From the Globe:
It was Geoffrey’s fascination with street style that ultimately led to his murder. [Monica Douglas] says her son had borrowed the large gold necklace he was wearing, against her wishes, from a family friend the previous weekend. Geoffrey’s friends later told her that he wore the chain simply to look tough.
I remember huddling with Charlie (our principal) and Geoff’s mom at the Boston Medical Center emergency room. A nurse was trying to convey that Geoff was dying, but was also trying to avoid such a blunt statement. Mom kept saying “But he’ll be okay, right?”
The next day was a blur. A team of social workers from Brookline High had come over to help us out. Girls were sad. Boys were angry. They wanted to do something. And by something, they meant find the killers and shoot them. We said the obvious stuff. “Let the system work,” etc.
Years later the shooters were convicted of gun possession and assault, but acquitted of murder.
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Since then it’s been about one incident per year affecting a kid in a big way, and several affecting kids a bit less directly (i.e., cousins, friends shot).
1. Z was a student at our school. Her brother was shot and killed in 2006.
“This is one of those successful immigrant stories; we thought he was going to do it,” his cousin and family spokesman, Abdirizak Mahboub, said outside [Abdullahi]’s home on Shawmut Avenue. “It’s tragic that he was saved from the bullets of Mogadishu, but the bullets ” His voice faltered, and he started weeping.
Abdullahi and a friend were walking out of Peters Park on Shawmut Avenue Sunday when they saw Sierra and another boy standing nearby, said David Fredette, an assistant Suffolk district attorney. Abdullahi and his friend saw one of them crouch and point a gun at them, Fredette said. Abdullahi and his friend ran down Shawmut Avenue, toward Abdullahi’s apartment on the avenue.
The friend made it inside, but Abdullahi did not follow. When the friend went back outside to find Abdullahi, he saw him lying down, a bullet wound in his torso. Abdullahi was pronounced dead at Boston Medical Center less than an hour later.
The good news is that Z has become a superstar student in college.
2. Y was a student at our school. Her dad brutally killed her grandpa in 2006.
Boston police said yesterday that Lee, 41, was arrested late Saturday and charged with murder, hours after officers found the remains of an elderly black man believed to be those of [Edward Lee].
The law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation said the elder Lee’s torso was found in his Mattapan home. His arms, legs, and head were found in at least two plastic bags strewn in the yard of a Roxbury neighborhood where [Brian Lee] had done occasional odd jobs, according to neighbors and the law enforcement officials.
3. X is a student at our school. Her dad was shot in 2007.
Three years after being exonerated of the shooting of a Boston police officer, Stephan Cowans moved into a large house here on a suburban cul-de-sac, drove his new Mercedes or BMW to counseling sessions, and spent time with his grandmother.
His efforts to move on from the nightmare that consumed his life a decade ago ended Thursday, when police found him shot to death in his four-bedroom, two-story Colonial-style house.
4. Rashard Monroe had been a student at our school. He was playing with a gun in 2008, and accidentally shot his friend in the face.
“[Monroe] was waving the firearm around, and it went off,” Hickman said, describing the scene. “It hit [Floyd] in the face … and went through one of his eyes.”
With that description, members of Floyd’s family began to weep inside the court room.
Hickman said Monroe left the scene of the shooting when it happened, but once found by authorities, admitted that the gun was his and he did not mean to shoot Floyd. Just as Baez did, Monroe expressed remorse for his actions, according to authorities.
We exchange occasional letters. He pled to manslaughter and got 3 years.
5. Anthony Peoples had been a student at our school. He was shot in 2009.
It began with simple flirting – four young friends leaving a Dorchester party early Sunday morning when at least one man followed them to their car, trying to get the three women’s phone numbers.
But when they rebuffed the advances, the consequences turned deadly.
The women’s friend, 19-year-old Anthony Peoples, told the pursuer to leave them alone. Moments later, as the four friends sat in a Nissan Sentra, ready to drive away, someone pulled out a gun and shot into the car. Peoples, a Boston resident, was killed along with Chantal Palmer and Shacora Gaines, both 20, who had come from Brockton for the party. The fourth person, a woman whose name has not been released, was unharmed.
