The St. Louis cemetery vandalism: maybe not a hate crime?

The St. Louis cemetery vandalism: maybe not a hate crime? February 22, 2017

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_toppled_stones_(2981745429)_(2).jpg (location not identified)

In the news this week:  a Jewish cemetery in Missouri was vandalized, with about 200 headstones toppled over.

Was this a hate crime?

That’s the operating assumption.

But apparently vandalism of cemeteries isn’t all that unusual.  My google search for “headstone tipped” produced the following recent incidents:

Headstones tipped over in Green Bay cemetery” – 100 headstones tipped over at Fort Howard Memorial Park in Green Bay,  July 28, 2016.

Teens tipped over headstones at 175-year-old Michigan cemetery ‘because they were bored’” – 30 headstones tipped over by two 15-year-old boys and a 13-year-old girl, at Lacota Cemetery in Geneva Township, Michigan, March 19, 2016.

Vandals damage headstones at Ocean View Cemetery” – 13 headstones tipped over at Ocean View Cemetery, Astoria, Oregon, October 19, 2016.

Vandals tip more than 40 headstones at Bellingham cemetery” – 47 monuments topped at Bayview Cemetery in Bellingham, Washington, November 20, 2015.

30+ headstones destroyed at Sturgis cemetery” – more than 30 headstones destroyed at Oaklawn Cemetery, April 4, 2016.

30-plus gravestones knocked over by vandals in Minnesota cemetery” – 30 gravestones knocked down at Hillcrest Cemetery, Cloquet, Minnesota, May 6, 2016.

etc.

Secondly, this vandalism took place in University City, Missouri.  That’s a close-in suburb of St. Louis — and the St. Louis area is characterized by a relatively small City of St. Louis and large numbers of small-ish suburbs surrounding it, many of them just as poor, and just as, er, “diverse”, as the city itself is.  According to Wikipedia, it’s split half-and-half between black and white in the 2016 census, and the white part of the city is heavily Jewish, but the cemetery itself is in the black part of town.  The site niche.com gives it a “C” in terms of its crime rating, only slightly better than St. Louis (the city)’s C-.  (For further comparison, Ferguson got a C as well.)   Where this particular city fits into the puzzle of St. Louis and its relatively poorer and relatively better-off suburbs isn’t immediately clear to me, and as I type this, but here’s some census data, in which black households aren’t in poverty, necessarily, but much poorer than the whites/Jews on the other side of town:

http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Household-Income
http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Household-Income

and more likely to use food stamps (though with less prevalence than the average for the state):

http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Food-Stamps
http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Food-Stamps

Which means that, if this cemetery was a particular target because it was Jewish, it still (probably) doesn’t fit into the “Trump-inspired Neo-Nazi” narrative, but a more uncomfortable story of tensions among racial groups.

 

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_toppled_stones_(2981745429)_(2).jpg (location not identified)


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