By now the entire country knows about Martha Odom, the beautiful young woman and a senior at Ascension Episcopal School in Lafayette, who was on a trip with her classmates to Baton Rouge and was slaughtered, while 10 others were wounded, amid what appears to have been a rumble among gang members at the Mall of Louisiana around lunchtime on Thursday.

It’s a national disgrace, what happened at the Mall. It’s a permanent black eye for the city, but it’s just one more disgrace in a long pattern which has been utterly uninterrupted for decades.

And the Mall of Louisiana, Baton Rouge’s hub of retail commerce, is still shut…

They’re trying to isolate who all of the culprits were, but the basic facts of this are pretty apparent.

This was a gang fight that turned into a mass shooting because Baton Rouge is afflicted with a class of people who have zero impulse control, no respect for human life and absolutely no aspiration for achievement in their lives.

Go on YouTube and you can see them celebrated. It’s utterly disgusting.

The political class in Baton Rouge has put up with this for at least three decades.

It’s not even unreasonable to say that some of them are on the take from the criminal element. We noted a couple of years ago, for example, that the NAACP in Baton Rouge wanted to give its President’s Award to a known drug dealer who was up for murder.

Then you see how the political class in certain parts of the city do business, particularly with respect to taxpayer dollars coming into local government coffers, and you recognize why there is so little opprobrium offered to the criminal class.

But you can’t talk about these things, because to do so means you’re a “racist.”

“Look at the inequality!” they scream. “Don’t you have a problem with that?”

What are they talking about? Well, the second video above runs through a good swath of the numbers. The “white” parts of East Baton Rouge Parish are safe and prosperous. The “black” parts of the parish are utter shitholes which are much more reminiscent of Haiti or Venezuela than the United States.

The numbers are amazing, frankly. This city is essentially two completely separate civilizations living side by side.

A lot is made of the disparity of household income (or per capita) by race in Baton Rouge. The latest detailed breakdown comes from ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates (inflation-adjusted to 2023 dollars), based on race of the householder:

• White households: Median household income: $84,768
• Black or African American households: Median household income: $46,710

The disparities of household income in predominantly white neighborhoods vs. predominantly black neighborhoods are much, much worse. Why? Because black families who generate middle class incomes get the hell out of black neighborhoods as fast as they can and move to where the white people are.

Who can blame them for that? Drive around in predominantly black neighborhoods in Baton Rouge, particularly north of Florida Boulevard, and it literally looks like hell on earth. These are places where first-world commerce in any real sense is all but impossible, where drugs and crime are the norm, where the law-abiding are hunkered down every night at sunset (and often before) behind barred windows and doors, where gunshots are heard so often they barely even register.

I live on Highland Road in a nice area which isn’t far from Gardere, one of Baton Rouge’s worst hellhole neighborhoods, and you can hear the gunshots every other night. It’s an utterly surreal experience; we have very little crime in my neighborhood, but if I took a 15-minute walk to the southwest after dark I’d be taking my life in my hands.

Because in neighborhoods like Gardere, where the black community dominates, here’s how the people live.

Parish-wide, ~44.5–50% of children under 18 live in single-parent households (almost all of which are households with no father in the home), per recent ACS/FRED estimates (e.g., 44.5% in 2024 5-year data). The numbers show it’s in the neighborhood of 70 percent in the black community, but just 20 percent among Baton Rouge’s white citizens.

What does that produce? Well, let’s look at incarceration percentages by race. Based on 2021 data from the East Baton Rouge Parish jail, black and Hispanic individuals comprised  some 80% of the average daily jail population, while making up just 46% of the parish’s general population—indicating significant overrepresentation.

Is that evidence that black folks get a raw deal from the cops? Well, available data on homicides (the most reliably tracked violent crime) from local analyses (e.g., Gun Violence Archive reports for Baton Rouge) show that homicide victims in Baton Rouge are about 85% black and only 8% white or Latino. The suspects/offenders and offenders are 80% black.

That’s among the murders where there is a suspect who’s arrested. For example, there’s the celebrated/infamous 2022 case of Allie Rice, an attractive white girl driving late at night through the gang-infested neighborhood along Government Street east of downtown to her home near LSU, who stopped at a railroad crossing and was shot dead – many think as part of a gang initiation. The perpetrator was almost certainly black, and eyewitness accounts indicate two black men were seen fleeing from the scene of the crime. But with nobody ever arrested in the case, it doesn’t show up in the numbers are a black-on-white crime.

And if you bring up Allie Rice’s murder in conversation with black people in Baton Rouge, here’s what you get – they’ll protest that white people in Baton Rouge care about Allie Rice but couldn’t give a damn about the Lakeeshas and Shinequas who also get killed and nobody ever solves their murders.

