Lawmakers in New York are fighting back against the "Knockout Game," proposing it be made a felony and calling on President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to respond.
In the racially charged and sometimes deadly crime, one or more assailants, usually black, target a randomly selected white person and, for amusement, try to knock out the unsuspecting victim with a single punch.
Hundreds of cases have been documented in the book "White Girl Bleed A Lot."
Now New York City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., a Democrat, told WND: "I've been warning about this crime coming to New York. I put in a resolution to make it a felony."
Vallone is head of New York City's Public Safety Committee, with oversight over the police department. He vehemently disagrees with those who deny that the Knockout Game is a real problem.
"People who don't believe that this is exists in New York City right now remind me of people who used to say the Internet is just a fad," he told WND.
Ahead of most other politicians, Vallone has spoken out against the Knockout Game. In November, he publicly stated: "I've already written to [Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly. I want to know what we're going to do about it. … These kids need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and we need to ensure that this doesn’t keep happening."
State Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn, a Democrat, wrote to Obama and Holder in November, requesting a federal response to the Knockout Game.
Hikind recently told the New York Times: "It's sick, it's scary. … It's like nothing I’ve experienced in my 31 years in office."
In addition, three Republicans are introducing legislation to punish juvenile Knockout Game attackers as adults. State Sen. Hugh Farley is lead sponsor of a bill that would treat young criminals who play the Knockout Game as adults for the purposes of criminal punishment. Jim Tedisco, a Republican assemblyman representing Glenville, is also sponsoring the bill. Assemblyman John Ceretto, a Republican representing Lewiston, is a co-sponsor.
New York City has been the location of a string of Knockout Game attacks directed against the Orthodox Jewish community. The attacks have not spared the very young or the very old.
In November, a 78-year-old woman pushing her great-granddaughter's stroller was punched in the back of the head. Her purse and other belongings were not taken, a characteristic of the attacks.
A 12-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy was also attacked by a group of "15 black youths."
The young man was punched in the face then shoved to the ground. Afterwards, the group of blacks is said to have cheered and yelled, "We got him."
After years of establishment media silence about the Knockout Game, the New York City attacks pushed the vicious pastime into the national media spotlight. However, the damage from the game was evident years ago. As early as July 2011, the American Thinker featured an article on the Knockout Game. As WND reported, there were at least six deaths caused by the attacks as of September.
The media is slowly starting to acknowledge that the attacks are a form of racial violence. A New York City CBS outlet reports:
There have been seven so-called "knockout" or "polar bear" assaults in the Crown Heights and Midwood sections of Brooklyn… The alternate name "polar bearing" comes from the fact that the victims are white.
In the Huffington Post, Al Sharpton wrote that the attacks are racist:
These kids are targeting innocent people, and in many cases specifically targeting Jewish folks. We would not be silent if it were the other way around, and we will not be silent now. This behavior is racist, period.
See a trailer for "White Girl Bleed a Lot":