A professed gang member was quoted in today's Fresno Bee saying, "None of my boys are changing. Maybe one out of 20 wants to get out. A lot of them are locked up, but they get out and do the same things - get faded and rob some fools."
Stanley Crouch of the NY Daily News offered up the following information in a recent op-ed:
Addressing a dilemma tantamount to terrorism, a few months ago Ben Stein wrote in the conservative American Spectator that, "In the five and a half years since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities." ...Besides all of the human costs of these murders, the burden is estimated by the World Health Organization to cost an annual $300 billion. That amounts to about 150 weeks in Iraq, or three years.
This would seem a good subject for presidential debates, right? Wrong, apparently.
Given that there have presumably been nearly 10x as many Americans killed as a result of domestic gang violence as opposed to foreign radical terrorism in the half decade since we began our "War on Terror", it would seem to me that we have either a distorted set of national priorities or an unsettling lack of compassion for our fellow member of the body politic.
To those who are, in fact, concerned, the question remains what can we do about it? Local authorities have been trying, mostly in vain, to curb gang violence for decades. The problem continues to be that most gang members, seem to be impervious to reform, just recall that quote I started this post with. The only real solution to this is probably the very unspecific concept of prevention. Keeping kids involved, strong parents, focus on education and opportunities and so on. But these are the same notions and aspirations we have been telling ourselves are the cure for poverty and social disaffection for generations, and still we have the problems. We know "poverty" is a relative term and that the lifestyle maintained by some considered in poverty in America today would not have had such a distinction a century ago or in certain other countries; nevertheless, such comparisons are, perhaps, beside the point as the statistics fail to account for those today who either can't reliably be counted (i.e the homeless) or don't want to be counted (i.e. illegal immigrants) and their relative conditions would undoubtedly skew the statistics downward. Oh, the successes of the War on Poverty!
To Mr. Crouch's last point there, that the issue is not even on the general national radar, is an interesting one. I think the issue tends to be concentrated in certain areas (most notably California and Florida) so most of the country, at least geographically, isn't directly affected by gangs. I don't know if the FBI should be involved in ridding us of gangs, but I do know local level authorities have been struggling with it for decades, with decidedly mixed (if not downright disappointing) results. In England the answer the national government devised was a ban on handgun ownership, even to the point where the police do not carry guns (one of many facets of English life hilariously skewered in the unmissable Hot Fuzz, now on DVD), but the result was not what they expected):
In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.
Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.
The Home Office figures - which exclude crimes involving air weapons - show the number of deaths and injuries caused by gun attacks in England and Wales soared from 864 in 1998-99 to 3,821 in 2005-06. That means that more than 10 people are injured or killed in a gun attack every day.
(More on the Brown/Blair adminstrations recent fudging of these stats here).
One commentator opined that much of this youthful aggression was abetted in previous generations through mandatory national service of some sort and maybe that is the case (a case Charlie Rangel has advocated bringing back and presidential candidate Chris Dodd advocates sans the mandatory-ness).
Ultimately, though, perhaps this is simply a sad fact of life that we will have to abide, and there is no real way to rid ourselves of gangs and other unprovoked acts of violent crime; there will always be young, out of the mainstream, frustrated individuals who will feel slighted/disrespected by "the system", don't want to change their ways and don't even necessarily even want to be broadly accepted, will likely act out in rash and often violent ways as a means of gaining some respect (read: fear) or status in the public eye. If that sounds like a form of domestic terrorism maybe that distinction is not too far off (see the death toll at the top of this post once again for a reminder of the devastation), although if you thought there was a ruckus about calling Katrina victims refugees, just imagine the maelstrom that would ensue from classifying fellow citizens as terrorists.
2 comments:
It's a simple solution, isn't it? A War on Gangs means fighting a 'war' specifically against... well, specifically against freedom-hating gangs!
Excellent post, Jason. You hit the nail on the head: you can't fight a war against gangs for the same reason you can't fight a war against Drugs, Poverty, Terror or, um, Barry Bonds fans - it's all much to general. How do you win a war against any of those things?
Right, we've got it backwards, we deal with policy in the specific and wars in the abstract. Not only that, but I'm concerned about the majority accepting police state tactics to gain a feeling of security with measures like affixing GPS tracking devices to released gang members and talk of installing surveillance cameras in public areas.
Heed the words of Ron Paul from the floor of the house some 5 years back:
Most police states, surprisingly, come about through the democratic process with majority support. During a crisis, the rights of individuals and the minority are more easily trampled, which is more likely to condition a nation to become a police state than a military coup. Promised benefits initially seem to exceed the cost in dollars or lost freedom. When people face terrorism or great fear- from whatever source- the tendency to demand economic and physical security over liberty and self-reliance proves irresistible. The masses are easily led to believe that security and liberty are mutually exclusive, and demand for security far exceeds that for liberty.
Once it's discovered that the desire for both economic and physical security that prompted the sacrifice of liberty inevitably led to the loss of prosperity and no real safety, it's too late. Reversing the trend from authoritarian rule toward a freer society becomes very difficult, takes a long time, and entails much suffering. Although dissolution of the Soviet empire was relatively non-violent at the end, millions suffered from police suppression and economic deprivation in the decades prior to 1989.
But what about here in the United States? With respect to a police state, where are we and where are we going?
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