And that is an entirely valid point, but it misses completely why we have to have these atrocious discussions.

Nobody thinks it was the Klan who got to Lakeesha or Shinequa. Everybody knows, at least generally, what their murderers looked like. But talk to cops in Baton Rouge and they’ll tell you the people who live in those neighborhoods where the murders come in baskets are too damned terrified to say anything that would help solve the crimes.

Because even if the police were able to make arrests, the legal system spits the thugs right back out. And the old rule that snitches get stitches applies perhaps even more to civilians than it does to the thugs in the gangs – because the law-abiding aren’t hardened and it’s easy to intimidate them into shutting up.

We actually don’t have a wealth of statistical data to show the disparity in high school dropout rates, undergraduate and graduate degrees, full-time employment and other metrics of performance between the black community and white community in Baton Rouge, because typically speaking the people who do such research are Democrats and the approach they want to take is to attribute the results to “racism” or the continuing effects of “Jim Crow.”

Except Baton Rouge has been a state capitol and state government has been one of its largest employers for decades, and it’s been two or three generations of state government actively recruiting employees from the black community. Further, Baton Rouge sits at the center of the Mississippi River petrochemical corridor, where lucrative blue-collar jobs have been readily available courtesy of large corporate concerns priding themselves on non-discriminatory hiring practices.

Major employers in Baton Rouge have been doing everything they could to drag the black community into prosperity, is the point, and have actually accomplished that – at least for the people willing to take advantage. And that is an unadulterated good thing which must continue.

There is a black middle class in Baton Rouge. Like I said above, it lives in white neighborhoods. It also lives in the suburbs – particularly in Livingston and Ascension Parishes – just like the white middle class does. Track population over the past 50 years in Livingston and Ascension, and what you’ll find is that while those parishes have grown in population and prosperity, they’ve also grown in diversity.

But what you don’t find great numbers on is community performance. For example, there are no readily available stats giving a racial breakdown on SNAP recipients, or Section 8 housing, or Medicaid drilled down to the parish level. If you had those numbers, most people would agree that they’d show it’s very, very few white citizens/families in East Baton Rouge catching that government dependency and getting trapped in the cycle of poverty and dysfunction those programs create. That isn’t to say there aren’t lots of white people around the state and/or country  who are. We know there are. But that isn’t very true in Baton Rouge.

Where I’m going with this is that the Left will tell you we have racial disparities driven by racism in this town, and those disparities show up in events like the Allie Rice murder or the Mall of Louisiana shooting almost as either a cry for help or a lashing-out at the real evildoers.

But that’s bullshit. It’s a disgraceful lie.

Those racial disparities are cultural disparities.

There is no gang culture in white neighborhoods in Baton Rouge. There are no areas where white thugs have taken over and are making videos of themselves brandishing firearms and showing off scars from bullet holes. No filmmakers or journalists come to Louisiana’s capital city to document the behavioral pathology of Shenandoah, Oak Hills or River Bend.

Poor leadership has allowed vast swaths of Baton Rouge to fall into a cultural poverty driven by substance abuse, criminality, behavioral pathology and low achievement which forces its victims to live in Third World conditions, accept subsistence income through low-grade criminal activity and government dependency because legitimate commerce in the neighborhoods where they live has ground to a halt. And that poor leadership decided long ago to make peace with, and profit from, this atrocious status quo.

So much so that attempting to lift people up beyond that status quo now makes one a sellout or an Uncle Tom or a racist. When amusingly (or disgustingly, depending on your sense of humor), the people most guilty of casting aspersions on the critics of this pathetic performance are the biggest sellouts of all.

Go look at where Cleo Fields or Gary Chambers make their homes. It ain’t in the Murder Triangle.

We are long past the point where anybody ought to care about the names they’re called. We need a muscular, aggressive law-enforcement presence in Baton Rouge to mirror that laid down in Washington, DC and Memphis. State Police, National Guard, the FBI, anybody we can get. Camp out in those afflicted neighborhoods and squeeze that criminal element until it isn’t fun to act like a thug anymore.

Ever since career criminal Alton Sterling got himself killed fighting a cop over a gun in 2016 and riots and terrorism followed, the criminals have had very little fear of the police in Baton Rouge.

The gangs, and the gang culture, must be crushed. People need to be made to fear not the gangs, but the law. In Baton Rouge’s worst neighborhoods, that’s not the case.

What we’re seeing is that you can’t contain the criminality in those worst neighborhoods. It will show up elsewhere, as it did on Thursday. And the days of simply accepting our capital city as a hub of Third World gang culture and behavioral pathology must come to an abrupt end – no matter how unhappy that makes certain compromised individuals who want to call people names.