Why Did It Take an Activist to Bring ‘Superpredators’ Into the Campaign?

http://fair.org/home/why-did-it-take-an-activist-to-bring-superpredators-into-the-campaign/

Something was accomplished, though: Hillary Clinton got a new talking point that she could use to depict her husband as tough on crime as she stumped for his re-election in New Hampshire.

In reality, the wave of youth crime associated with the crack epidemic—itself a product of the influx of cheap cocaine from Latin America, but that’s another story—had already peaked in 1994, and by 1996, when Hillary issued her warning, juvenile crime rates were in freefall. Far from unleashing a conscienceless, empathy-free reign of terror on the nation, teens a decade later were committing crimes at roughly one-half to one-third the rate of their older siblings.

The fact that as this remarkable decline in youth crime was happening, Clinton was warning that many “kids” were now “superpredators” whom “we have to bring…to heel” is surely relevant in a campaign in which Black Lives Matter has brought criminal justice issues to the forefront, and media constantly refer to African-Americans as Clinton’s “firewall” against the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders. Despite this, in the nine months after Buzzfeed‘s Andrew Kaczynski and Christopher Massie first unearthed the speech, there’s been a virtual blackout of Clinton’s “superpredator” quote in US newspapers.

According to a broad search of US newspapers and wires in the Nexis news database for stories containing the words “Hillary Clinton” and either “superpredator,” “super predator” or “super-predator,” there were only four stories that referenced the quote before Ashley Williams’ intervention—all from February 2016. The first was in a college paper, the Miami Student of Ohio’s Miami University, where Brett Milan (2/2/16) wrote of Clinton: