The latest victim of Boston’s out-of-control crime spree is Alberto Duarte, a 24-year-old father of three who, according to the Globe story, was shot four times with a rifle because he stepped in to try to protect a 17-year-old girl who was being threatened, reportedly saying, “if you want to shoot someone, then why don’t you shoot me?”
According to Duarte’s brother, he “worked two jobs. He drove handicapped people around in the morning, and he cared for our grandmother during the rest of the day.”
Here’s Mayor Menino’s response to the tidal wave of violence: “This is very disturbing to me and the Police Department…. Police can’t do it alone. What’s the answer? That’s tough for me to say. Some of these young kids don’t understand death.”
Umm, Mr. Mayor? You’re the Mayor. It’s your job to come up with answers. People in your city are now being murdered practically every day. If you just throw up your hands, nothing is going to change. If you didn’t want to solve problems like this one, you shouldn’t have run for reelection.
UPDATE: (By Charley) From Bruce, check out the terrific police work:
Duarteâs loved ones exchanged harsh words with police yesterday when, 15 hours after his murder, they pointed out shell casings just feet from the crime scene that police apparently missed. Officers cordoned off the area and took the casings as evidence.
Worst homicide department in the nation? You think?
Make no mistake, the Boston Miracle is gone. Apparently the whole approach that saved lives got flushed down the toilet in 2000.
They did it inn the 90s. There was a real plan executed then that worked.
Today Mayor Menino and Dan Conley are clueless.
One of the architects of the original 90’s plan was on ‘BUR this morning, saying that the city had basically abandoned the plan around 2000.
<
p>
Isn’t that just great?
Here’s the link to the interview. He’s maddeningly vague, but you get the idea.
This is bigger than Boston and bigger than the police. Murders are not only up in Boston. They are up in Hartford. They are up in Springfield. They are up everywhere you find disillusioned people.
<
p>
We are seeing the results of federal economic policy that marginalizes the poor. These people have no hope. They don’t see a future where they will be gainfully employed because this country does not care about gainful employment for people it deems undeserving — like people without college degrees or people without high school degrees. Especially if you’re not white and you have no connections.
<
p>
Our country is on a crash course because it is betting on an economy that only works for those that have significant amounts of skill and credentials. Everyone else be damned. But there is a fatal assumption that anyone and everyone is capable of “skilling-up”, and that if you don’t, it’s your own damn fault and that you deserve what you get.
<
p>
The people who can’t compete in this economy turn to illegal drugs, and the illegal drug trade is intertwined with violence (just as illicit booze trade was 75 years ago).
<
p>
For all the complaining about welfare, it does take the edge off for hopeless people. Yes, I believe it fosters dependency, but taking it away fosters hopelessness if there is no transition plan to join society.
<
p>
More cops MIGHT do something, but it’s not a matter of hiring 5% more. Cities probably need 25% more cops to cope with this increase of people who have no problems committing violent crimes. And even 25% more cops isn’t going to make the murderer from the above story go straight. They might just succeed in harrassing them out of Boston so they move to another town that didn’t hire 25% more cops.
<
p>
Police don’t make most people less willing to commit crimes. They move the crime elsewhere, they make people feel safer so that there isn’t a flight of “good” people that allows more “bad” people to move in.
<
p>
It’s the economy, stupid. Why was there less crime in the late 90’s? Because there were many more jobs for the less skilled.
Describe some attributes of a “federal economic policy that marginalizes the poor.”
Sure.
<
p>
1. Flight of jobs to other countries. There are now few livable jobs for the unskilled. I can’t finger the exact economic policy that is causing it to happen, but it has accelerated and I don’t think that the Internet is solely to blame.
<
p>
1a) Visas that allow people from other countries to come here and work for lower wages than Americans would accept. And a blind eye to immigration as long as they are depressing wages.
<
p>
2. Pressure against labor unions. Love them or hate them, labor unions are responsible for higher wages for people who can’t bargain for them individually.
<
p>
3. A business climate that favors mergers and consolidations. We now talk in terms of efficiency on a global basis, such as “it is inefficient to have more than two global companies manufacturing razor blades”. I like to think that if our corporations were smaller, there would be more of them, they would be more spread out across the country, and there would be more jobs available. I believe that a lot of the gains of the upper and upper-middle classes have been at the direct expense of the lower-middle and lower class. Case in point; merge two companies, fire 50% of the middle-management and support staff, and create wealth for the shareholders and top executives.
<
p>
4. Low minimum wages. Wealth in this country is pooling at the top. Wages are far more skewed than they ever were. And no one seems to care, the rhetoric from our national political leaders is that these people deserve those wages.
<
p>
5. Obfuscation of economic numbers. Changing the meaning of the CPI to mask inflation. Monkeying with the unemployment to hide the disenfranchised. All this is to defuse any possible political pressure that revealing the true numbers would cause. What if unemployment was shown to be 10-12%? Would you think the country was on the right track?
