John DiIulio is the person who coined the term “superpredator.” In 1995 DiIulio predicted that a wave of teenagers driven by "moral poverty" numbering in the tens of thousands would soon be on the streets committing violent crime. These "hardened, remorseless juveniles" were framed in the article as a pressing "demographic crime bomb." DiIulio's narrative used racist tropes to further stoke fear — broadly attributing "moral poverty" to "Black inner-city neighborhoods" and families and specifically and repeatedly calling attention to gang violence and "predatory street criminals" among "Black urban youth." Five years later, DiIulio renounced the superpredator theory, apologizing for its unintended consequences. While Dilulio predicted that juvenile crime would increase, it instead dropped by more than half. Conceding that he made a mistake, Dilulio regretted that he could not “put the brakes on the super-predator theory” before it took on a life of its own. DiIulio warned that by the year 2000 an additional 30,000 young “murderers, rapists, and muggers” would be roaming America’s streets, sowing mayhem. “They place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize as just so much worthless ‘white trash,’" he wrote. The “superpredator” theory, besides being a racist trope, was not borne out in crime statistics. Juvenile arrests for murder — and juvenile crime generally — had already started falling when DiIulio’s article was published. By 2000, when tens of thousands more children were supposed to be out there mugging and killing, juvenile murder arrests had fallen by two-thirds. BLAOW! HOLD THAT.