Haunted by Gun Violence

The New York Times reported today that homicides in Chicago are down.  Data shows that year-to-date homicides have declined by 34%.  This is the kind of crime drop that has public officials, police, and news reporters cheering.  Statistically speaking, Chicago and other major cities are "safer" places than they were a year ago.

But, stats don't easily map onto the lived experiences of community members in these "hot spots" of crime.  People living in areas with long histories of gun violence don't suddenly "feel safe" because politicians, police, and newspapers say so.  Many are haunted by memories of family members, friends, and random acquaintances who have been gunned down in their backyards, on their stoops, and on corners in their neighborhoods.  These memories aren't easily washed away by larger statistical trends in violence.  They linger on in the minds of community members.  They become key events that shape how community members make sense of their own lives and safety in the world. 

Photo of North Philly mural from Carlos Javier Ortiz, 2008

Many of the folks that I've met throughout my fieldwork live in places that see similar annual fluctuations in crime.  I always found it interesting how community members continued to be gripped by fear and continued to live their lives as if violence could happen during times when local politicians and police were celebrating drops in violent crime.  Their everyday lives seemed unchanged by the public enthusiasm around improved crime fighting.  One of the residents in the NY Times article captured this lingering fear best, "If you ask me, nothing has changed.  I'm still scared to let the kids play in front of the house."  

While year-to-year crime drops give everyone hope that they are making a dent on crime, we should remember that feeling "safe" and being "safe" are two different things.  Making people "feel safe" is an elusive thing that requires a different kind of intervention.  Simply increasing the number of police officers on the streets, or changing their tactics aren't likely to improve feelings of safety on the ground.  I'm not sure what this would look like, but it's worth asking: What kinds of things might help community members "feel safe"?  

Styles Make Fights: Salah vs. Storyboard

Styles make fights.  Anybody who is a fan of the UFC can appreciate how different fighters bring different skill sets to the table (e.g. when Demian Maia used his jiu jitsu to neutralize Jon Fitch's incredible wrestling/ground and pound).

A Crazy Popping Battle

I thought about that adage while watching a recent popping battle between Salah (on the right) and Storyboard (on the left).  If you have 5 extra minutes today, you might want to check this battle out...It showcases two poppers from different generations going all out!

Salah is a master of illusion!

Both have really unique styles.  And the deejay mixes some nice tracks into the background (I personally like it whenever a deejay doesn't immediately rely on the well-known canon of Zapp & Rogers, Ohio Players, and other funk classics).

I like this battle because both are from different generations and have really unique styles.  Who do you think won?

A Serial Killer on the Dating Game: Some Sociological Reflections

I recently watched Louis Theroux's BBC documentary, "A Place for Paedophiles."  The documentary takes place at Coalinga State Hospital, a hospital for pedophiles who have completed their prison terms but haven't been able to transition back into society.  While many maintain that they are "cured," the vast majority are stuck in an institutional limbo because they cannot find housing. As convicted pedophiles, most are subject to complicated laws that prohibit them from moving into areas that are close to schools; some face hostile neighborhood associations that do not want a pedophile in their midst; and others are still aware of their urges and do not trust themselves.  This means that most will spend the rest of their lives incarcerated, even though they are all technically "free men" under the law.  

The documentary is quite disturbing and provocative, simply because it challenges one's ideas about how the criminal justice system works and the rights of convicted offenders.  As a good journalist, Theroux doesn't really take a side in this story.  At some points, he challenges inmates who claim to be cured, but still show behavior that says otherwise.  At other points, he describes the sad reality for most men in Coalinga; they will in all likelihood live out the rest of their days in this hospital because nobody wants them as a neighbor or tenant.

Rodney Alcala aka the "Dating Game Killer"

Today, while taking a break from writing, I perused Youtube and stumbled upon a very creepy story that also plays off the aforementioned documentary.

Rodney Alcala, aka the "Dating Game Killer," appeared on the Dating Game in the midst of a serial killing spree in California.  When he was invited on the show as a bachelor, Alcala was already a convicted rapist and sex offender.  He would eventually win a date with bachelorette, Cheryl Bradshaw (below in video), who later refused a date with him because he seemed "creepy."  Here is a short video of his appearance on the show.  It's pretty eery.

Alcala was eventually arrested and convicted for the murder of Robin Samsoe--a 12 year old girl that he abducted, raped, and murdered.  Police found her decomposing body in the LA foothills several days after her disappearance.  His death penalty was overturned because jurors were improperly informed of his sex offending history.  He was found guilty in a retrial, but had this case overturned because of discredited witnesses.

