The Great White Gang is discovered by "The New Yorker"

One of the most desirable Man-Bites-Dog stories of 21st Century journalism is the murderous white youth street gang. The New Yorker finds one 2500 miles away in Arizona:

Letter from Arizona

How a Homegrown Teen Gang Punctured the Image of an Upscale Community

The authorities didn’t seem to pay attention to the Gilbert Goons until one boy was dead and seven others were charged with murder.

By Rachel Monroe

June 21, 2024

After the killing of Preston Lord, what had been hidden was now open: a group of mostly wealthy white teens was terrorizing Phoenix’s East Valley.

In author Rachel Monroe’s tweet announcing her story, she makes more precise (but less interesting to New Yorker subscribers) the racial demographics of the Gilbert Goons, calling them “mostly white, mostly wealthy boys” rather than her editors’ “mostly wealthy white teens,” which makes them sound like they are all-white, and thus presumably white racist. But, the seven charged with first degree murder in the beating-to-death of a white boy at a 2023 Halloween party appear to be 5 whites, one part black, and one perhaps mestizo or pardo (all photos are from other online sources, not from The New Yorker, which didn’t include any).

So, as former Arizona senator Dan Quayle might say, diversity is the Gilbert Goons’ strength.

The Awards & Recognitions section of the Web site of Gilbert, Arizona, lists some of the area’s accolades: #1 Best City for Early Retirement, #2 Safest City for Trick-or-Treating, #6 Best City to Raise a Family in the West. Gilbert recently surpassed Scottsdale as the Arizona city with the highest median income, and, according to F.B.I. statistics, only one American community of its size had a lower crime rate in 2022. … Driving down Gilbert’s wide, smooth roads, past vast developments enclosed by white fences, you get the impression of a place that, like an adolescent, hasn’t yet adjusted to its proportions….

Preston Lord

Preston Lord, a slight, gangly sophomore known for his school spirit, was there with friends from the basketball team. The party was wilder than they were used to. …

Sometime before ten, Lord and his friends watched as a teen-ager they knew, a Latino boy in a baseball cap, filmed two partygoers arguing. Treston Billey, a stocky eighteen-year-old wearing a white pin-striped suit, told him to delete the video.

Note that the unnamed boy being harassed is described as “Latino” while Treston Billey of the Gilbert Goons who started the harassment is depicted only as “stocky.” (The 5,500-word New Yorker article has no photos of the main characters.) Personally, I’d call Billey “a George Zimmerman-lookalike,” but New Yorker subscribers don’t pay to be reminded of embarrassing moments for their conventional wisdom about who are the racial good guys and who are the racial bad guys.

The air had a pre-fight crackle to it; people stood around waiting to see how the tension would break. Lord and his friends, together with the Latino boy, left the party and walked down the street. A group of older guys followed them. Because they were “tall and strong-looking,” one of Lord’s friends said, he thought they might be football players. …

At some point, Lord and his friends began to run. … But the older kids caught up with Lord and knocked him down. When he was on the ground, a group of guys began “kicking on him,” “standing right above and beating down,” “getting on him and going at it,” witnesses told police. The beating was over in seconds. “He’s out,” someone said. A neighbor’s surveillance-camera footage showed ten boys running away, some of them laughing.

… Two days later, he died; the coroner ruled the death a homicide.

… Later that night, Sherman’s friend Talan Renner told him, “I might have hospitalized that kid. I hit him pretty hard.” …

I’m not sure how the district attorney can rationalize charging seven with First Degree Murder in this case, which sounds like textbook unpremediated Second Degree.

In December, the Arizona Republic reported that Lord’s death was not an aberration but the culmination of an alarming trend: a group of largely upper-middle-class teen-agers had been wreaking havoc in Gilbert and the surrounding East Valley communities for more than a year, with few consequences. The paper reported that the group called itself the Gilbert Goons, a name that apparently originated in a Snapchat group. High-school students knew about them—one victim later described them to law enforcement as “a group of kids just harassing Arizona”—but the Gilbert police seemingly did not. “We do not have documented incidents associated with that group name,” officials told the Republic. The newspaper detailed seven violent attacks by members of the group, many of them captured on video. Others soon surfaced. The Goons seemed to be a loose association of some two dozen kids, mostly but not entirely white and wealthy, who attended high schools in the Gilbert area.

… Three-quarters of Gilbert residents are white, and, even as Arizona has become a swing state, the city remains solidly conservative—Donald Trump won the area by fifteen points in 2020, and most of the East Valley is represented by Andy Biggs, a former chair of the House Freedom Caucus….

About a week after Lord’s death, Queen Creek police executed search warrants at four houses in a wealthy subdivision called Whitewing.

Whitewing.

Proof!

… Like other parents I spoke with, they seemed bewildered by their child’s actions in the past few years, as if, since the pandemic, teen-age bad behavior had sparked into something unrecognizable and extreme. (Violent crime rose nationwide in 2020. It has since returned to pre-pandemic levels, over all, but rates of youth violence remain elevated in many places.) …

And while we are at it, we can blame the Gilbert Goons on School Choice:

Arizona’s strong libertarian tradition has led the state to embrace a consumer-oriented approach to its educational system. “I don’t think people understand what it’s like here,” one parent told me. Since the mid-nineties, Arizona has had open enrollment, meaning that students can attend any public school within a given district. “There are eleven different schools with over two thousand kids, some with three thousand kids, all within seven miles of me,” the parent went on. “The troublemakers can switch schools really easily. Or kids switch schools because of bullying, or because they just don’t like the kids there.”

Several parents told me that open enrollment contributes to a sense of unrootedness in the East Valley. That feeling was compounded when, in 2022, Arizona became the first state to implement a universal school-voucher program. Students can now have their pick of strip-mall schools, online religious homeschooling programs, or “traditional academies”—charter schools that emphasize discipline and often boast Roman columns out front.

What’s more racist than Roman columns?

OK, let’s look at Centers for Disease Control data on homicide victimizations of 15-19 year old males.

This isn’t murder perpetration, but homicide victimizations can serve as a rough proxy for how much bad trouble youths are getting themselves into. The CDC’s Wonder website makes data available all the way back to 1999, and now all of 2023 is finally available after the standard six month lag for homicides.

In 1999, black males age 15-19 died by homicide 15.2 times as often per 100,000 as white male youths. But by 2023, blacks youths died 24.7 times as often, as the black homicide victimization rate (almost all at the hands of other blacks) increased 50% over those 24 years, while the white rate fell 8%.

In 1999, the black death rate was 2.5 times the Hispanic rate, but now it is 4.8 times as bad, as the Hispanic rate has fallen 23% over the last two dozen years.

Virtually nobody is aware that Hispanic behavior was improving (especially before their worsening during the George Floyd racial reckoning) while black behavior was getting worse. It’s hard to fit these important facts into standard narratives blaming whites, so they are almost never reported.