried to get them to change their ways through intensive one-on-one intervention, including therapy, mentoring and offering to pay them when they reached agreed-upon goals. 

Boggan, supported by Sacramento City Councilman Rick Jennings, is proposing to bring Advance Peace to Sacramento. 

In September, the Sacramento City Council will vote on whether to try Boggan’s program to reduce gun violence and gun-related homicides. The city is being asked to commit $1 million over four years in an attempt to target “the most lethal young men walking the streets,” Boggan said. 

Reformed felons would serve as mentors. Participants, called “fellows,” would receive around-the-clock support along with cash stipends paid in increments for reaching milestones such as beating substance abuse, getting a high school diploma or improving parenting skills. 

A month before the City Council vote, resistance to the idea of Advance Peace is simmering in Sacramento’s law enforcement community and among some on the City Council. District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said she has “many concerns” and that Sacramento already has community organizations that “provide excellent youth mentoring and intervention programs.” 

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones, in an email interview, said he has “fundamental objections” to the program and to the idea of paying “people just to (not) commit crimes or shoot people.” 

Boggan conceded that the cash payments, which could total $9,000 over 18 months, are part of what makes Advance Peace a “tough sell.” He emphasized that none of the money given to participants would come from the city. Instead, it would come from philanthropic donations.

The rising tide of color is consuming western civilization, regressing what's left of the nation our pioneering European ancestors forged from the wilderness to the African mean.