He was eventually arrested and convicted on 5 counts of murder and received the death penalty.  This happened, however after a long career in serial killing.  Although there is no official body count, homicide investigators estimate that Alcala killed between 50-130 women.  Police would later seize a collection of photos that Alcala had shot himself.  Many of the photos are sexually suggestive in nature and feature young women and children.  There is a gallery of these (that are PG or PG-13) online.

I guess these two stories highlight core issues at stake when we debate the rights of pedophiles and sex offenders.  On one hand, Theroux's documentary reveals a grossly unfair "institutional limbo" that awaits pedophiles who can't find housing in the "outside world."  Their situation challenges our larger beliefs in the efficacy of the criminal justice system; if someone does their time, they should have the right to move on with their lives.

At the same time, stories from Theroux's documentary and certainly Rodney Alcala's case highlight the fear that many have against ever allowing pedophiles and sex offenders back into the general public.  These stories seem to provide a rationale about the need for increasing surveillance and restricting the rights of registered pedophiles and sex offenders (who by most clinical accounts are all serial offenders).

In the end, I don't really know how to feel.  I feel conflicted on this.  How do you all feel?  Should our society increase the surveillance of pedophiles and sex offenders?  Do the repeated crimes of some, warrant the upsurge in surveillance of a group deemed highly likely to reoffend?  What does all of this say about our criminal justice system?

Where's Nancy Lanza?

Like many of you, I have been glued to news coverage of the Newtown shooting. While watching the memorial last night and reading news today, I was struck by a curious omission: Nancy Lanza’s murder does not “count”.

Nancy Lanza's death does not "count" in the public eye.

When the President, journalists, and others talk about the tragedy in Newtown, they talk about 26 victims.  Last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper had a special segment dedicated to remembering the “26 lives lost” in Newtown, CT.  The President made several references to the 26 victims in his moving speech to a small auditorium in Newtown.  An LA Times article reports that firefighters have erected 26 Christmas trees honoring the fallen in Newtown.  

Nancy Lanza is the 27^th victim.  Why is her story omitted from memorials? Why is her death and story not worth mentioning when we memorialize the victims of this tragedy? 

Is it because she’s the mother of the assailant?  Is it because she bought her son the guns that were eventually used in the spree shooting?  Is it because some of us secretly believe that she was “responsible” for her son’s heinous crime?

Nancy Lanza was tragically shot in the head four times.  News are reporting today that she was worried about her son and was a great mother.  Some of her friends have balked at the idea that she was a “survivalist,” and claim that this is the news media spinning her into a caricature that helps us make sense of this tragedy.   

I won’t pretend to know the inner-workings of her life, or her relationship to her son, but I find it strange and troubling that her death doesn’t seem to count.    

The Existential Fall Out after Newtown

The Existential Fall Out after Newtown

I have a heavy heart tonight.  My thoughts and prayers are with the families of Newtown.  The Newtown shooting is a terrible tragedy. It has reminded me of lessons learned while studying the families of murder victims. 

For the past 2 years, I have been researching the everyday lives of families who lose someone in a murder.  This has been difficult—and often heartbreaking—research.  I have spent many nights thinking about how much I take my family, friends, and other people in my life for granted.   I think about the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings whose first and last thoughts of each day are of the person they loved and lost. The things that I have seen and the stories that I have collected have left a deep and permanent mark on my soul.

Amongst the many thoughts swirling around in my head, I keep returning to a troubling “double standard” that we often taken for granted when shootings happen.

On one hand, the Newtown shooting reminds us that fatal violence can happen at anytime to anyone.  It is a painful reminder that life is precious and that it can be snapped away from us at any moment.  The Newtown shooting makes many of us feel an existential fall out. How could this happen?  Why did this have to happen?  And what does this mean for me?

For many of us, these shootings cut a little too close to home.  They happen in places to people who remind us of ourselves.  We begin to wonder: “Are we ever really safe?” “Will our children come home from school today?” “Will this happen at my favorite movie theater?”   

In turn, these ideas shape how we feel about families who mourn in the wake of such tragedies.  We feel deep empathy, compassion, and sadness for families and victims in Newtown.  We talk about the victims here as innocent children who met a horrible death completely out of their hands.  We wonder how the families and friends of victims will cope with such a loss.

But, the same kinds of sympathy and compassion are often not extended to families who lose their children in street shootings every day.  These situations are treated very differently by the media, by our leaders, and by many of us.  We see these shootings as events that only happen to people who are caught up in the wrong crowd.  We assume that these victims—who are often children—must have been dealing drugs, in a gang, or doing something to meet such a horrible end.  Everyday violence in our inner-cities helps us hold onto a precious myth: Fatal violence only happens to people who bring it on themselves.  If we can believe this, or at least think it might be true, we can feel safe again. 

How do we reconcile these conflicting responses to tragedy?   

