The McNeils weren’t the only ones who felt threatened by Epp. David Samson and Libby Jones, a white couple who hired Epp to build their home in 2004, testified that they carried a gun as a “precaution” around Epp because of his threatening behavior. According to Jones, Epp nearly hit her when she expressed dissatisfaction with his work at a weekly meeting. The couple even had a lawyer write a letter warning Epp to stay away from their property. Samson testified that after they fired him, Epp would park his car across the street and watch their house, saying “it got to the point where my wife and I were in total fear of this man.”

McNeil’s attorney Mark Yurachek told Salon that “DAs throughout the country enjoy that kind of flexibility of deciding who to prosecute, but it’s curious that he took a year to do it.” While he said there’s no way to know what swayed the DA to prosecute, Yurachek revealed that letters, which he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, were written to the DA’s office demanding that McNeil be charged. “They were mostly emails from people cajoling prosecutors to investigate,” says Yurachek. “One was from Epp’s widow. Others were written anonymously.”

Barber was clear that the NAACP remains firmly against stand your ground laws because “they give cover to those who may engage in racial profiling and racialized violence,” adding that “There is a history and legacy of discriminatory application of the law” that continues to this day. “African-Americans are caught in curious position. On one hand, we fight against stand your ground laws, but once the laws are on the books they aren’t applied to us.”

Meanwhile, Barber argues that McNeil’s treatment stands in stark contrast to that of George Zimmerman, who has been afforded the benefit of the doubt despite his victim being unarmed. “America’s always had a difficult issue dealing with race, so rather than face it when it’s exposed, the tendency by some is to try and dismiss it. But the reality is you do not see this kind of miscarriage of justice when it comes to whites.” He adds,  “John’s whole life has been taken away from him. His wife is very ill with cancer and she has lost a husband, his sons have lost a father and society has lost a man that was contributing to his community.”

What happened is, he had his bike locked to his car while he went to services on Good Friday, and when he came back, his bike was gone, and he doesn’t think a nun stole it so basically his parents lied to him when they said “we are all the same” and his favorite movie is no longer “In the Heat of the Night.” (The deductive reasoning on display is staggering: It couldn’t have been monks, must have been black people.)

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

Stupid strawman liberal friend! If we’re all “the same,” why did a (probably) black person (possibly) steal Mark Judge’s bike?

It actually gets dumber from there — on Page 2 he excitedly recounts the time universally loathed asshole Piers Morgan totally told off Toure — but long story short Mr. Judge has decided that “black pain is no different than white pain” and so therefore Soledad O’Brien (??) should stop complaining. After all, the black person who may have stolen his bike may also have “a car, a nice apartment, a hot girlfriend and good health.”

I mean, sure! That’s possible! It’s definitely within the realm of possibility that the hypothetical black person you assume stole your bike because you were near a “poor black neighborhood” when it disappeared has a really sweet life, sure.

Wise up, White Americans. Your liberal parents lied to you when they said “this country’s centuries-old tradition of state-sponsored discrimination and institutional racism means a black person would never steal your bike, so just park that shit wherever.” Or like maybe your “white guilt” is just weird curdled racial resentment (“even though I try super hard not to be incredibly racist black people still won’t forgive me!”) which caused you to go in a really weird direction with your otherwise totally normal anger about being the victim of some random crime of opportunity.

I journeyed to Alawadi’s adopted hometown of El Cajon in Southern California to find out more about her death. El Cajon is a microcosm of Iraq, but an Iraq that no longer exists. More than 40,000 Iraqis are struggling to build a new life there, having fled persecution in their homeland. One local described to me a community where “There’s Chaldeans, Yazidis, Mandaeans. There’s Shi’a, Sunni, Kurds. There’s Assyrian and Armenian.”

The first wave of immigration came in the late 1970s on the eve of the devastating Iran-Iraq War. Others, including Alawadi and her family, fled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, mainly Shi’a who unsuccessfully tried to overthrow a wounded Saddam Hussein at the urging of the senior Bush administration. The third wave was courtesy of the junior Bush’s 2003 invasion, which spawned Islamist militias that have decimated Iraq’s Chaldean Christians, Mandaeans (followers of John the Baptist) and Yazidis (a 4,000-year-old syncretic religion). Out of the millions of Iraqi refugees from the most recent U.S. war, 59,000 have landed on American soil.

Many have found their way to El Cajon. They tell of harrowing escapes from kidnappings, bombings and death squads, years in refugee camps and life savings spent to hopscotch from country to country. Recent arrivals come bearing deep traumas and have landed in a depressed economy where they often sink into joblessness, squalor and depression. They have also discovered not everyone is welcoming.

