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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AK2004 who wrote (461)	4/19/2003 8:04:38 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

This is good stuff, imo: tomhayden.com NPR Radio Nation November 21, 2002 Ten thousand African American and Latino young men, have died in gang-related warfare on the streets of Los Angeles in the past 20 years. That doesn’t count the thousands more shot, stabbed and hospitalized at a cost in the billions, nor the death toll nationally. It’s as if this untabulated, invisible body count is somehow acceptable, perhaps even deserved. The fact is that America’s thirty year war on gangs- including the highest incarceration rate in the world - has failed to end the bloodletting. We have ignored one of the most successful ways of ending the madness, the 1992 truce called by gang members themselves in Watts, who prophetically insisted on a peace dividend of investments in education, training and jobs. Bob Dylan once sang, too much of nuthin makes a fellow mean. Well, too much of nuthin has produced a new generation of marginalized teenagers who’ve never known that peace dividend. In this center of globalized trade, the only niche market for them seems to be low-level drug trafficking. We are tone deaf to this history. The new LA police chief, William Bratton, calls every day for greater public fury in support of a renewed war on gangs. Bratton’s program, which originated in New York, carries out the strategies of neo-conservatives like James Q. Wilson and William Bennett who push for aggressive stop-and-frisk policies and mass juvenile arrests for graffiti, panhandling and capturing subway turnstile jumpers. Bratton’s policies in the 90s gained credit for sharp reductions in the street crime rate in New York City while nothing was done about the root causes of inner city violence because, in Professor Wilson’s words, there were no root causes. While some liberals were cheering these Republican law-and-order policies, there was another tale on the other side of town. In a two-year period, the NYPD stopped 45,000 people for suspicion of having a gun. In 35,000 of those stops, no weapon at all was found, and of the 9,500 who were arrested, half the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. With Bratton’s emphasis on greater pre-trial detention, 900,000 people were incarcerated in NYC between 1993-1999, nearly all of them African-American and Latino, yet the level of incarceration for actual convictions showed little increase. The gung-ho get-tough atmosphere resulted in the notorious precinct rape of Abner Louima and the NYPD shooting of immigrant Amadou Diallo with 41 bullets, made legendary in a Bruce Springsteen song. Finally, the state Atttorney General and civil rights attorneys stepped in, and the NYPD was forced to abolish its street crimes units for their unconstitutional search-and-destroy behavior. If this sounds familiar, it is because the Los Angeles Police Department was placed under a federal court order for precisely the same behavior in the Rampart scandal. Has Bratton become the new sheriff in town to really reform policing as the courts have ordered, or to renew the very atmosphere that led to the Rampart scandal? The public should be angry, I agree, at the young lives wasted by the failure of the war on gangs, and by the conscious economic neglect that has locked a generation of inner city youth in slums that increasingly resemble the prisons to which they are headed.