I’m here to tell you that many of our popular assumptions about the second group of victims are deeply problematic and misinformed.  Many of the people that I have followed over the years have been young men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This is a powerful message that John Rich—a physician, scholar, and interventionist—teaches us in his powerful work on young black men’s experiences with trauma. 

This is a theme that also resonates with my work:  One family I followed lost their youngest son in a street-style execution shooting.  The mother and two older brothers of the victim faced an unsympathetic and sometimes cruel world.  Newspaper articles talked about this case as an example of how families need to keep closer tabs on their children.  Local community leaders and church pastors used this event to denounce drugs in the community.  And, most hurtful of all, supervisors at the mother’s work filed complaints about her work productivity slipping after her son’s death.  When she told them that she was in the bathroom wailing over the loss of her youngest child—she was fired and released with severance. 

This is only a small sample of the many tragedies that I followed in Philadelphia.  I hope that this underscores the need to rethink how we process and make sense of gun violence across the board.  The deep sympathy and pain that we all feel tonight for the victims of Newtown should be extended to families who lose sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandparents, aunts, uncles, best friends, and siblings in our backyards everyday. 

Should Cop Killers be Eligible for Parole?

I'm teaching Ethan Brown's "Queens Reigns Supreme" tomorrow.  For those who haven't read the book, QRS is a rich book that chronicles Southside Queens in the 1980s--an area that has long been an iconic home to many of Hip Hop's elite (e.g. Run DMC, Nas, 50 Cent, Mobb Deep).

While many know of the area from songs that describe the neighborhood, Brown's book describes the rise and fall of various drug organizations in Southside Queens.  Much of his narrative focuses on Lorenzo "Fat Cat" Nichols, a notorious drug lord who ran an organization that controlled large areas of Southside Queens and was one of--if not the biggest--distributors of heroin, cocaine, and later crack in the area.  Using a mix of media reports, police wire taps, and other data, Brown reconstructs a complex history of Nichols and various other drug crews from the area.

In QRS, Brown also introduces us to Fat Cat's longtime friend/enforcer/and high-ranking lieutenant, Howard "Pappy" Mason.  Fat Cat and Pappy met while incarcerated and later became close affiliates that controlled much of the drug trade in Southside Queens.

Pappy becomes a central player in this story because he is later shown as the mastermind behind the highly-publicized assassination of NYPD rookie police officer, Edward Byrne.

RIP Edward Byrne

I won't spoil everything here, but Byrne was serving as a night's watch for a witness against Mason and the Nichols organization.  Mason, who was behind bars for gun charges, ordered the hit on Byrne--who was shot and killed while sitting in his police car around 3 am in the morning.  4 men were later arrested in the murder of Bryne.  Mason was later convicted of this and many other crimes, landing him with a life sentence in prison.

As it turns out, the four hitmen who killed Edward Byrne are scheduled for their first parole hearings in November of 2012.  Not surprisingly, this has mobilized police officer unions and other concerned citizens, who have begun signing petitions to keep these guys and other convicted cop killers behind bars without chance for parole.  So far, these efforts have garnered 250,000 signatures.  Here's a recent article from the Washington Post that describes the assassination, backlash, and parole situation.

This story and many others that I've collected during my research on fatal and non-fatal gun violence  challenges my baseline thinking about crime and punishment.

On one hand, I believe that prisoners--even violent offenders--can be rehabilitated and that our prison system works best if it allows for people to become seen as rehabilitated.  Otherwise, we open the door for a system that treats all offenders as 'lost causes' and deprives people of the right to redemption.  This, to me, is a fundamental human right and something that we should vigorously protect.

But, at the same time, there is an inescapable (and often glossed) emotional side to this story and many other homicide cases.  When reading about this case and others, one can't help but feel incredible pain for the family and friends of Edward Byrne, who lost a son, brother, cousin, friend, to a cold-blooded assassination.   Indeed, the hitmen were later arrested and convicted because some of them were bragging to others about the killing.  Another report claimed that one of the hitmen laughed when he saw brains flying out of Bryne's head.  

Although these kinds of details are gruesome and difficult to hear, I think that the voting public should know about these details.  Family members, friends, and others mourning a homicide think about these and many other cold and horrible details when thinking about a loved one who was taken from them.  Long after suspects have been arrested, tried, and convicted, family and friends are left with traumatic mental images that haunt them for the rest of their lives.

As a public who routinely votes for or against prison and policy reform, I believe we should know and try to empathize more with victim's families and friends.  By knowing these kinds of details, we can make decisions that are not just informed by our personal political ideas and sensibilities, but also shaped by an understanding of how these events transform the lives for family members and friends of victims.  I think this is an important type of social understanding that should be part of any healthy policy debate.