One memory from the (jam-packed) funeral: a group of kids, in full gang regalia, strutting in. The minister was up front imploring the community to stop the violence. I was watching one of the kids. He didn’t blink, just stared stony-faced.
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It’s interesting, perhaps, to think about this at the gubernatorial level.
To my knowledge, no candidate even talks about this at a significant level. Did it come up in the debates? I didn’t see ’em. On websites, Charlie Baker has nothing on this topic; Deval Patrick has CORI reform but nothing about reducing violent crime.
I assume they know what they’re doing: that voters don’t care, so they need to stick to what voters do care about.
Nor do I think “Enough is enough” type editorializing does much to change that dynamic. I’d expect something in Globe tomorrow because a toddler got shot last night.
So my question: if we hold apathy constant, are there any public policies that
a) would lower the shooting rate, and
b) can plausibly be passed*
(*Assuming the status quo policies is fairly solid, and won’t easily be displaced?
I.e., you can’t just say “Let’s change all the police details, so instead of paying them overtime to guard potholes being filled, give them the same money to walk an overtime beat in Mattapan, where they’re needed.”)
I wish I had some ideas. Do you?
I’m looking at this in a general sense. Men need to find another way to impress their friends (and girls) other than violence. In middle-class life generally you make friends and get a girlfriend by making money.
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p>The business environment in Boston is lousy. You can see this just by looking at the retail stores, they are “a cut below” adjoining cities, such as my neighborhood in Brighton vs. yours in Watertown. In addition, many Boston neighborhoods just look like shit. There are several reasons for this, but some that could be changed are higher commercial property taxes in Boston, generalized corruption in Boston (big government for white people), a history of social services over business (big government for black people) which leads to less disposable income among your customers, and a heavy regulatory environment in the state which hits small marginal businesses hardest.
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p>I think these young men would be better off in an environment that took their energy and connected it to capital investment so they could try to succeed in business. They could also use a culture which promotes investment rather than bling, such as women could be choosier about who they sleep with. There are young men who choose not to party all the same, and do succeed and get out.
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p>So I would cut the commercial R.E. tax in Boston, cut the state investment tax to 0% and lobby for the federal tax to be as low as possible in order to get capital into these marginal neighborhoods. I would also review state regulations to determine which are stifling small businesses in the cradle.
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p>As long as the best way to make money is to gamble or deal in violence it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that many of these young men act the way they do.
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p>My personal experience of this is that my daughters have gone to BPS schools in crime-ridden neighborhoods as part of an effort to ship smart white children into black neighborhoods for a few hours a day, and black children back into white(r) neighborhoods. After-school activities are severely curtailed because the city will not pay for late busses, and the environment ten feet outside the school building is a no-go zone. We are nice white liberals and still my children report to me that there are a lot of problems with the black boys and girls so this starts early.
You’re suggesting that property taxes are a reason for these killings? Wow.
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p>The retail stores in parts of Boston (and Springfield too) are a “cut below” because retail follows the money. If people in a neighborhood aren’t making any money, you’re not going to get an Ikea there. You’re going to get a “Aaron’s Furniture Rental”. Or more likely an empty storefront.
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p>A corollary is that white people aren’t going to shop in a non-white neighborhood. They’ll drive out of town to go to the mall. So that means 70% of the potential customer base is just non-existent.
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p>Another problem is that most retail is dominated by national players. Try and start up a bookstore, or a grocery store, or an electronics store. You won’t be able to compete. So the big business mentality is what reigns, and those stores all use the same demographic services to dictate where they will open a store and where they won’t.
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p>There isn’t much that can be done on a local level, because these problems are all the result of national economic policy. There are almost no jobs with good potential for semi-skilled workers. Burger King is about it. And before someone suggests the “trades”, let me tell you story about how I called a plumber, who happened to be black, and when he showed up at my house my elderly mother-in-law thought that we were being robbed. The “trades”, with their apprentice-based models and word-of-mouth referral systems present plenty of roadblocks to non-whites.