“There is a hate crime problem in El Cajon,” says Basma Coda, an Iraqi-American who works at the Chaldean-Middle Eastern Social Services. “We have documented six physical attacks since 2007 in which Iraqi refugees were beat up and had broken bones. All had to go the hospital. They were all over 50, and one was a 75-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease.” (The El Cajon police department did not return calls about the alleged crimes.)

“There are a lot of anti-Islamic groups and know-nothings here,” says California State University professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism in San Bernardino. Nonetheless, he and other hate-crime monitors are skeptical of some of the alleged details of Alawadi’s death. “Why are the police so quick to say it is an isolated incident? That suggests to me they are looking at other motives. There is the possibility this could be some sort of personal attack or revenge attack.” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups nationwide, says that when he first heard about the threatening notes, “I raised an eyebrow. It’s too perfect. It’s highly unusual to have notes that spell out the motive on paper.” As for the crime itself, Potok says, “It is quite unusual to invade someone’s home, especially a woman, and violently beat her to death in the dining room.”

Indeed, in the days after her death several revelations called the hate-crime allegation into question. On April 4, an affidavit for a search warrant about the murder was “accidentally released,” according to the New York Times. The San Diego Union-Tribune, which first received the document, claimed it shows a “family in turmoil and cast doubt on the likelihood that her slaying was a hate crime.” Alawadi was said to be planning on leaving her husband, based on blank divorce papers found in her vehicle. Last November, police investigating reports of two people possibly having sex in a car found Fatima with a 21-year-old man. After her mother was called to pick her up, Fatima allegedly jumped out of the moving car at 35 mph. While being treated at a hospital for her injuries the court records state, “Police were informed by paramedics and hospital staff that Fatima Alhimidi said she was being forced to marry her cousin and did not want to do so she jumped out of the vehicle.”

The document also mentions “a neighbor reported seeing a skinny dark-skinned male running west from the area of Alawadi’s house” on the morning of the murder. According to the affidavit, as of March 27, the police had not confirmed the whereabouts of Kassim Alhimidi, Alawadi’s husband, at the time of the murder. And curiously, “a handwritten note was located at the scene that the family denied seeing before.”

Yet some in the community are still skeptical because there is no suspect, motive or murder weapon. Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says, “There are definitely questions that are brought up by the article, but we should not jump to a conclusion unless there is a real fact provided. Our community is not immune to these issues.”

Some observers worry that the new information in the Alawadi case will be misused. Hanif Mohebi says, “From the beginning we were very cautious about the murder because we are all human beings, and this could go any way. The Islamophobes will exploit this. If there is something that advances their agenda, they will most definitely use it.” Right on cue, Geller and Spencer began their postulations about “honor killings.”

Potok also stresses that, whoever murdered Alawadi, the rise in Islamophobia is genuine. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked a 200 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups nationwide from 10 such groups in 2010 to 30 in 2011. Potok attributes the spread to “the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy in 2010 that was really ginned up by opportunistic activists and politicians … This is a classic case of words having consequences.”

The rumors of notes, in particular, have unsettled Iraqi immigrants to El Cajon. The notes have hurled them back to wartime horrors they seem unable to escape. After the United States occupied Iraq, a favored tactic of extremist militias was to deliver a note to intended victims warning them to leave or be killed. Families would receive letters because a child or husband was collaborating with U.S. forces, or perhaps they were the wrong ethnicity or religion in the wrong part of town. Religious minorities were sometimes given the “option” of converting to Islam.

Basma Coda says, “We have threatening notes in our office that people brought from Iraq.” The notes say things like, “You are an infidel. You are a sinner. You deserve to die. If you don’t leave by a certain time, you and children will die.” Often they would be given a specific day or time to leave. Coda says, “The Iraqi refugees in El Cajon every day they live their fear. They live their trauma. The future is unknown for these refugees.” She says her social service organization is trying to help them, “but one incident like Alawadi’s murder takes them back to the trauma they experienced.”

On March 30, I attended an outdoor prayer service and candlelight vigil for Alawadi. I met one of her neighbors from Iraq. Abbas Almeali, 42, clad in traditional Iraqi garb and headdress, said he knew Shaima and her family from Samawa, the closest city in southern Iraq to the Saudi Arabian border. He fled in March 1991 after the revolt failed, but “was proud to be part of the uprising.” He said Alawadi’s father was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime and her uncle was hung during the uprising. “She was a nice girl, she had no problems with anyone,” Almaeli said.

