Links? I've seen this go by but haven't gone digging for good local news sources or the like...
The basics here on the Robert Fuller (10 June) and Malcolm Harsch (31 May) deaths in California:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Robert_Fuller
https://apnews.com/00d5f3f25c869d79a02230a95dc23667
I couldn't find much on the Dominique Alexander (9 June) death in NY. A fourth one, unnamed, yesterday in Houston, has been reported as also part of the series, but the dead man (unnamed) was apparently Hispanic.
Alexander was walking distance from my apartment. I don't know anything more about it, but I can confirm that it's weird -- in twenty years in the neighborhood I've never heard of a suicide by hanging in a local park.
This is the Palmdale one, with reference to another in Victorville, also greater-LA desert area.
I feel like hanging specifically from a tree would be the last way a Black man would choose to kill himself. (Also how frequent is hanging to begin with as as a suicide method?) Suicides do happen but these should be investigated the fuck out of.
but I can confirm that it's weird
No you can't. Hangings in parks, along river trails, etc. happen all the time. Generally the media doesn't report unless it's a celebrity or something.
4: Hanging is the second commonest method of suicide, after shooting, for men in the US. (And men are 80% of suicides.)
5: The media shouldn't report because study after study has shown that if you report a suicide you encourage more suicides, especially if you report details like the method used. UK newspapers aren't supposed to report suicides for this very reason - if the death is newsworthy (eg it's a celebrity) it's reported as a "sudden death" or something.
There have been more in the past few years. There was one here (in St Paul, IIRC) maybe three years ago that was passed off as a suicide. I remember seeing it on facebook. I think it was the summer Philando Castile was killed. At the time, my sense was that people, including Black community organizers, wanted to believe it was a suicide because the other option was too horrible.
I wonder what we'd find if we had the capacity to comb national death records over the past sixty years. I bet this may spike up in times of political tension but it's been going on all along, just hidden in the noise.
6: I see "suffocation" as #3 per NIMH, yes, but that could be a much larger category than hanging (carbon monoxide, etc.).
I mean, suicide is not great either because the result is still a dead person.
The black male suicide rate in the US is around half the national (male) average, which doesn't leave a lot of room for murders being wrongly classed as suicides. But that still means 44 black men, mostly in their 20s and 30s, killing themselves every week - if they could bring that down to the rate that Spain or Italy have, they'd be saving a thousand black men every year.
It's an interesting question: all the risk factors for suicide - financial problems, mental health issues, imprisonment etc - are surely much higher for black men than white in the US. And yet the rate's lower. It may simply be a case of available methods - they don't tend to have guns handy as often.
Yes, I would like to be cautious about this being a pattern. Interesting point that this apparently happens regularly but isn't publicized.
The one in front of the courthouse though -- no note? Why commit suicide there if you don't to make it clear why you're doing it?
I was looking it up yesterday because I'm also confused about this. Approximate 25% of suicides are by hanging. In a few minutes of looking, I didn't find a breakdown by race.
I'm really glad our AG is looking into it. I do think that if these were lynchings, in the traditional sense of being done by a group, there will be social media pictures, because people are so fucking dumb.
5: Mmmaybe, but it's a gossipy neighborhood. Like, for current/tidal reasons, the Columbia boat house is where drowning suicides wash up/get hauled out of the water, and I do hear about those -- not media reports, conversation with people who saw the pulling-out-of-the-water. But I'll admit that while Fort Tryon is walking distance from me, it's a longish walk, and it might be outside the range of gossipy neighbors.
But I don't have any real belief about the apparent pattern. The nationwide aspect of it makes it seem less likely to be terrorism, I doubt a group of perpetrators is travelling around the country, but I don't know anything -- I figure more facts will come out.
This could turn into a HUGE story that would mostly be a distraction. I hope a nationwide pattern of the following does not occur.
- X number of people were found dead by hanging in public in the last 5 years and I never knew about it? Why is this covered up?
- Suicides are always covered up, by which I mean the press considers it irresponsible to publicize them too much.
- But how do we know it's a suicide??
- The police investigated it and found no evidence otherwise.
- But I don't trust the police to investigate these things.
- Well, it all comes back to that, doesn't it.
I think 14 makes a good point. Not just that social media makes people dumb, but lynching always was terrorism, and terrorism means publicity. If it's an organized spate of lynchings, I'd expect some credit-taking somewhere.
The credit taking seems to me that it's on a tree, not on a door knob or something inside the house. Strange fucking fruit.
OK, but mostly that people are incredibly stupid on social media.
Except me. All I do is like pictures of my nieces and nephew.
It's an interesting question: all the risk factors for suicide - financial problems, mental health issues, imprisonment etc - are surely much higher for black men than white in the US. And yet the rate's lower. It may simply be a case of available methods - they don't tend to have guns handy as often.
I thought, in general, suicide was more common in more affluent communities (though, I'd think, not as strong a correlation with afflience as eating disorders), but I'm not sure where I picked that up.
Something doesn't have to be Proud Boy Lone Wolf Social Media Terrorism - it just has to be violent racism. Not everyone, probably not even most people, boast when they commit hate crimes.
I've had several friends badly injured - as in hospitalization - in hate crimes. I pretty narrowly missed being beaten up on a largely empty train platform in the small hours of the morning. None of the perpetrators were organized terrorists planning violence; they were just violent straight men. (The guy who threatened me wasn't white and I doubt very much that he was a big user of social media.) None of those people posted on social media, or if they did it was so discreetly that it never came to anyone's attention.