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p>In short, we don’t need capital — we need jobs to generate more consumer dollars. Retail will follow. We need jobs that can be worked at by people in poor neighborhoods where a college education is pretty much not going to be the norm. Our economic model — one we continue to pursue — is that people without an education just should not exist. But they do, and always will.
Men don’t want makework jobs. They want to make a big payoff. That’s who supports good retail, people who have extra money, not government workers.
I didn’t say “makework” — which implies doing useless and unnecessary work. People want to work where they make a difference — although I don’t think that anyone in those neighborhoods would balk at a public job that was doing more than moving dirt from one side of the street to the other and then back again. A job is a job when you have none.
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p>I think that our entire economy is broken due to a few things which the government has aided and abetted:
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p>1) Globalization of manufacturing (and to a lesser extent, service) jobs. Millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost since we normalized trade with China and Mexico. In the Springfield area, we recently lost jobs to China and Mexico, making golf balls (Spalding/Top-Flite), wrenches (Danaher Tools), toys (Lego, Hasbro), paper (Ampad), and those are just the big ones I can think of off the top of my head. Those were jobs that paid a good wage and could be worked by someone without a college degree.
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p>2) Lax anti-trust laws. We have fewer but bigger businesses. More efficiency = fewer jobs. How many local companies do you know that were purchased and then either consolidated elsewhere or shut down?
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p>3) Technology. Jobs are lost when machines come in. Normally this could be handled by our economy because technology creates new jobs, but coupled with #1 and #2 above, those new jobs are often created overseas.
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p>4) Hostility to unions. Unions fight the trend toward cheap labor. Cheap laborers aren’t very good consumers. Sure, we all pay a little more for our goods when the workers are paid better, but we have seen the alternative — a broken economy where the top executives get most of the benefits from driving down the cost of labor. Cheap DVD players do not compensate for the lack of ability to buy necessities like education, housing, and health care.
You seem to be looking for the answers to come from above. I do not think it’s a good idea for black people to sit around and wait for Target to move into the Roxbury Mall. I recently took a walk around Dudley Square, and there is no Dunkin Donuts there, even though it is a major bus hub. So the answer is not going to come from national franchises, or giving a tax break to Super Stop and Shop to please move in.
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p>A local businessman who knows how to deal in the neighborhood is the best way to start bringing business and jobs to a poor community. However he is the riskiest investment because of the marginal state of the neighborhood. Now on top of that risk you have high taxes on the returns, as well as heavy regulation. Three strikes and you’re out.
Johnson opened a movie theater in Harlem — first one in decades. Everybody said it would fail because the kids (pre-teens, teens, 20s) would ruin it. Fights, graffiti, etc.
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p>He did it anyway. My wife and I took the subway up from downtown to watch a Friday night film, mostly just to check it out. Here’s the thing, based on my one experience:
* Everybody there was black or Hispanic. The moviegoers, the ticket-taker, the manager.
* It wasn’t overly fancy, but it was clean. Even the men’s room stalls were graffiti free.
* Before the commercials begin, Johnson gets on that screen. He reminds everyone that he hires local kids, and so if you’d like a job, take an application. He also reminds those kids that they better show up on time and their pants better cover their buttocks. Then, he reminds folks that neither weapons nor hats are allowed, nor are gang colors. Then employees walk up and down the aisle, presumably to scan for those things.
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p>Magic Johnson is exactly what your last paragraph asks for. Trouble is: there aren’t very many businessmen with the capital, the interest, and the cred to pull it off.
There are two ways to do this. The first is you mandate that a certain amount of the lending has to happen in designated areas that are poor. This does not expand the pool of capital, and draws some of it away from the places lenders would like to invest, so it hurts the whole economy.
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p>The second way, the way that works, is you expand the pool of capital. First it gets to all the easy areas, and then when there is nothing else to do in those areas, it spreads to the riskier areas.
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p>As for employees, there are a lot of people who for one reason or another are going to be “subprime” hires. Boston up to now has attempted to fix this by hiring some of these people itself as city employees, expanding its payroll in a recession. Eventually this blows up.
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p>The only thing that really works is expanding the economy so much that the subprime job applicants are the only ones left. This has happened in the past so it’s not impossible.
