juleswin
12-09-2013, 05:04 PM
By Amanda Marcotte
As my colleague Emma Roller reported previously on Slate, the "knockout game," in which young black men randomly hit white people in an effort to knock them out, is not a real epidemic. That didn't stop an explosion of media stories, often based on the thinnest of evidence, chronicling this supposed trend in November. Now one of the alleged victims, a St. Louis woman named Ashley DePew, who claimed she was attacked in a "knockout game," has been exposed for lying. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other local outlets, police say that what really happened is that her boyfriend hit her, and she borrowed the popular urban legend in order to cover for his crime.
You couldn't come up with a better encapsulation of how American perceptions of crime are skewed. Domestic violence has gotten more media attention the past couple of decades, but it's still a chronically under reported crime, and most people remain unaware of how widespread the problem is. Victims like DePew routinely conceal what's really going on. In contrast, of course, you have the outrage and hysteria over an imaginary crime that seems dreamed up for no other purpose than stoking racist anxieties. And the fact that the media and its audience buy into it allows real criminals to borrow these myths about black violence to get away with their very real crimes.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/12/09/it_wasn_t_the_knockout_game_ashley_depew_of_st_lou is_was_punched_in_the.html?wpisrc=burger_bar
News clip of the knockout game before it was revealed as a hoax
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgLzxKahlA0
After
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIupqXJuRf4
Again not trying to say nobody has ever been a victim of this sick game, we've all have seen the video and its all real. The only part I disagree with is that this its a growing trend. Also the feminist can easily see through the made up hysteria about the knockout game but misses when it comes to domestic violence, believing in fact that is it an under reported crisis in our society. The truth is that just like we do not have a knockout game crisis, we also do not have a domestic violence crisis in this country.
As my colleague Emma Roller reported previously on Slate, the "knockout game," in which young black men randomly hit white people in an effort to knock them out, is not a real epidemic. That didn't stop an explosion of media stories, often based on the thinnest of evidence, chronicling this supposed trend in November. Now one of the alleged victims, a St. Louis woman named Ashley DePew, who claimed she was attacked in a "knockout game," has been exposed for lying. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other local outlets, police say that what really happened is that her boyfriend hit her, and she borrowed the popular urban legend in order to cover for his crime.
You couldn't come up with a better encapsulation of how American perceptions of crime are skewed. Domestic violence has gotten more media attention the past couple of decades, but it's still a chronically under reported crime, and most people remain unaware of how widespread the problem is. Victims like DePew routinely conceal what's really going on. In contrast, of course, you have the outrage and hysteria over an imaginary crime that seems dreamed up for no other purpose than stoking racist anxieties. And the fact that the media and its audience buy into it allows real criminals to borrow these myths about black violence to get away with their very real crimes.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/12/09/it_wasn_t_the_knockout_game_ashley_depew_of_st_lou is_was_punched_in_the.html?wpisrc=burger_bar
News clip of the knockout game before it was revealed as a hoax
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgLzxKahlA0
After
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIupqXJuRf4
Again not trying to say nobody has ever been a victim of this sick game, we've all have seen the video and its all real. The only part I disagree with is that this its a growing trend. Also the feminist can easily see through the made up hysteria about the knockout game but misses when it comes to domestic violence, believing in fact that is it an under reported crisis in our society. The truth is that just like we do not have a knockout game crisis, we also do not have a domestic violence crisis in this country.