Kamyar Hedayat, a medical doctor of Iranian heritage, spoke at the vigil. Hedayat said as he has practiced critical care for children, “I’ve watched children die, and I know how death affects families.” Hedayat said, “It is ironic that a woman who escaped the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein and the bombs of George Bush, Sr., lost her life in San Diego seeking safety and civility.”

Michelle Fawcett contributed to this report.

SO 1 enables LAPD officers to file Suspicious Activity Reports on observed behaviors or activities. Where things get murky, however, is how SAR guidelines categorize constitutionally protected, non-criminal and commonplace activities such as using binoculars, snapping photographs and taking notes as indicators of terrorism-related activity. The SARs are coupled with the LAPD’s iWatch program, a campaign the police pioneered to encourage regular citizens to report “suspicious” activity, including “a person wearing clothes that are too big or too hot for the weather,” or things that just plain old don’t “look right.”

Far from being merely a local phenomenon, the standardized program that the LAPD developed in 2008 served as the lead model for a National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. “Success” stories from the LAPD’s program are used in national training material, and the LAPD touts it as “the first program in the U.S. to create a national standard” for terrorism-related procedures.

According to the Information Sharing Environment, the nationwide SAR initiative “establishes a standardized process whereby SAR information can be shared among agencies to help detect and prevent terrorism-related criminal activity.” Personal data that is collected on these individuals is treated as criminal intelligence. The rapidly expanding and dangerously intrusive network houses personal data on thousands of Americans. “The level and the rate at which local law enforcement is expanding its intelligence-gathering activity is very alarming,” said Ameena Mirza Qazi, deputy executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations-LA. “We as community advocacy groups hope to continue to work with law enforcement and encourage them to maintain their community policing models working with communities to identify criminal behavior.”

The SAR program’s broad reach extends into every level of the security hierarchy, from citizen policing to federal intelligence agencies. The Minnesota Joint Analysis Center, one of the nation’s 72 “fusion” centers — information-sharing centers created by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security — is where the SAR report on Najam Qureshi, as well as thousands of others, found its final destination. Qureshi was a kiosk owner at the Mall of America, where security guards stop and question, on average, up to 1,200 people each year.  He was questioned by guards and later visited by the FBI at home after his 70-year-old father negligently left his cellphone at a table in the mall’s food court in 2007. The FBI prodded Qureshi and his family, asking “how many people they knew in Afghanistan” and if “they knew anyone who might want to hurt the United States.”

“The problem with this program is that the behavior range of what can be reported is so broad that it just lends itself to discriminatory application,” said Jumana Musa, deputy director of Rights Working Group, an advocacy group based in Washington. “When it comes to these innocuous activities, what people are reporting on is not necessarily the activity, but who is doing the activity.”

As a counter-terrorism initiative, the SAR program is already in place in major cities like Boston, Miami and Seattle, and is in the process of being rolled out across the nation by September of this year. The Los Angeles model gives citizens in other places an idea of what they can expect. Between 2008 and 2010, the LAPD shared 2,668 SARs with the local fusion center, which only uploaded 2 percent of them to the database — meaning that the majority of the reports did not have a reasonable indication of criminal activity. Though only a fraction were used by the fusion center, the LAPD retained the remaining 98 percent of its SARs in intelligence files, even though they did not serve as evidence of crime.

This is in stark contrast to former LAPD policy, which mandated that any intel amassed to follow a lead had to be destroyed if reasonable suspicion of criminal activity hadn’t been established. “This is such a drain of resources when there are real crime threats out there where these resources could much better be utilized,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent and currently the policy counsel on national security, immigration and privacy at ACLU National. “The real problem with these systems is that they encourage and cause waste and drive resources away from legitimate investigations.”

According to an independent analysis conducted by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions in April 2011, analysts  “also expressed a desire to obtain feedback on SARs reported to federal agencies on whether the SARs did, in fact, constitute genuine threats; such feedback reportedly occurs rarely, if ever.” The report also found that the majority of thwarted terrorism plots came from investigations into criminal activity as opposed to intelligence gathering. “They’ve created this expensive, and resource-intensive system that has a huge impact on innocent people’s privacy,” said German. “And yet there is no science showing that this is an effective way of going about law enforcement or intelligence gathering.”

The most alarming feature of LAPD’s Special Order 1 is the vague language that lowers the threshold for what can be considered “suspicious,” and does not even meet the already soft federal standards that require “articulable facts and circumstances that [are] …  indicative of criminal activity associated with terrorism.”  Special Order 1 only requires “articulable facts and circumstances that [are] … reasonably indicative of suspicious activity associated with terrorism.” That single word removes a citizen’s safeguards from harassment, eliminates the requirement of probable cause, and encourages officers to investigate non-criminal activity.

