Crime Time #3 (Updated with info from Philadelphia)

Michael Perez, Philadelphia Inquirer. A bullet casing in the street at Duffield and Pratt Streets, where a gun battle took place on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006.

Clarence Page, an op-ed writer for the Chicago Tribune, but based in Washington, wrote a piece about Washington's recent crime wave, "Crime makes a comeback." He starts out with this:

The last time I saw Chris Crowder, he was giving Bill Cosby a hard time for allegedly being too tough on poor black folks. Now Crowder, 44, is dead and I am thinking that Cosby was not hard enough...Crowder's death reminds us of the terrorism too many of us still face on the streets back home, too often at the hands of juveniles. Too many parents have dropped the ball. They are either unwilling or unable to prevent their kids from falling off the social cliff. And too many parents still are children themselves. They have left it up to others to do the child-rearing they should be doing themselves. Some may quarrel with Cosby's language, but they can't fault him for speaking the truth.

Courtland Milloy has another column about the juvenile perpetrator issue, "Juvenile Delinquency Gets Old Fast for Victims." While the New Kid on the Eckington Block blog responded to an earlier entry in this blog--he thinks it was critical, but I think his entry merely makes good points about the foundations of effecting true public safety--that to work, "Broken Windows" theory needs to be implemented by willing police officers, and supported by the courts and politicians.

The Sunday Loudoun County Extra edition of the Post has a story about two stabbings at the opening of a Hip-Hop club in Ashburn, Virginia, in "Violence Mars Night Of Hip-Hop In Ashburn," meanwhile the crime rate overall as well as the murder rate in Prince George's County is dropping, according to this Post editorial, "A Crime Wave Wanes ."

And the Southern Maryland Extra edition of the Post reports, in "2 Indian Head Men Gunned Down At Bryans Road Shopping Center," that:

Two Indian Head men were fatally shot in broad daylight Tuesday outside the Bryans Road Shopping Center in western Charles County, and two District residents were charged in the incident after being pursued into the city by Prince George's County police.

Is that part of DC's crime epidemic too?

Finally, yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer has a column by Claude Lewis, "How best to fight guns? Bring back childhood." He writes:

Let's limit gun sales. Let's have a gun summit.

Such tired slogans are the best evidence that, as this year's appalling murder totals mount, Philadelphia is devoid of ideas.Illegal guns are as ubiquitous as thugs willing to use them. Somebody looks at you wrong and it's bang, bang, bang, and several new deaths are recorded - 214 victims killed as of this writing.

Curfews! More cops! Use those we have better! All ideas with merit, but limited merit. Someone capable of killing is not going to tremble at a midnight curfew.

What Philadelphia needs is a moral revolution - somewhere between the too-tough tactics of the late Frank Rizzo and the too-tender touch of the current police commissioner, Sylvester Johnson.

What I'm calling for is a war by teaching. The best way to lower the death toll now, and keep it low in the future, is to change the culture. It's hard work, requiring toughness, collaboration, consistency and perseverance. It must start in the home and spread outward toward the school and the place of worship. We must arm our youngsters with enough character to develop the best of what's in them. In the past, we have done poorly in such cultural battles - think of our nation's longest war, that on drugs and alcohol, which we are losing badly, particularly in Philadelphia.

Sadly, for many of today's youth, the choices are prison, wheelchairs or death. We now live in a society in which childhood often disappears by age 12. There are children in Philadelphia selling drugs to pay the family rent, selling guns to keep food on the family table. Kids are producing kids in outrageous numbers. Many of their progeny grow without guidance. Their principles - when they have principles - often are shaped by bawdy dress, stunning illiteracy, and transparently tragic lifestyles. We are manufacturing so many sociopaths today that we barely recognize their humanity.

What all this tells me is that we have an obligation to do the difficult work of bringing back childhood - creating children with something in their hearts and heads besides bottomless anger, depravity and violence.

Philadelphia is now a killing field, and neither police nor politicians can do much because they so often work at cross-purposes.

A veteran police officer told me that the major problem is a lack of accountability for criminal activities in the city. He blames politics and the judiciary for what he terms a lack of "quality control." The police may arrest - but the courts can free people even if guilty. Too often, when the police do their jobs, the politicians intervene. The officer insists that "some of the solutions are in the hands of the people, not those motivated only by popularity polls and voting trends."

Like with schools and the question of improvement, a goodly portion of the problem is culture, and that''s what needs to be addressed. Chief Ramsey has said this frequently, but he hasn't articulated the issue as well as Claude Lewis.

The Inquirer has run a number of other stories on the crime problem in Philadelphia, which seems to be "more localized" in the poorest neighborhoods, unlike recent "leakages" in DC to the National Mall and Georgetown. See:

• As Center City thrives, neighborhoods wracked with violence
• City's call for police help gets no reply
• In the city, any day can be a killing day
• Lethal day in Phila. leaves 5 fatally shot

cf. this blog entry from Ming88 about Malaysia and being the Rudest city! and why. Many of the points Ming88 recounts are similar to those expressed in DC or Philadelphia.

Index Keywords: public-safety