“Knockout Game” hurts/kills innocent victims

Picture this. You’re a young guy in his 20s, an elderly woman in her 70s, a vet in his 40s down on his luck and some guy walks up to you and POW! He “roundhouses” you with a right or left and you’re down for the count or maybe for good. Knockout! That’s the new urban blight game gangs and solo thugs are playing with innocent people of all ages and genders, representing a new low in civility and a disregard for law and the safety of others.

“Knockout game” has even come to Wiki’s attention: In one of many names given to assaults in which, purportedly, one or more assailants attempt to knock out an unsuspecting victim, often with a single sucker punch, all for the amusement of the attackers and their accomplices . . . or “polar-bear hunting” (when the victim is chosen for being white). Serious injuries and even deaths have been attributed to the “knockout game.”

“While news sources report that there has been an escalation of such attacks in late 2013, with some identifying it as a hate crime and/or a crime requiring new targeted legislation, some media analysts have cast doubt on this and have labeled the trend, although not the reported attacks themselves, both with racist undertones. Conservative media outlets have been seen by liberal analysts as promoting a view that the “knockout game” trend is real and that mainstream media do not report on it due to the racial aspects.”

In fact, Cara Buckley wrote an article, November 22, 2013, in The New York Times, titled, “Police Unsure if Random Acts are Rising Threat of Violence or Urban Myth.

“Fear swept through Borough Park, Brooklyn, as soon as the news got out that a young man was randomly assaulted by strangers early Friday morning, and the attack was possibly part of the so-called Knockout Game. The attack added to a growing log of reports of such crimes in the Northeast and various parts of the nation. Young assailants are randomly picking unlucky targets and trying to knock them out with just one punch. And they’re getting away with it. Yet police officials in several cities where such attacks have been reported said that the ‘game’ amounted to little more than an urban myth, and that the attacks in question might be nothing more than the sort of random assaults that have always occurred.”

This writer does not believe the “Knockout Game” is an urban myth. YouTube has ample documentation of these brutal crimes, all the more brutal for the innocence and vulnerability of their targets.

“And in New York City, police officials are struggling to determine whether they should advise the public to take precautions against the Knockout Game—or whether in fact it existed.”

I’ve seen several NY-1 visual reports of a black belt rabbi in Brooklyn giving men and woman, who appeared to be potential hate-crime targets, lessons on defending themselves from one, two or three assailants.

“We’re trying to determine whether or not this is a real phenomenon,” former Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Friday. “I mean, yes, something like this can happen. But we would like to have people come forward and give us any information they have.”

Unfortunately, people may have fear of reprisal if they come forth with information. That, too, has been going on.

“Dread about being singled out for attack has taken root in Jewish communities in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Borough Park and Midwood, according to Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman.” Those are all middle-class Jewish neighborhoods with which I’m very familiar. I went to Brooklyn College and lived in Midwood for a number of years.

The Times reported, “Two weeks ago, a 78-year-old woman in Brooklyn reported being punched in the head, with her assailant fleeing without touching her shopping bags or her pocketbook.” If that isn’t the most flagrant form of irrational cowardice and violence, it begs bringing back Charles Bronson’s 1974 movie performance in Death Wish, “In which a New York City architect becomes a one-man vigilante squad after his wife is murdered by street punks, in which he randomly goes out, appearing to be a victim, and kills would-be muggers on the mean streets after dark.” This would lend “”Knockouts” some blowback. It is my advice to the creeps performing these crimes to consider. Who’s packing what?

The Times also reported that, “This followed sporadic reports of similar recent attacks in Crown Heights, Mr. Hikind said, including one on a 19-year-old Hasidic man who said he had been approached by eight men and then punched in the face by one of them, in what the police said was a possible hate crime.” Crown Heights has had a history of Jewish/black street crime, going back to the Dinkins administration. The “Knockout Game” will only stimulate Jewish retribution against blacks if not quelled immediately.

