At 4 a.m. on May 30—Memorial Day—in the middle of “Urban Beach Week”— Raymond Herisse, 22, of Boynton Beach, Florida, was shot dead by police in the South Beach area of Miami Beach.
One of Haitian-American Herisse’s many mug shots.
[VDARE.com note: As usual, none of the mainstream media has published anything useful about Raymond Herisse's citizenship status, where he was born, et cetera.However, leftwing blogger Axis of Logic describes him this way: Miami Police Assassinate Character of Haitian Youth After Taking His Life]
“Urban Beach Week,” aka “Hip-Hop Weekend” has come to mean anarchy in Miami Beach. Up to 300,000 black “hip-hop” fans, many intent on wreaking havoc, descend upon a city with fewer than 90,000 residents, only four percent of whom are black. They assault and intimidate people, block traffic, blast music 24/7, steal food and drink, trash restaurants, urinate on police vans, and fondle every woman who tries to walk down the street. This mayhem is a ten-year tradition.
The unfortunate truth: this is what too many blacks, of all ages and social classes, understand as “just having fun”—committing crimes, or cheering them on, as they watch the world burn.
Raymond Herisse’s family is reportedly looking into suing the City of Miami Beach. So is black Tallahassean Cedrick Perkins, 30, who was shot in the chest during the same incident, he believes, by out-of-control police, and who “wants justice”.[ Bystander says police shot him on South Beach in Memorial Day shootout, By David Smiley, The Miami Herald, June 4, 2011] Three other pedestrians were reportedly also wounded by gunfire.
Various bloggers and posters with zero tolerance towards police and unlimited tolerance toward hoodlums denounced the cops as ”EVIL ANIMALS” who are guilty of “MURDER,” and who are destroying the country.
Typical: leftist white photographer Liam Crotty [Email him]visited Herisse’s neighborhood, so he could tell the story “on the life of Raymond Herisse.”
Herisse, Crotty tells us, was the son of a hardworking, Haitian “single mother” of three—immigration status unspecified—who, though she speaks little English, holds down two full-time jobs to support her teenage daughter and herself.
According to commenter “Former Neighbor”, Raymond was the good son. There was a bad son:
“Take a look at her two daughters. Smart, kind, polite, respectable….and Raymond was the same way…. She has a young daughter at home and Raymond, she decided to protect them by throwing Kevin out to keep him and his thug friends away.”
(That would make, counting an older daughter, for four kids.)
“Raymond on the other hand always seemed to be a help to his mother. I know he worked and gave money to help his mom. He stayed with his little sister while his mom worked late shifts.”
Raymond worked? Doing what—retailing oxycodone and cocaine? According to CBS News reporter Jim DeFede, Herisse had “a long criminal history and … has served prison time.”
Leftist lensman Crotty’s sugarcoated profile mentioned in passing that “Raymond may be linked to a robbery and shooting of a BP gas station” around the corner from his house.
It neglected to add that, after Herisse was killed, the BP clerk identified him as the man who had shot him in the chin, when two men had robbed him the previous November. Or that he had reportedly been arrested 13 times in the previous four years in Palm Beach County, and at least once in Broward County.
(I was unable to reach Herisse’s mother.)
National crime rates have allegedly dropped since the 1990s, and the official crime rate in Boynton Beach dropped even faster. But in 1999, it was 98.3 percent higher, and in 2009, it was still 76.3 percent higher, than the national rate.
So much for the attempt by Crotty and other leftwing bloggers, to cast Herisse’s neighborhood as “safe” and “suburban”.
Boynton Beach’s crime rate might have something to do with its demographics. It is only 55.6 percent “white alone”, while being 27.8 percent “black alone”, and 13.5 percent Hispanic.
Thanks to violent neighborhood takeovers by American blacks (aka “integration”) and by Third World immigrants, which sociologists euphemistically refer to as “neighborhood succession,” America’s “suburbs” increasingly resemble their French counterparts, the “banlieu”.
In Florida, small towns and big cities alike have been hit by diversity: Bradenton, Immokalee, Miami, Jacksonville. White Cubans have institutionalized banana republic-style corruption in the Miami-Miami Beach area. The entire, 18.8 million-strong state, now fourth-most populous in the U.S. is only 57.9 percent non-Hispanic white, and is 16 percent black. It is a demographic perfect storm.
The Herisses’ neighbor, Cathy A. Vivarttas, whose son, Herisse’s friend, was killed in an illegal street drag race, called it “kind of ironic….two single mom’s [sic] living right next to each other with sons the same age and both die too early in life.”
Rather than being “ironic”, the situation was thoroughly predictable.
