Six homicides this past weekend; half of the dead are children. I don't care how uncomfortable the conversations get, we've gotta get past them. Assigning blame in broad strokes is not what anyone is seeking; I'm pretty sure it's putting in play pragmatic, actionable solutions that everyone wants to see implemented.
Gun control is part of this, and it is certainly not the only part. We do have to acknowledge the fact that this City is witnessing a small group of young men who do pretty much all the shooting. These young men are 16-29; from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, frequently broken homes; are under-educated; have little expectations of making it to age 40 and therefore have a F-it-all mindset; suffer from repeated psychological traumas; feed off the underground markets for illicit narcotics; have pretty much no marketable employment skills; often have a criminal record; and have an indifference to the lives of others. It's only a couple hundred young men (for the sake of discussion, let's say 1,500) who are going around causing so much harm, pain, and suffering, and they destroy the City for the rest of us.
Now, here's the uncomfortable part... These 1,500 young men are, by and large, African American. We all know that there is no causal relationship between a person being African American and being predisposed, genetically, to this population of 1,500 young men causing all the troubles. Anyone who says so can F right off. We can see that there remain certain socioeconomic barriers (what I call the Ghost of Jim Crow) that need to be overcome for a significant number of African Americans in the City, and the County, and elsewhere. Solving these barriers is not an easy task, and we all have to recognize that it will not all be solved any time soon. I do believe we will get to socioeconomic parity in the relative future, but we're not there today.
We also should acknowledge how STL is not the only city in which these factors are at play. I look to the post-reconstruction era all the way to the start of the modern Civil Rights movement, and I can see patterns of migration from the South to cities in the North. You can see histories of large African American migration patterns to cities up the Mississippi, first to Memphis and then to STL; for others, the path went up to Chicago and then Detroit. My former business partner was African American, and he came to STL in 1955 from Mississippi, while he was still a boy, when Emmett Till was murdered and his family said it was time to leave Jackson. They had family here and transitioned well, but for others not so economically viable things weren't so easy. In effect, the US witnessed what can be called in retrospect large migrations of poor ethnic minority refugees from the South to the cities of the North, which were never really planned or anticipated. Such population shifts have taken place throughout history, just not often within one country during peacetime. Past efforts at managing the effects of these migrations took place on a top-down level, from housing projects to school busing programs to the growth of social welfare programs, with varying degrees of successes and failures. Still, our country is left today with a large population of America that is urban and disadvantaged because of historical circumstances beyond their controls, who just happen to be African American.
*Note: Anyone have issues with my word choice or phraseology, please know that my intent comes from a good place.
This is all prologue, to get that talk out of the way. Now back to the crime part of the crime thread...
What the hell do we do to stop eight year old girls being shot on Friday nights? $25K rewards? Check out that linked article and see the pictures of these kids... They're the City's children, and they are being murdered. We've got to hit up both ends of the spectrum for this. On one side, we need to back groups that further the advancement of the urban black underclasses; I'm quite fond of both For The Sake Of All and Better Family Life. We need to donate, and we need to volunteer. Concurrently, we need to back the StLPD, for us all to report crimes when we see them, anything that makes it so hard for the criminal options to exist that it gets these 1,500 young men to put down the guns, go to jail, or move far away - not by threats or any of that crap, but by making it so difficult to conduct illicit business that they move to "better markets". We also need to acknowledge that East STL and the Near East Side is lawless and desperate. And, we need to see our politicians enacting policies that will actually accomplish meaningful changes, not just talk but delivering actionable policies that are funded and supported. I can't stomach little kids being murdered anymore.
We all need to be angry.
