We Get the Crime We Deserve

Mitch Lundgaard, who was murdered by a black criminal whose life he had just saved moments before.

1,245 words

Something extremely unusual took place in Appleton, Wisconsin in May 2019: A firefighter died in the line of duty. This hadn’t happened there in many decades, and was quite a shock to the local residents. A deeper dive into the case, however, reveals that what happened wasn’t terribly unusual. In fact, it upholds what we know of racial differences — largely because such occurrences happen with depressing regularity.

Mitch Lundgaard, a white firefighter and first responder, was called to a bus where Ruben Houston, a black man, was suffering from an opioid overdose. Houston was unresponsive and possibly dying. After Lundgaard revived Houston and took him off the bus, a police officer noticed a suspicious bulge under his shirt on his right side. When asked about it, Houston said it was his phone. When the officer asked him to lift up his shirt, Houston refused, and then pulled out a pistol and fatally shot Lundgaard, the man who had saved his life. This triggered a shootout with police in which Houston was also shot and killed. An officer and a female bystander were also wounded.

Shocking moment drug dealer open fires on police officers

Again, a black-on-white murder. Again, a thug with no regard for human life, including his own, murders a productive member of society (Lundgaard was a married father of three). And again, the mainstream media fails to give this outrage the attention it deserves. The only reason that people are talking about it four years later is because it may have been partially caused by a clerical error. In 2011, Houston had changed his name by adding the “o” to his original name, Huston, but somehow the local court system was unaware of this. Then, in 2019, just days before Lundgaard’s murder, an oblivious judge reduced Houston’s bond for a drug charge from $5,000 to $500. Houston/Huston was a career criminal who had done federal time. Had the judge known this, he would not have lowered his bail amount by an order of magnitude, which would have kept this criminal in the joint and prevented Mitch Lundgaard’s all-too-preventable murder.

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This reminds me of a line from Evan Connell’s 1959 novel Mrs. Bridge. “Society gets the crime it deserves,” Mr. Bridge says while remarking on a grotesque double homicide. A boy who had been coddled and spoiled by his progressive parents decided one night to shoot his progressive parents while they were sleeping. What had always irked Mr. Bridge about this family was how the parents had allowed their boy to refer to them by their first names.

I’m not saying Mitch Lundgaard deserved what he got — although Houston certainly did. I am saying, however, that we as a society deserve what we get when it comes to black crime. We choose to ignore the realities of race, which point to the lower average IQ and poorer impulse control of a significant portion of the black population. This is rock-solid social science that has been analyzed and commented on for over a century. It also has the imprimatur of genetics and neuroscience to back it up.

When we fail to consider such basic realities, we are endangering ourselves and our children — all because we want to believe that the races are equal. We value a chimerical moral ideal more dearly than we do our own physical safety. Well, stupid is as stupid does. The judge should have taken race into account before reducing Houston’s bond. He should have understood that a free black offender would more likely harm innocents than a free non-black offender, and erred on the side of caution. Furthermore, Lundgaard should have realized the potential danger he was in when he treated a black man who had overdosed on a bus. When he revived Houston, he was practically celebratory and calling him his buddy. Later, according to bodycam footage, police officers had the following exchange with Houston (minus some garbled crosstalk):

First Officer: Let’s go to the hospital, get checked out. If they say you’re okay. Then you’re on your way. I don’t —

Houston: Well, I have to get home, man . . .

First Officer: You’ll get home. Listen, I talked to my boss. The only other alternative to you not going voluntary — if you go voluntary, you hop on the cot. You ride down there. You get checked out. It’s done. If you don’t go voluntarily, here is what I have to do. I feel that you’re not making a safe choice in your best interest —

Houston: Wait, I’m conscious. I’m consciously talking to you —

First Officer: You’re not making a safe choice in your own interest. And I have to involve Crisis. We have to go to the hospital, anyway, to start that process, and we have to have them evaluate to make sure that you’re making safe decisions for yourself. I don’t want to go there.

Second Officer: Do you have any weapons on you?

Houston: No, sir.

Second Officer: You have a bulge on your right side.

Houston: That’s my phone.

Second Officer: Okay, don’t reach for anything.

Houston (hands up and backing away): That’s my phone. Look, man, I have a problem with officers touching me.

First Officer: Lift up your shirt, then. Lift up your shirt. We wanna make sure that everybody’s safe.

Seconds later Houston drew his weapon and killed Lundgaard, likely because his gun was illegal and he preferred to waste an innocent person’s life than get caught by the pigs. It is a chilling scene, not least for the solicitous concern Lundgaard and the police were showering upon such an obviously undeserving recipient. As soon as Houston began getting defensive and ignoring the officers’ instructions, Lundgaard should have stepped away for his own safety. A race realist would have done so, and if that poor man had been a race realist, he would have had a better chance of surviving this regrettable encounter.

Mitch Lundgaard died essentially because our race-denying system requires its police, paramedics, and other representatives to show more concern for black people than blacks show themselves. This is madness, and it has to stop. We must realize that there are two species of crime in a multiracial society such as ours: black crime and non-black crime. Every statistic we have points to this glaringly obvious fact. Here are three graphics illustrating this point from impeccable sources:

Source: FBI.

Source: National Conservative.

In 2018, 13% of the population of the United States was responsible for 49% of the interracial violent crime. The following year, they pulled off 49% of all murders. And during the first ten months of 2023, they committed over 62% of interracial murders. How much more evidence does anyone need?

This is not to say that blacks do not have rights or that our justice system shouldn’t try to do right by them. But given the clear and persistent racial disparities in crime statistics, black offenders should be treated with much greater caution and scrutiny than non-black offenders. This needs to be explicitly embedded in our laws, scrupulously followed, and strictly enforced. According to the data, public safety requires it. If we ignore the data, we sacrifice public safety — and perfectly innocent people such as Mitch Lundgaard will continue to die.

We as white people ignore all of this at our peril. We have done so long enough now to deserve some of the blame for what black people have been doing to us.