I just sort of confirmed, using the Sutton Database on the CAIN site, what I sort of understood, that if you combine North Belfast and West Belfast and then look at South Belfast (North, South, and West Belfast are all, individually, roughly the same size as far as population goes, and both South and North had a small Protestant majority and West was about 85% Catholic), there were about 4.5 times more loyalist murders of Catholics in the former bloc than in South Belfast (in the former bloc, almost exactly 329, and in South Belfast almost exactly 74). I also looked at figures for the security forces, and the West/North combo had a figure 47 times higher than that of South Belfast (almost exactly 94 for the former bloc (27 in the North and 67 in the West) and almost exactly 2 for South Belfast). I just looked (using the very credible and academic site “Northern Ireland Elections”) at the 80s and 90s Westminster and 1996 Forum and 1998 Assembly elections (and 1-2 sets of local elections results that were grouped together based on Westminster Constituencies), and on average the SDLP did roughly as well as SF in North Belfast. So it's not because North Belfast was a republican stronghold, although obviously West Belfast was, but there were almost twice as many sectarian murders in the North than in the West. And although of course South Belfast was mostly Unionist, so was North Belfast.
So, in this post I'm sort of telling you what some of you already know. But I think it’s safe to say that WORKING-CLASS Catholic civilians were MUCH more likely than middle-class Catholic civilians to be killed by loyalists or the British (for Catholics, South Belfast is pretty much the only solidly middle-class area in Belfast). I think it’s because, as sectarian as the State was, a lawyer and/or professional or business connections and/or media connections and/or political connections to the Alliance (a slightly Unionist, mostly Protestant liberal democratic party, see this and this) help relatives or survivors put pressure on the police and Stormont (either the sectarian devolved government that died in 1972, or the N. Ireland Office of the British government, or the devolved, non-sectarian Assembly that has been there most of the time since 1998) to get who did it? I mean, in all fairness I imagine the SDLP (see this and this) always or almost always did what they could for relatives or survivors, even those who were working-class and/or republican, but, the SDLP was of course possibly MORE Catholic than SF and certainly much more Catholic than the Alliance, and was much more in favor of uniting Ireland than the Alliance and were much more likely to have contacts with republicans. I just confirmed what I knew which is that the Alliance was/is MUCH stronger in South than North or West. The likelihood of a victim's family or a survivor being close to Alliance politicians or leaders or activists was higher in South Belfast.
There is also some relevant stuff here, starting with the paragraph "I go into some detail...." and end with the paragraph "UPDATE 1/31/20...."
What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?
1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.
2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.
3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.
4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.
5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).
UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005), and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.
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