Why Did It Take an Activist to Bring ‘Superpredators’ Into the Campaign?
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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 epidemicitself a product of the influx of cheap cocaine from Latin America, but thats another storyhad 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 Clintons firewall against the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders. Despite this, in the nine months after Buzzfeeds Andrew Kaczynski and Christopher Massie first unearthed the speech, theres been a virtual blackout of Clintons 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 interventionall from February 2016. The first was in a college paper, the Miami Student of Ohios Miami University, where Brett Milan (2/2/16) wrote of Clinton:
For starters, she helped perpetuate the racist myth of the super predator in 1996 and supported the 1994 crime bill, the worst crime bill in American history.