Words from Steve

Juvenile Violence: Symptoms and Solutions

By Steve Nawojczyk
www.GangWar.com

Over ten years ago I decided to retire from my job as coroner of Pulaski County, Arkansas. In part, it was simply because I felt the decade I had spent in the coroner’s office was enough. But there was also a deeper reason—a reason that came from both my heart and my gut.

I was tired of zipping up body bags over the faces of the dead youth of our county, and in a larger sense, our country. In essence, I realized I was zipping up a bag over the face of our future. Most of these young faces were black. And the vast majority were the casualties of gang violence, the carnage left behind by the domestic war that has engulfed us.

Moreover, I realized there were two wasted lives for every body bag--that of the person who was murdered, and that of the person who did the killing. In all likelihood, the latter would be cast into the omnivorous maw of our prison system, where he could hone his criminal skills. Gang violence, simply put, is the most corrosive force in our inner cities today.

As the late Dr. Martin Luther King said long before gangs became so pervasive, “The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It’s either non-violence or non-existence.”

Just imagine what he would say if he were alive today. And gangs not only wreak a terrible toll of black-against-black violence, but also deepen the fears of the white community, thus broadening the racial divide that cleaves our country.

I never viewed the job of coroner as one which merely required that I certify someone as dead. Rather, I viewed the dead as my clients. They had no advocate. I sought to shine a spotlight on the cause of their death. In most cases, that meant being an advocate for more research into fatal diseases. But, for an increasing number of the dead, it meant getting to the root causes of violent mortality.

Several years ago, studies showed that every school day in the United States, according to the National Education Association, at last 100,000 students take a gun to school. Another 160,000 students skip class because they fear physical violence. Forty students are injured or killed by firearms, 6,520 teachers are threatened with bodily injury, and 260 are assaulted.

The average cost of treating a crime-related injury in this country is $41,000. We spend $20 billion a year treating the victims of gunshot wounds. Gang violence is not only tearing at our moral culture and killing our children, it’s also picking our pockets.

But no amount of money could be as costly to our collective psyche and social cohesion as the cultural effects of the gang wars. In an article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1995 reporter Michael Leahy quoted a number of white citizens as saying they “never” venture south of Interstate 630 in central Little Rock. I-630 is the freeway that bisects the poorer, more crime prone southern areas of the city from the more affluent northern areas. A generation ago, no one would have known what you were talking about if you made such as statement. Our urban areas are literally becoming, to borrow from Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”—one predominantly white and nonviolent, one predominantly minority and quite violent. This can do nothing but erode the process of racial healing.

I don’t pretend to have the answer. No one has the answer. Congress, our state legislature, and our local governments have all cogitated about the issue, and no one has come up with an answer so far. Obviously, we need tough law enforcement measures against those who commit crimes with guns, and those who bring guns into our schools. But locking people up and throwing away the key won’t solve the problem. There’s always a wannabe gang-banger ready to take the place of the gang-banger who just got jailed. The disease spreads like a fast-moving bacterial infection, which multiplies exponentially. Trying to stomp it out one person at a time is doomed to fail.

When I was a kid, my schoolmates and I joined groups like the Boy Scouts and the 4-H Club. Now, we have thousands upon thousands of kids who are involuntarily made members of the “5-H Club”—Homeless, Helpless, Hungry, Hugless, and Hopeless. It is a ripe feeding ground for gang leaders to solicit their young recruits. The gangs provide these kids with a twisted version of the love, money, protection and respect that they often can’t find at home.

Obviously, one place to start looking for solutions is in our public schools, but I fear that some of the measures many schools have taken—albeit well intentioned—may actually be counterproductive. Here are what I perceive as some of the realities our schools must address:

• Raising the minimum grade-point standard required for participation in team sports is probably a mistake. By depriving these youth of the camaraderie and purpose they find on the playing field, we may be pushing them toward gangs, where they hope to find the same things.
• Tolerate no misbehavior by gang members or others in school. Ban the hand signals and types of dress—such as blue bandannas for the Crips—that signify gang membership. Back then President Clinton said that he’s not averse to the concept of school uniforms. I’m not certain how I feel about this issue, but we need to study it. It would remove the stigma that separates those who can afford nice clothes from those who cannot.
• Find creative ways to punish students who misbehave without suspending or expelling them. Expulsion only serves to put them on the streets 24-hours a day with their “homies.”
• Designate adults in the schools and the cities at large to identify and immediately remove gang-related graffiti. Gangs use graffiti to insult other gangs, thus provoking violent retaliation.
• Use school volunteers to teach students who can’t read how to read. Many of the gang members I’ve talked to over the years have sheepishly admitted they couldn’t read, thus leading to low self-esteem. They look to the gangs, therefore, for pride and “respect” in their lives. Unfortunately, too many gang members view “respect” and “fear” as synonyms.

Even if these measures only made a small dent in the problem, it would be worth it. But, in a broader sense, we have to realize that it’s going to require the efforts of our entire society to solve this problem. It’s going to take everyone, black, brown and white; from the right of Rush Limbaugh to the left of Ted Kennedy, to solve this problem. It’s not an ideological quandary, but rather a social and moral nightmare in a country that is slowly descending into a state of cryptic fear.

My task, by in large, has been a sad one. During my years as a coroner, I saw many kids who I knew—who I had talked with and even videotaped—turn up on a metal slab at the Crime Lab. I’ve seen an 18-month-old baby whose entire lower body was shattered in a hail of bullets. I’ve seen a 10 year-old whose entire left upper arm was blown off, leaving his lower arm dangling precariously from what little was left. He looked as though it had been gnawed off by a shark.

And then there was T-Bone, a 19 year old gang-banger whose name I saw repeated again and again in graffiti around Little Rock. I sought him out and finally found him hanging out at the housing project. He was morose, surly and mad, yet something about him got to me.

I asked him, “T-Bone, why do you want to keep living like this?” And he answered, “Man, I just wanna be free! I just gotta be free!”

This statement seemed puzzling first, but in talking to him further, I soon understood. For T-Bone, “free” meant to have a life with a normal family, a normal home, a normal job, a good income, and a nice car. The American Dream. But, to T-Bone the American Dream seemed like The Impossible Dream. He looked around him and saw no way out of the imploding of opportunity and water-torture diminution of the human spirit that were the stuff of his every day life. The primary source of income in his world was selling drugs.

Soon, I encountered T-Bone again dead. Shot in the back on Cumberland Street by a rival gang-banger.

His was just another body bag to be zipped up, yet another statistic added to the list. T-Bone, became, much to my sorrow, another piece of our collective future that was forever snuffed out.