<
p>
6. Pretending, on a federal level, that a Black kid from Boston has the same economic chances as a white kid from Wellesley, and using this as an excuse to cut funding to programs that try and level the playing field — such as public jobs, incentives for businesses to outreach, and even the whole concept of affirmative action.
<
p>
7. Tax cuts that favor the rich. We are changing the economic game to “winners”, where we reward people who are successful and penalize people who are not. Now we are even saying that when a billionaire dies, his kids should get to live the easy life. What happened to the concept of a meritocracy?
<
p>
I’m sure there’s more, but this is off the top of my head.
Multi-factoral causes of violence must be addressed (0.00 / 0)
in meaningful and substantive ways if anything significant is to be achieved in our societal response to this increasingly tragic state of youth on youth violence in our communities.
<
p>
Understanding this problem as being, in part, a public health problem and using the science of public health to Absolutely, anti-poverty work is also a crucial component of effective and sustainable responses to the youth violence problem. Hello, Mr Romney and Legis’, please raise the minimum wage to a measly $8 an hour.
<
p>
But the other multi-factoral causes of the problem must be identified as well. It is only when all of these factors are addressed in a coherent fashion that we can collectively get to work on creating an effective, successful, sustainable solution to end this upsurge of tragedy.
<
p>
Dr. Debra Prothrow-Stith at the School of Public Health at Harvard U has done some very good work on understanding violence as a public health issue and bringing to bear part of the solution using this framework.
<
p>
From my 13 years as a nurse working with the poor, with the homeless, providing homecare in Rox/Dor/Mattapan/So End and many other neighborhoods of Boston that I and so many others cherish, I have come to believe that having a more functional and more cost effective health care system in the state, and the country for that matter, would be an enormously valuable tool to use in responding to this youth violence problem. And public health programs should absolutely part of any health care system but we have created this artificial separation of public health from physical health.
<
p>
I believe this artificial and harmful seperation of healthcare from public health programs results, in part, from how we have allowed the provision of physical healthcare services to increasingly be treated as a commodity, e.g. Chapter 58’s Romney-Care “Individual Mandate” but thus far, public health has remained where it belongs–in the public domain. (Although around the world there is a evil trend of multi-national corporations to privatize public health, e.g. Coca Cola’s campaign to privatize drinking water supplies in developing countries. See the group Corporate Accountability Int’l, based here in Boston’s So End to learn more about that!).
<
p>
Establishing a constitutional right to comprehensive and sffordable health insurance is also one of the multi-factoral peices that would help us as a society to successfully addess this tragic and frightening problem. Please sign on to help this effort at http://www.HealthCar…
<
p>
More factors are at play here, of course, but let’s commit to coming to some agreement on the priority items and then doing what we, as a COmmonwealth, can do for each of them.
<
p>
Good question, David, on your previous post on this topic: “How many more must die in Boston?” — and I am obliged to respectfully point out that that question relates, with MUCH higher numbers, to the fact of widespread lack of comprehensive health insurance in Boston (and don’t be looking for the Chap 58 law to solve that, ‘cuz it won’t), as well as to youth violence…
I’m not sure if I buy the concept of public health programs being a direct influence on crime. I don’t oppose the concept of universal health, I just don’t see it as a solution for crime.
<
p>
When I ask myself “Why didn’t I grow up to become a criminal?” I don’t rank “I had health care available” as a reason.
<
p>
I have a loving two-parent family who taught me to stay out of trouble.
<
p>
Violence was not glorified by anyone I knew nor was it glorified by any of my cultural influences.
<
p>
My friends were not the type to cause anyone any trouble.
<
p>
When I was a teenager, during the summers, my uncle gave me a job that even paid better than the minimum wage, so I didn’t just hang around causing trouble, and I had money to spend too. The job more or less sucked (warehouse work), and my parents constantly let me know that the path to a better job was via college.
<
p>
I was raisesd to believe that I would attend college, no questions about that.
<
p>
I went to a private school where everyone was planning on going to college.
<
p>
When I was in college, my father helped me get an internship at a local company (such an internship would not be possible today because that company has been bought and consolidated by another company across the country).
<
p>
I knew that I would someday have a job, a family, and a future. There were no questions about that either — it was a given.
<
p>
After I got out of college a family member gave me a local job which got me lots of experience — I probably would have had to move from the area to find one otherwise.
<
p>
I parlayed contacts from those jobs that family members had helped me find into other jobs.
<
p>
Sure, if I was sick, then of course, health issues would be important. But I just don’t see the link between a sixteen year old who guns someone down and health care. I doubt my mother got much prenatal care back in those days.
<
p>
Please enlighten me as to why you think this is the best place to focus our efforts.
Call me fuzzy-headed, but I really don’t see the connection. Let’s say we pass univeral health care tomorrow – everyone gets it, no questions asked. I can’t see why that would make any difference to the folks doing the shooting.
<
p>
Economic points are closer, but as others have said in another thread, even that doesn’t strike me as what’s really going on, at least in the short term. Rather, it looks to me like the Mayor and the BPD have given up on a program that was working, they haven’t put anything else in its place, and state gov’t doesn’t seem to care. How depressing.