“In using different language, it opens the door to somebody saying this is a lower standard,” said German. “What we’re seeing is a lot of people being stopped, harassed, even arrested for doing no more than taking a photograph.” In some cases, police counter-terrorism training has been proven to be blatantly Islamophobic or hyperbolic at the least, which can color an officer’s perception of a “suspicious” threat.

Take, for example, an incident that transpired in December 2009 in Henderson, Nev. An observant bystander called the police to notify them of a suspicious scene — seven Muslim men were praying in a gas-station parking lot. Praying in a public space is a constitutionally protected activity, and though no illegal conduct was described in the tip, the Henderson Police officers detained the seven Muslims for approximately 40 minutes and searched their vehicle. In a recording of the incident, a police officer expresses that he doesn’t know what they could be praying about and suggests that they could be chanting, “I want to kill a police officer today.” The officers later said that “they were not trained well enough to know how to appropriately respond to Muslim religious behavior.”

With recent revelations about the NYPD’s actions, civil liberties groups are concerned that vague criteria provided in SAR policies puts a bull’s-eye on the Muslim American community. “The program absolutely targets the Muslim community,” said Musa. “But I think the issue is that it could really target any community, it depends on what the threat is that people decide they are looking at.”

As of March 28, the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) reported 85 homicides since the beginning of the year — the majority of them committed by firearms.

That’s a 6 percent increase over the same period last year — and if the upward trend continues, Philadelphia will be on course to beat last year’s already grisly record. There were 324 murders in 2011, an increase of 6 percent over 2010.

While homicide was on the wane last year in most major U.S. cities, Philadelphia has continued to defy the national trend that has taken violent crimes like murder off the national news radar.

Philadelphia’s reported murder rate of  20.7 deaths per 100,000 population now tops U.S. cities with populations of more than 1 million.  (Chicago is number two at 15.7, and Los Angeles a distant third at 7.8.)

But against this grim backdrop, the city is fighting back..

On Jan. 27,  Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey  announced  a “Crime Initiative”  that focuses on what many believe is the source of the problem: the widespread availability of illegal guns, and lax enforcement of  mandatory sentences for illegal gun possession, particularly for repeat offenders.

In an interview with The Crime Report this week, Ramsey claimed that — despite the surge of  March homicides — the new crime initiative has  already made a difference in getting “bad guys off  the street.”

“There is a 22 percent increase of individuals being held for illegal gun possession this year over last year,’’ Ramsey said, noting that the strict enforcement of  mandatory prison time for gun possession had swept up many repeat offenders.

“We (were) arresting the same people over and over again — people who are on probation [and] who get away with carrying a gun,” he continued. “There (was) very little incentive for them to stop doing what they’re doing if there’s no jail time imposed.”

According to Ramsey, tougher prosecution will also help persuade more eyewitnesses to come forward and identify lawbreakers.

Revolving Door

“I think once people see that there’s an actual consequence when someone is arrested committing a crime, they’ll be more likely to come forward,’’ he said.  “Part of the problem has been the revolving door; a person feels, “I provide info, [but] before I leave the station, the person is back on the street.”

But can the Crime Initiative alone grapple with an issue that has deep roots in the city’s economic and demographic problems?

Philadelphia has been an extremely violent city since as far back as 1990 when — along with New York City and other major cities — it registered record numbers of homicides. In Philadelphia, the murder toll reached 525 that year.

Why, when other cities have recorded remarkable declines, is Philadelphia still suffering from a killing spree?

One grim facet of the Philadelphia murder statistics may help provide a clue to the answer. Victims and killers alike were overwhelmingly young males.

Forty percent of the killers arrested in 2011 were males between the ages of 18-24, with 22 percent in the next oldest category, from age 25-34.  Murder victims showed a similar demographic, with the great majority young males.

“The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by a tiny fraction of the population,’’ adds  PPD spokesman Lt. Ray Evers, noting  that some 80 percent of the perpetrators and victims have “records of multiple convictions for violent crimes.”

Moreover, most of the homicides occur in a few identifiable sectors of the city’s poor neighborhoods, where “crews” of young men form part of a low-level gang culture, Evers says.

“They sell drugs, but not as a primary enterprise,” he says, pointing out that few of the homicides appear to be drug-related.  “A lot of the killings are over arguments (like) ‘you looked at my sister wrong.’”

The PPD’s crime statistics for 2011 show that the biggest single cited cause of homicide was “arguments” (38 percent).

Jerry Ratcliffe, chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University, believes that is a powerful indicator of why Philadelphia’s violence has been so hard to curb.

