Detroit murders for 2012 top U.S. deaths in Afghanistan

Curmudgeonly columnist Jack Lessenberry has a powerful piece on the Michigan Radio website in which he reveals this disturbing fact: More people were murdered in Detroit last year than our nation lost fighting in Afghanistan.

Lessenberry, the political analyst for Michigan public radio, wrote that the startling number of homicides in the city, 375, was overlooked by far too many members of the media. And Lessenberry suggested that the oversight was due to the fact that most of the victims were black and most were men.

This lack of community concern about black-on-black crime was emphasized in a speech last week by Detroit’s interim police chief, Chester Logan.

Lessenberry took up the story from there:

“He told (the audience) he was angry because while everyone knows Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen allegedly murdered by a white man, few remember Delric Miller, a nine-month-old Detroit baby murdered last February. ‘Why isn’t there the same rage when we do it?’ asked Logan, who is black. ‘Our civil rights organizations didn’t speak out, you didn’t see Al Sharpton come here. Why?’

“The chief also got mad when the rapper Queen Latifah recently said gay marriage should be the next civil rights movement. Logan isn’t against same-sex marriage, but said, ‘Why don’t we make the next civil rights movement the reduction of black-on-black violence in our major cities? That should be almost our singular focus, to stop this madness.’

 “’… Our children, our young men are dying like dogs in the street and it seems like we’re passing it by.’”