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Chicago Mon Dec 29 2008
Not JUST Gang-Related
The Sun-Times editorial board argues that explaining away Chicago's exploding violence as "gang-related" makes it too easy to forget that the gang members are themselves Chicagoans, born, raised, and hardened by Chicago's streets. Kudos to the Sun-Times; stuff like this reminds me of why losing local reporters year after year is not only sad but dangerous. We need journalists to keep pursuing these stories, relentlessly..
...But, we say, understand how killers are made.....Main told the story of James Hampton, who admitted to police that he had killed his girlfriend's former boyfriend. The former boyfriend had beat up the girl, had smashed a window of Hampton's car, and -- perhaps his greatest offense -- had dared to stare Hampton down...."I'm not fitting to be running and hide from dude," Hampton said in a taped confession. "Then I seen him, and he look at me, and I look at him. I just shake my head."...Normal people -- that is to say people with a modicum of education, a decent job, a belief in their future and a sense of belonging to the larger society -- don't kill people over stuff like that. They've got too much to lose. They shrug off the disrespect and move on. If necessary, they call the cops....But Chicago's most violent neighborhoods are full of men like James Hampton, their fragile sense of manhood at the mercy of the next show of disrespect. They kill to keep it....Poke beneath the surface of any shooting on that weekend of April 18, our reporters learned, and you will likely uncover a tangle of social woes that only an entire city, as a whole, can do much about. The police can clean up mess after mess, but more messes will come along.
Read the whole thing.
jeesh / December 29, 2008 3:42 PM
"Poke beneath the surface of any shooting on that weekend of April 18, our reporters learned, and you will likely uncover a tangle of social woes..."
You don't need a local journalist to regurgitate this bullshit mantra. They teach this in journalism school. You could program a computer to generate these reports.
Why is it that all reports of crimes have boiled down to looking at "social inequalities" as the culprit for a crime? And then you wonder why accountability is a foreign concept.