In Chicago’s Grand Crossing neighborhood, Antonio Smith, 9, was shot several times at about 4 PM on Wednesday, Aug 20. He was shot in the head, the arms, and the chest, the Chicago Tribune reports, near the location where one gang’s turf meets another’s, the victim of an apparent case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Eight others were wounded in the shooting, one fatally, but Antonio was clearly an innocent victim.
In Baltimore, Keith Powell, 17, was gunned down on Aug 21 on the Northeast Side, only two days after Adrian Gilliard, also 17, was shot and killed in a separate incident in West Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun reports.
“Young people are losing their lives in the city of Baltimore,” the Sun quoted Baltimore Police Chief Anthony W Batts as saying to a group of teenagers.
Many victims of these shootings are African-American. Most are male. Officials often blame gang activity and pledge to step up community policing efforts, but sadly, police departments aren’t built for raising children not to shoot up their neighbors. That job belongs to our families, our religious institutions to a point, and our teachers to a lesser degree.
At least in Chicago, gangs seem to have been involved. Gangs often spring up in response to the heavy-handed tactics of law enforcement. Those tactics, as we have shown in Ferguson, Mo., are often called upon to subdue some of the desperate crimes people commit if they have become trapped in communities with high rates of poverty, unemployment, and broken homes.
“All these factors have fed a culture of violence on the streets,” wrote Jerome G Miller in the book Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge University Press, 1996). “The ethics of the street among certain minority groups is indistinguishable from the rules of survival in a maximum-security correctional institution.”
In a study about 20 years ago, of 60,715 African-American males in Baltimore, aged 18–35, 34,025, or about 56 percent, were under the supervision of the criminal justice system. That’s one reason it may be so difficult for young blacks to tell the difference between a community and a correctional facility.
But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If we can’t stop the perpetually high murder rate, there will be no chance for a general ceasefire in these communities. If we can’t have a ceasefire, there will be no chance for calm and collected people to have the necessary conversations about the heavy-handed posture our police departments seem to have adopted. And if we can’t have those conversations, gangs will continue to spring up in response to heavy-handed police tactics.
The number of teens killed in Baltimore this year, 12, has already passed the number for all of last year, 10. Somebody has to take the first step, and it should probably be people in African-American communities, probably the young men who don’t want to die as they’re walking down the sidewalk with their girlfriends and who don’t want their girlfriends killed in the crossfire.