I think that people who don't encounter violence themselves underestimate how much there is. Certainly, if I lived say twenty blocks south of here, kept to my usual boring indoors habits and had a car, I wouldn't encounter any even though I'm visibly queer and gender non-conforming, etc.
But in this case, the only reason to think that these are hate crimes at all is the performative nature of them -- you might beat someone up or kill them out of random hatred, but hanging a black man from a tree, if it wasn't suicide, would have to be with the intention of creating the appearance of a lynching. If communication of that appearance wasn't part of the intent, then we'd be back to square one with figuring out who did it and why in an individualized way.
I don't know - I think people take a lot of satisfaction in racist violence. I don't think there needs to be a message - people just have to think it's fun or similar to what people they admire might do. Malice is really powerful - the feeling that they're imitating racists of the past and creating fear in the neighborhood might well be enough.
Now that I think about it, you'd assume there would be some kind of sign of a struggle, though, so there's probably some accurate medical records for most cases, whether or not they're getting accurate media coverage.
The case of Lennon Lacy here in North Carolina fits this pattern as well, and is well worth revisiting.
To speak to LB's point, the KKK doesn't have to take public credit for a lynching for it to be have the effect of terrifying black people. In Lacy's case, if it was in fact a murder, as seems to my un-cop eyes to be extremely likely, the message seems quite clearly to be "don't sleep with white women". In the case of the Ferguson protestors who've been found dead in burned out cars, the message seems to be "the police will murder you and get away with it if they want to".
To gswift's point, I'd really love to know what the racial breakdowns on suicide methods are. My instinct is that that black people as a rule do not commit suicide by hanging themselves in public places, but that's pure speculation. I would also be curious to know the level of certainty we actually have that such suicides were, in fact, suicides. Absent clear evidence, it seems obvious that the institutional biases are always to conclude suicide over homicide.
So for anyone following the story of the federal security officer who was murdered in Oakland: it is as I suspected and they've arrested a far right guy "suspected to be part of the Boogaloo Movement" for the killing. The officer, Dave Underwood, was black and a contract employee for Homeland Security; some details in this story. Pretty grim shit, also close to home.
Also close to home in that my bike commute takes (took) me past that courthouse and there is always, always a DHS FPS car out front.
So, the Minneapolis Police Department (you guys have heard of them, right?) has in place a new mass surveillance system since April:
The Fusus Unified Awareness platform will enable the Minneapolis Police Department to view public cameras and quickly determine the locations of privately held cameras in major business corridors throughout downtown and other areas. The platform also incorporates real-time officer geolocators, integration with gunfire detection sensors, building floor plans, and a multi-media public tips line
This was funded by unanimous vote of the supposedly progressive city council with no debate -- the council president confirmed that it wasn't even reviewed by the public safety committee.
Apparently, no one has noticed that this happened until an activist friend of mine happened across the press release.
27: Not just a random far-right guy! An Air Force special operations spook. This is an absolutely wild story.
And Jesus fuck, our police chief is still in open council pretending like this race war fanboy was somehow part of the protest
The media shouldn't report because study after study has shown that if you report a suicide you encourage more suicides, especially if you report details like the method used.
Which is why, for many years, the Toronto Transit Commission had a policy of not going public about subway suicides, for fear the publicity might trigger copycats. Last year, the TTC decided to change this policy; I'm not sure how that's working out.
the only reason to think that these are hate crimes at all is the performative nature of them -- you might beat someone up or kill them out of random hatred, but hanging a black man from a tree, if it wasn't suicide, would have to be with the intention of creating the appearance of a lynching.
Yeah, this. Lynching is a public spectacle of racialized hatred and violence, where the publicity is meant to terrorize the subject group, while affirming the power of the dominant group to just openly torture and murder with impunity.
32 was me.
Also: 11 years ago, my cousin's 18-year old son Matt committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree. My cousin, the boy's mother, was the one who found him, and she has not been the same person ever since: she will never, ever get over this, obviously.
(My cousin and her spouse have this weird FB group where they "talk" to their dead son Matt. It is just too awful.)
32 is complicated by two things. One is that subway suicides have a low success rate (advertising this might turn people away rather than encourage). The other is that it is basically impossible to hide, because thousands of people's travel gets messed up and so people figure out what happened even if official word is "unspecified delay" or whatever.
They should just blame it all on one particular maintenance worker, that nobody likes. "The D train is delayed because Gary dropped his fucking wrench on the tracks again."
If forgot it's Canada. "Please accept our apologies. The D train is delayed because Gary dropped his fucking wrench on the tracks again."
Over here it's "delayed by a person under a train" which is helpfully non-specific about how the person got there. It could always have been an accident. Even if it wasn't, I still think the policy is the right one. Copycat suicide is a thing, and there is a huge and morally significant difference in reach between something that a few thousand commuters work out for themselves and something which makes the mass media.
I thought, in general, suicide was more common in more affluent communities
Apparently not, at least not for young people - https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-01-27/higher-poverty-tied-to-increased-youth-suicide-risk-study-shows
Risk factors include loss (financial or personal), a history of suffering violence or abuse, and being part of a group that's discriminated against.
It continues. This is not a rash of copycat suicides.
My aunt committed suicide by hanging herself in the basement. She had locked the door and left a note telling my 10 year old cousin when he got home from school to call his dad and not to go down the stairs.
I wonder too about Ned's 17.
39, see 2: this is the unnamed Hispanic man.
Click through the link that this Vinnie person provided: the dead man is described as "a Hispanic/Caucasian male".
I would now like to update my priors about the Fuller killing:
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