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p>None of this is going to take care of killers, who are probably past help.
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p>So give the ‘haves’ more, and when they’re stuffed to the point of illness, maybe some of the capital will go to the ‘have nots’.
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p>Trickle down doesn’t work. It’s simply mental gymnastics to justify Gordon Gekko.
Jesus said “The rich jerks you will always have with you.”
Hizzoner states “cowards”, “gun control”, “everything in our power”, yada, yada, yada. Commish says “cowards”, “gun control”, “everything in our power”, yada, yada, yada. What do you call people that do the same thing over and over again expecting different results?
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p>I’ve been to less developed countries where the police can’t or won’t tackle the local crime. What happens is that private citizens take to patrolling the local streets. Usually the older, trusted mature men, sometimes with a younger man, sometimes not. I wonder if that would work here?
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p>Oh, well, we can always rely on our police to respond after the crime and make the report then haul away the dead and dying. What more can a people ask?
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p>“The police cannot protect the citizen at this stage of our development, and they cannot even protect themselves in many cases. It is up to the private citizen to protect himself and his family, and this is not only acceptable, but mandatory.” –Jeff Cooper
This did come up in the debates very briefly. Jill Stein was asked this question by Deval Patrick, making it sound like he has been talking about it when, in fact, this has been a topic she’s been discussing. The only place it was covered by the Globe was here. Or at least that I can recall.
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p>I have been in this area of work for a long time and while the term gun control comes up so much, I really do believe that access to guns, both illegally and legally has aided in skyrocketing violence in our communities. While there were always fist fights and knife fights, the growth in guns has really changed things. I believe this on the international front too, especially when considering the the drug trade/drug cartels. I do believe the two are interrelated as well.
Yep. It’s amazing how easy the access to guns is. The Boston efforts I recall didn’t really seem to get traction – guns for cash, etc. A bunch turned in but of course no evidence that it changes total gun supply in any significant way.
Illegal weapons will be with us always. Shut down the manufacturers, seize the citizen’s legal guns, take away the military’s guns, take away the police guns, work to bar access of guns through borders and some machinist will make his own gun. (nobody remembers zipguns-it wasn’t a cheap gun rental…) Is the problem guns, or murders? Do we try to find a way to solve the problem or treat the symptom? My experience is that government treats symptoms, not problems.
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p>“I wish I had some ideas. Do you? –GoldsteinGoneWild
There’s some gun crime in my neighborhood in North Cambridge, but not as bad as some neighborhoods in Boston.
One of my students got killed there a few years back.
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p>I think more police, doing community policing, would help. Making violence-reduction a high priority might help, too.
By the way, go to the Herald’s website and read some of the “post-racial” comments about this. Here’s a sample:
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p>And those are the comments that haven’t been deleted for being over the top.
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p>The overwhelming public attitude seems to be that these people simply deserved to die because of who they are and where they lived.
…I find myself agreeing with the second blockquote you used. The others are varying degrees of offensive.
What evidence do you have that either the perpetrators, the victims, or the neighboring residents were:
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p>* not authoritative parents
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p>* habitual thugs
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p>* not cooperative with police
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p>* had a “hip-hop” mentality
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p>* had no personal or collective responsibility?
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p>Other than the fact that the victims and neighbors were black, that is.
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p>The assumptions are the problem here. Crime strikes someone black? He must have been on welfare, he must have been a drug dealer. Or he was a member of “hip hop culture”, which, along with “thug”, is used to describe an “undesirable black”.
We do know that from time to time police complain about people not being co-operative. It was the neighbors themselves on the news begging people to come forward and saying or at least implying some of these things.
is that people are scared. the authoritative parents who make sure their kids go to and from school everyday, having to walk through the yellow tape and police: they are scared.
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p>not cooperating with the police: people are scared- of the police and of retaliation from neighbors and turf wars.
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p>The turf wars these days are by street, not just neighborhood. Talk to the teens and their parents who are just trying to get by. You walk 1 block over and you are in someone else’s territory. It is a really unfortunate reality that many people are stuck living in.