Ever since George Floyd’s death kicked off Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots nationwide, the rate at which black Americans are being murdered has skyrocketed.
No one seems to want to talk about it or put forward actual solutions.
And the brain-melting justification for demanding the shutdown of this local gas station will leave you dumbfounded.
It’s a gas station
No city or community in America has a higher homicide rate per capita than Jackson, Mississippi.
Despite seeing a reported double-digit drop in the number of murders committed in each of the past two years, Jackson’s homicide rate remained at over 78 per 100,000 residents in 2023 – more than 12-times higher the national homicide rate of roughly six per 100,000 Americans – with 118 homicides occurring in a city with less than 150,000 people, according to WLBT.
Unsurprisingly, like most American cities with sky-high crime rates, Jackson has long been a Democrat-controlled city.
And residents are clearly getting fed up with the sky-high rate of violent crime, particularly murders.
But it seems as though they may be putting their energy toward supposed “solutions” that don’t actually address the issues at hand.
WLBT recently reported that Democrat Councilman Kenneth Stokes led a group of local activists to publicly protest outside a Texaco station in the wake of the murder of 23-year-old Jacobi Austin, who was shot and killed outside the gas station earlier last month.
“We want to make sure that when we go into these stores, our kids go into stores or wives and children – hey, we want to make sure that we safe when we go into these places,” protester Enoch Sanders said.
“The citizens stand up and speak out. We’re going to continue to do that. For the next generation, those next ones up, they’re going to be affected. We want to make sure we change the narrative,” another protester, Andrew Campbell, said.
On the surface, it’s certainly hard to argue with law-abiding Americans who simply want themselves and their loved ones to be safe in their local community.
But the protesters weren’t just protesting for safer streets in the wake of Austin’s murder.
They were openly calling for the gas station to be shut down by the city government.
“Where people suffer harm or injury, it’s got to be considered a nuisance,” Stokes claimed. “How many people have to die here before they realize it’s harmful?”
“Have the integrity of a human being”
Councilman Stokes told WLBT that he will be bringing a “vote of no confidence against the city’s legal department and director for not declaring the gas station a nuisance and shutting it down before now.”
Apparently, the Democrat Councilman believes that it’s the gas station that is harmful to his city and not the actual perpetrators of violent crime.
Furthermore, the protesters even went so far as to attack the character of the small business owner who is merely trying to operate a business in one of the most dangerous cities in America.
They claimed that the “business is causing people” to die and called on the owner to display “the integrity of a human being” by shutting it down.
“If you are providing a business that you see is detrimental to the community that you’re serving, and that your business is causing people to lose their lives, then you should have the integrity of a human being for yourself to say, we need to shut this down,” protester Joseph Holiday claimed.
Of course, the Mississippi state government has attempted to help Jackson get a grip on its violent crime.
The Republican-led Mississippi state legislature passed HB 1020 last year, which expanded the Mississippi Capitol Police’s territorial jurisdiction to include all of Jackson.
As CNN noted at the time the bill was signed into law, Jackson has long been plagued by understaffing within their police department and the legislation set out to help the city through additional officers, a new 911 call center, and the appointment of four “temporary special circuit judges” and an additional staff for the public defender and District Attorney’s Office to “help to alleviate heavy caseloads.”
But as CNN also highlighted at the time, Jackson’s Democrat elected officials claimed it was a “‘slap in the face of our city’ and a regression toward the state’s painful Civil Rights era past.”
“[The law] says we don’t value your voice,” Jackson Democrat Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told CNN last year. “I think that it says, ‘You’re a population that is meant to be controlled, as opposed to being supported.’ I think this is a message that says that we don’t believe that black leadership is capable of moving forward for itself.”
Just as a suggestion for the Democrat Mayor, but there may be more trust in Jackson’s “leadership” if they didn’t blame their homicide issue on a gas station.
Patriot Political will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
