Reviving the Myth of the ‘Superpredator’

The New York Post (7/28/15) further sensationalized an already breathless Daily Beast story.

A week ago, rumors were whipped up on social media about a contest between two Los Angeles gangs to indiscriminately kill 100 people, whether rivals or bystanders, in 100 days. The rumors were posted with the hashtag #100days100nights.

It was internet hearsay until the early morning hours of July 28, when the Daily Beast ran an “exclusive story” that blessed the rumors with credibility. Citing an unnamed “law enforcement source,” the Daily Beast reported that bloodthirsty gangs were indeed pitted in a contest to put fatal bullets in the first 100 bodies unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

The story draws from a well-worn narrative that depicts gang members, and poor urban folk generally, as mindless, amoral, sadistic, blood-lusting subhumans, too stupid or evil—or both—to need a reason to kill. The narrative took its modern form in the 1980s, when the news media used an actual rise in violence associated with the crack cocaine street business to incite a new moral and racial panic.

By the early 1990s, as drug war hysteria fed an unprecedented build-up of the prison system, news organizations were declaring that youth born in the crack cocaine era would grow up to be “superpredators,” a “new breed” of offenders with “absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.” Hillary Clinton warned of super predators in 1996 while campaigning for her husband.

Today, news organizations mostly recognize that the superpredator was little more than an ugly and racist caricature reflecting the witch hunts of the times. But old myths die hard, and in the days after the Daily Beast ran its story, some news organizations were all too eager to revive the racist narrative.

The right wing New York Post screamed that gangs were locked in a “kill contest,” which is also what the Daily News called it. For AOL.com, it was a “horrifying contest.” The Daily Mail: a “sick contest.” Even the Manila Bulletin, based in the Philippines, wrote “the hashtag ‘100 days 100 nights’ serves as a warning that two LA gangs are up on a challenge of which group can kill 100 people within a span of 100 days.”

All of the papers cited the Daily Beast in their reporting. But as other, more rigorous reports suggest, and as a Los Angeles gang member confirmed to FAIR, rumors of a bet to kill bystanders were completely fictitious.

The Daily Beast was correct in reporting that #100days100nights was started by members of the Rollin 100 Crips, in retaliation for the death of a man referred to as “KP” by a rival gang. There was also a spate of shootings in South LA after KP’s death that injured 11 and killed one, including a mother and her child in a car, which the Daily Beast insinuated was proof of the macabre bet.

But a Rollin 100 member told FAIR that the reference to 100 days and 100 nights had to do with their crew’s name, and was a threat directed solely at the rival gang that allegedly killed KP, the 52 (or 5-Deuce) Hoover Gangster Crips. Any bystanders shot, he said, were not purposely targeted by the gangs.

“There’s no bet to kill 100 people at all,” the Rollin 100 Crip member told FAIR. “KC was [with the Rollin] 100s, so it makes sense with our name, 100 days and 100 nights of violence. But our energy was only toward [the Hoovers], not innocent people.”

Other reports were more discerning. The LA Times noted that police and gang interventionists believed the hashtag was a prank. Vice talked with a gang interventionist who said nobody sanctioned the shooting of bystanders in the area in question. Mic talked with an academic who said gang violence “is typically not random,” and the Washington Post quoted an LAPD deputy who said recent shootings in the area were “aligned more with typical acts.” And yet, despite speaking with community members, high-ranking police, and sociology professors, few if any news organizations actually spoke with members of the Rollin 100s to corroborate their reports.

The original story doesn’t even make sense: Why would a gang avenge its fallen member by inventing a contest with the other gang to kill 100 random people?

If you believe the superpredator trope, it doesn’t have to make sense. Black youth in gangs kill people because they’re monsters without a conscience or a brain. It’s a racist and pathetically alarmist idea, and the Daily Beast is doing its part to keep the myth alive.

For another example of media turning police hype about Twitter chatter into sensational fearmongering, see “Media’s Baltimore ‘Teen Purge’ Narrative Falling Apart,” by Adam Johnson (FAIR Blog, 4/29/15).

Aaron Miguel Cantú is an independent writer based in New York.