“Causal factors are difficult to determine when the cause of so much homicide is not necessarily the economy or the drug trade, but the simple fact that two people are unable to settle a dispute in a non-violent manner,” he told The Crime Report.

“Culture of Violence”

The result, says Ratcliffe, is a “culture of violence,” where “guns are habitually used to settle disagreements” — concentrated in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

And that can envelop an entire community in dysfunctional behavior.

In a recent article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Associate Professor Daniel R. Taylor of the Drexel College of Medicine cited a 2001 study, which found that children in the city’s high-crime areas were regularly exposed to violence that most Americans only see on the TV or movie screen.

The study, which focused on 7-year-olds, found that 75 percent of the children reported hearing gunshots; 61 percent worried that they might be killed; 10 percent had seen a shooting or stabbing inside the home; and 18 percent had seen a dead body outside.

The pervasiveness of violence, fueled by “poverty … hopelessness and easy access to firearms,”  leads to the kind of contagious effects similar to an epidemic, Taylor observed.

Philadelphia has been hit particularly hard by the national economic crisis. U.S. Census figures for 2011 show that more than 25 percent of the Philadelphia population lives below the poverty line — more than twice the average for the state.

Some 11,600 public sector jobs disappeared in 2010 alone.

Nevertheless, the link between economic hardship and violent crime remains questionable. Even at the height of the nation’s economic troubles, national crime rates continued to fall.

The “culture of violence” theme has been picked up by city officials as well, most notably by Philadelphia’s Mayor Nutter.

In public comments Jan. 3, after the city’s first weekend of the New Year had seen a horrendous six homicides, Nutter characterized the city’s killings as generally resulting from arguments.

“It’s ‘you looked at me cross-eyed,’” he said. “It’s ‘you bumped into me.’  It’s anywhere from crazy to stupid.”

Going After Guns

Another crucial element in the city’s push-back against violent crime is an increased focus on tracking illegal guns, including posting rewards for information leading to arrest and conviction of murder suspects and persons illegally carrying guns.

Ramsey, who was appointed head of the Philadelphia Police Department after successful stints as police chief in Chicago and Washington, has been outspoken on the role played by illegal guns in the city’s homicide epidemic.

In his interview with The Crime Report, Ramsey noted that shooting victims were sometimes found with as many as 10 to 14 bullets in their bodies.

Why do the shooters, nearly all of them young males, fire so many bullets at the young males they shoot?

“One reason they keep pulling the trigger,” Ramsey said, “is because the capacity of the gun allows them to do so. When I was first in police work, the guns were called Saturday Night Specials.

“They were usually low-caliber weapons and fired four or five shots.  Now they have very high-caliber weapons with much higher capacity. With a Glock you can fire 17 shots.’’

Other law enforcement sources contacted for this story have commented that Philadelphia street criminals consider it a matter of status to own a new, high-tech handgun like a Glock or a Sig-Sauer.  Both are semi-automatic pistols with magazines that carry a dozen or more cartridges, in calibers up to 10 mm.

“With those guns,” said Ramsey, ”you’re going to have more hits, and the possibility of death is much higher. We have people literally bleeding to death before they can get to a trauma center.”

High-Impact Policing

In their January announcement, Ramsey, Nutter and Williams also promised to put more officers on the street later in the year, in addition to focusing intense police presence in high-crime areas, similar to the “high-impact” policing strategies developed in New York and other large cities.

That’s been tried before in Philadelphia, with good effect.

The high-intensity police deployment planned for 2012 is a rerun of “Operation Pressure Point” deployed in 2009. That year saw a drop in homicides to 302 from the previous year’s 331.

The revived program, called Operation Pressure Point, will be launched next month.

But no one believes that the police can solve the problem themselves.

Francis Carmen, who works as a public defender in the city and specializes in murder cases, says that “putting more cops on the street would be akin to hiring more street cleaners in an effort to stop people from littering.”

“It’s responsive, not preventative,” he explains.

Besides Ramsey’s repeated calls for citizens to work more closely with police — coming forward with information about crimes they have witnessed — a significant element of the 2012 Crime Initiative is a plan to develop partnerships with groups that are already working to combat crime in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Bryan Miller, a board member of “Heeding God’s Call,”  a faith-based, anti-violence group, and a former director of Philadelphia Ceasefire, which worked with troubled youth, is encouraged by the plan, as well as what he says is the city’s stepped-up prosecution of gun homicide cases.

“The battleship hasn’t been completely turned, but it’s turning,” he said when he was interviewed last month.

Ramsey is also optimistic.

“We still continue to be plagued with violent crime in our city,’’ he said, “but it’s all fixable stuff. We’re taking the necessary steps and people are going to see the difference.”