According to Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega, Herisse had tried to run down at least five police officers, hitting one, before firing on policemen and bystanders. He went down in a fusillade of over 100 shots reportedly by 12 officers from the Miami Beach and Hialeah PDs.[100 Rounds Fired By Cops In SoBe Shooting, CBS Miami, June 1, 2011]
When police did not immediately find a weapon on Herisse, but two-and-a-half days later reported finding a black Beretta 92-F semiautomatic pistol “that was out of plain sight,” in Herisse’s car, Herisse’s supporters screamed “cover-up!”[Gun found in car of man killed by Beach cops during Urban Beach Week, Miami Beach Herald, June 1, 2011]
The time lag in finding the gun notwithstanding, during the most comprehensive video available of Herisse’s wild ride, the videographer can be heard saying that shots are being fired from inside Herisse’s vehicle.
Whether Herisse had or had fired a gun, he was not the “unarmed black man,” as depicted by leftist bloggers. An automobile is a deadly weapon. Police are duty-bound to use deadly force to stop a driver who is trying to kill people.
Did Herisse fire his weapon? Who wounded the passersby? How many officers were involved in the shooting? Was anyone getting commended, reprimanded, suspended and/or indicted?
On August 18, Det. Sanchez in the Miami Beach PD’s Media Relations division told me that he couldn’t comment, as the Internal Affairs investigation report is currently under review by the state attorney’s office.
Apparently, that is still the case. Four months after the incident, the Miami Beach PD has not issued the results of its investigation.
Meanwhile, since Memorial Day there has been a movement afoot to abolish “Urban Beach Week”. It was started by Herb Sosa, who heads the gay-Hispanic Unity Coalition, and who thus has double Politically Correct cover. Over 100 people demonstrated on June 3, [South Beach residents demand end to Urban Beach Weekend, Miami Herald, June 3, 2011]Peter Joseph Tapia set up a Facebook page, “END: Memorial/Urban Weekend in Miami Beach”, and there is a Web site, Takebacksobe.com, which proclaims:
“Memorial Day is a holiday to honor our military men and women - Not to live in fear, not be able to leave your home, get shot at, robbed and have to navigate through mountains of trash on the streets, impossibly crowded streets & gang wars….
To a man, Urban Beach Week’s critics insist that this is all about behavior, not race (also here).
Not everyone agrees. Doshon Farad wrote in New York’s black nationalist Amsterdam News [free registration required]:
“One might argue that police departments across the country have declared open season on Black men. At least that's what several Florida residents are claiming.”[Possible Cover-up in Shooting of Raymond Herrisse, a Florida Black man shot 100 times ]
Pot, kettle? Recent years have seen waves of murders and attempted murders of (mostly) white policemen by black men: Lovelle Mixon, Maurice Clemmons, Hydra Lacy Jr., Kevin Randleman (alleged cop and serial killer), Angilo Freeland, Johnny Sims, Carlos Boles, Marvin Lamar Stringer, Dejon Marquee White, and a couple of L.A. John Does on August 25.
Murdering or attempting to murder cops has become for many small-time black criminals a ticket to glory and martyrdom—because many blacks celebrate such racist psychopaths, and go so far as to engage in jury nullification on their behalf.
Consider the more staid position of the black newspaper, The South Florida Times: The mayhem is racist Miami Beach authorities’ fault for “not draw[ing] up plans to cope adequately with the very large number of revelers” that come every year—and yet, the authorities may not enforce peace for citizens, but instead must act as supplicants with black promoters and local black leaders, engaging in “dialogue” and “discussion.”[What We Think: It’s all about race]
SFT publisher Robert G. Beatty implies that blacks have a birthright to riot in any non-black dominated city.
There is, however, one thing I can agree with Robert Beatty on: “It’s all about race.”
For the past 10-15 years, middle- and working-class blacks have also attacked other tourist spots, e.g., Myrtle Beach (“Black Biker Week”) and Daytona Beach (“Black College Reunion”).
When white businessmen reach out to the blacks, the blacks and the NAACP—with help from the Justice Department—sue them for millions.
And when white businessmen seek to protect themselves from the racist blacks by closing for the attacks, the blacks and the NAACP sue them, too.
Miami Beach police have tried both aggressive and non-confrontational tactics in different years, to no avail.
Black invasions such as Urban Beach Week are yet another front in an over 50-year-long race war.
I’m sure there was no lack of police screw-ups during and after the shooting. But, foreseeing such problems, the leaders of a well-ordered city (or society) take every possible precaution to minimize the occasion for chaos—whereas in The Diversity Zone, leaders take every possible precaution to maximize the occasion for chaos.
Who was Raymond Herisse? A would-be mass murderer who was fortunately stopped in time? A screw-up of suicidal proportions, like his neighbor’s son?
We may never know.
But this much we do know: If no one has the will to put the brakes on “diversity”, not too far down the road, every week in every town in America will be indistinguishable from “Urban Beach Week”.
