Black-on-black violence is a “disease” that deserves a “national investigation,” Philadelphia
told a Youth Violence Prevention forum in Washington on Monday.
“It is a disease,” Nutter said. “It’s a rash, and if there were a rash killing a hundred and some odd young people on a daily basis we’d be doing something about it.”
Nutter said tainted food gets more attention than young people killing each other: “If there were five bad bags of spinach on the shelf somewhere, someone would put out a national alert. Every bag would be snatched off the shelves until someone figured out where they came from, what was going on, and there would be a national investigation.”
But, Nutter added, “There is no national investigation about this issue–that black people are killing black people all across the United States of America.”
Nutter noted that homicide is the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 16 and 34. In Philadelphia last year, 75 percent of the city’s 316 murder victims were black men and 80 percent of the arrests involved black men, he said.
Nutter told CNSNews.com that the Trayvon Martin case has received a great deal of attention, partly because the two people involved were of different races. While Martin is black, the neighborhood watch captain suspected of shooting him is half white and half Hispanic.