“Then, at 2:45 a.m. on Friday, on the border of Borough Park (another Jewish neighborhood), a 24-year-old man found himself suddenly boxed in by three men and punched by a fourth. Police said the four men had been out celebrating and were ‘somewhat intoxicated.’ Mr. Kelly said the victim overheard the group discussing ‘how you knock somebody out.’ (Amrit Marajh, 28, of Brooklyn, was charged with assault and with aggravated harassment as a hate crime.)” That’s exactly what it is, hate, beginning in the self and punishing others.

“Whatever the case, a type of panic set in. Mr. Hikind said a girls’ high school in Midwood canceled a Friday evening get-together after nervous parents called the school, expressing concern for their daughters’ safety.” This is one of the sickening side effects “The Knockout Game” produces. “It’s sick, it’s scary,” said Mr. Hikind, who gathered with other Jewish community leaders last week to discuss the attacks.

“It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my 31 years in office.”

The Times also reported, “But police officials cautioned that they had yet to see evidence of an organized game spreading among teenagers online, though they have been reluctant to rule out the possibility.” Let them Google YouTube and “Knockouts,” they’ll find plenty of examples, in NYC and other locales. Frankly, I think the cops are looking the other way on this one.

“There is particular concern within the department that widespread coverage could create the atmosphere in which such a ‘game’ could take hold in New York,” and my response is, it already has.

The Times reports, “Much news coverage of reported knockout attacks includes 2012 footage from a surveillance camera in Pittsburgh of James Addlespurger, a high school teacher, who was 50, being swiftly struck to the ground by a young man walking down an alleyway with some friends. Yet the Pittsburgh police said the attacker insisted the assault was not part of any organized ‘game.’” No, it was opportunity for random violence. This statement is echoed by . . .

“This was just a random act of violence,” Police Commander Eric Holmes said in a televised interview last year. “He stated that he was just having a bad day that day. ‘The assailant saw Mr. Addlespurger,’ the commander said, ‘and decided this was a course of action he was going to take.’”

“Telecasts have also shown teenagers in Jersey City, their faces blurred, describing knockouts, which they defined as anyone might; someone is struck and knocked out. But they did not report that it was a game.” It’s especially not a game if you’re the victim. And given the number of gun owners, it will only take a while until another Charles Bronson character or a Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante, will go out there loaded for bear. And we’ll be taking giant steps backwards in race relations.

“Bob McHugh, a police spokesman in Jersey City, said there had not been a single reported knockout incident there.” Jersey City is a rough place. And victims, again, may have been afraid of reprisal.

“If there ever was an urban myth, this was it,” he said. Tell that to the victims. “Still community concerns spurred by the video prompted a member of the City Council there, Candice Osborne, to post on her Facebook page, ‘there have been NO reported instances of this type of assault.’”

Yet, in the next sentence, “In nearby Hoboken, there was one report of a random assault; in September a man approached by three youths was punched, and died after his head became wedged in a fence between pickets.” But Police Chief Anthony P. Falco, Sr. of Hoboken said the attack appeared to have been isolated, an assertion repeated by Gene Rubino, a spokesman and assistant prosecutor in the Hudson County prosecutor’s office.

Isolated? A man, a human being died in a brutal murder. We don’t need a crowd of people killed like that to prove it’s a new form of urban terrorism.

“We keep getting asked that [isolated] question,” he said, of the Knockout Game, “and there is no noticeable trend.” Ah, but there it is . . .

“Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said much of the fear sown by the reports may have racial roots.” I agree. It has all the “hit and run” punk-fueled violence of the disenfranchised, a whole other issue in itself.

“There’s an element to who wants to see this through the lens of race,” he said. “The kids in Jersey probably set off racial alarms.” I don’t think it is rocket science to see that, though targets not only in NYC or Jersey but all over the USA have been victims.

“Police officials in Syracuse said the city had seen two such attacks this year, each fatal, and they were on the lookout for more. The police said that at least one of the assailants said he was playing the Knockout Game.

“’I think it’s very real,’ Sgt. Tom Connellan said.”

If this is a game, it is strictly of life and death, with any possible human being the loser. I don’t think that’s a game at all. That is an unprecedented slaughter of the innocents. And it doesn’t belong as in a civilized society.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.