Crime as a Disease
When Sylvester Stallone portrayed a cop named Cobra in the 1980s, the movie tagline was that crime was a disease. This choice bit of dialog occurs before Cobra opens fire.
Supermarket Killer: Get back! I got a bomb here! I’ll blow this whole place up!
Cobra: Go ahead. I don’t shop here. All right, just relax, Amigo. You wanna talk – we’ll talk. I’m a sucker for great conversation.
Supermarket Killer: [shouting] I don’t wanna talk to you! Now you bring in the television cameras in here now! C’mon, bring ‘em in!
Cobra: Can’t do that.
Supermarket Killer: Why?
Cobra: I don’t deal with psychos. I put them away.
Supermarket Killer: I ain’t no psycho, man! I’m a HERO! You’re looking at a fuckin’ hunter! I’m a hero of the New World!
Cobra: [shakes his head] You’re a disease – and I’m the cure.
After all these years it turns out that some public health officials agree. Crime is a disease. They are sponsoring a Chicago NGO called Ceasefire. “CeaseFire uses a public health model to stop shootings and killings. We combine Science and Street Outreach to track where violence is heating up and then cool the situation down.”
In April – May 2012, the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, convened a two-day workshop with more than two dozen professionals and experts in a broad range of fields to consider violence from a new perspective. While the theory has been a central part of CeaseFire’s thinking since inception, having leading experts in their respective fields apply the perspective to different manifestations of the same disease— self-directed, interpersonal, family, domestic, political and ethnic violence—was a truly momentous endorsement of the theory. CeaseFire’s bold vision that violence can be stopped if it is understood and treated in this way gained new ground from the historic event.
CeaseFire was named one of the “Top 100 Best NGOs” . Ranked first among violence prevention organizations worldwide.
In August of this year, a Chicago television station interviewed Tio Hartman, its executive director, to explain how it would work.
National Public Radio asked one of the Interrupters what their members had which other people lacked. What they’ve got, apparently, is that they are acquainted or sometimes were part of the crime system itself. As such they’re not there to interrupt crime. They’re there to make sure no unnecessary shots are fired.
“Not just anybody can come in and tell a guy to put his gun down,” says CeaseFire’s director Tio Hardiman, in a scene from The Interrupters, a new documentary about the group. “Most of the violence interrupters come from the hierarchy in some of these gangs. [And they] have one goal in mind: to stop killings. They’re not trying to dismantle gangs. What they’re trying to do is save a life.”
Not everybody is convinced. One blogger calls it a payoff to a gang and Democratic Party controlled group.
A Northwestern University study which examined the Ceasefire model in 2008 said the Interrupters basically accepted they were dealing with damaged personalities. “CeaseFire did not make larger demands upon them; there was no expectation that the often inadequately educated and under-employed young people they largely dealt with would – or could – “go straight” without a great deal of investment in turning their lives around. ”
The message was kept simple – stop shooting and killing … CeaseFire promoted a risk management approach aimed at at harm reduction, rather than personal redemption.
Despite having given up on redeeming individuals, the program had great hopes for redeeming the society these killers lived in. They would work on creating a “norm change” in which violence would eventually become “unacceptable”. To achieve this they would embark on a program not altogether unlike that used by missionaries in the cannibal islands. Those who joined their congregation would be rewarded by material goods.
Battleground Chicago
Encouraging local debates over what people “will and won’t accept” was one of CeaseFire’s core strategies. Outreach workers were to carry the message that “the killing must stop” to their clients, while the clergy were to speak to their parishioners and CeaseFire staff to the broader community. Marches, rallies and prayer vigils, backstopped by the widespread distribution of promotional materials, focused on stirring concern among the public. If the program was successful in actuating normative resistance to violence, the payoff could be considerable. …
A notable feature of CeaseFire’s staffing was their commitment to hiring what they dubbed “culturally appropriate messengers” to carry the word to the community. Who they hired was a strategic consideration. …
The basic idea of crime as a disease is that the criminals are victims as much as perpetrators of violence; that they are “sick” of a social disorder imposed on them by unjust conditions. Has the Ceasefire program worked? The conclusion of the Northwestern Report is that it hasn’t worked because not enough money has been spent on it. And such money as has been spent has been perverted by politics.
To summarize the discussion that follows, the evaluation concluded that CeaseFire’s funding mechanism was fundamentally flawed. The short, one-year funding cycle for most sites created job uncertainty and service interruptions, and drew staff time from operations to working on perennial funding crises. Start-up sites were especially impacted, due to the time it took to become operational in the first place, including recruiting and training staff, and developing a client base. The political nature of CeaseFire’s funding led to needy sites being passed over, while sites with more political clout but less violence received funding. In some sites, politicians also demanded too large a hand in the operations.
It is too bad the authors of the report did not explore the effect of government on the “norms” of the community in the first place. What role, for example, have government programs played in dissolving the entire fabric of these communities in the past decades? In a development that would have been comic were it not so tragic, the Sun Times describes a family that is moving back to Africa from Chicago because it’s now safer.
They came to the U.S. from Gambia — in search of a better life.
But two tough decades later, some of Kenwood Academy High School student Muhammed Kebbeh’s family say they are considering going back to Africa after he became the city’s 370th murder victim this year and second of his six siblings to be gunned down on the South Side in the last six months.
“I want to pack everything up and go back,” his oldest brother, Momadu Kebbeh, 36, said Wednesday, as his devoutly Muslim family mourned and prayed at their Washington Park home. “What’s the point of staying here?”
Thomas Sowell recalled growing up in Harlem back before the social cures improved everying. “People didn’t live in fear of drive-by shootings, in the Harlem of my day, if only because we had nothing to drive by in. Old photographs of Harlem show ample parking space on the streets. It was not an idyllic community, by any stretch of the imagination, but it had values that mattered in our daily lives, and common decency was in fact common. No material things can substitute for that.”
How did it come to this? Were these people exposed to some germ that made them that way? And could that pathogen possible have been the politically inspired efforts to improve the condition of the black community? There are many conspiracy theories that posit the deliberate infection of a minority group by scheming government officials. Has anyone every considered that dependency programs could be one of those?
That’s a 64 trillion dollar question. For the moment, the Interrupters are committed to work among those they acknowledge to be individually damned in the hopes that they can be socially saved. Maybe one day historians will conclude that the social amelioration programs started in the 1960s of which the politicians have primarily been the beneficiaries have worked like like some gigantic Tuskegee experiment on the black community. That too was done under the banner of Public Health.
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Nation building, right?
Some similar programs in Los Angeles, and similarly controversial, may have had some modest success peaking, oh, maybe ten years ago?
In Afghanistan, more recently, not so much.
So what is the payoff mechanism in THIS scam? Do we pay the gangbangers who are supposed to be “helping” with the violence problem with assault rifles and ammunition. Is THAT what ‘operation gangwalker’ was all about? Fast & Furious with a local flavor brought to you by your local “cracked-head” politicians (like Rahm Emmanuel and others of his ilk). YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!!!
Sounds like The Community Organizer Full Employment Act of 2012
“The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty”
Written by W. S. Gilbert
Composed by Arthur Sullivan
First performance December 30, 1879
No. 24: SONG (Sergeant & Chorus)
“When a felon’s not engaged in his employment”
When a felon’s not engaged in his employment
Or maturing his felonious little plans
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man’s
Our feelings we with difficulty smother
When constabulary duty’s to be done
Chorus:
Ah, take one consideration with another
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done,
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.
When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling
When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling
And listen to the merry village chime
When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother
He loves to lie a-basking in the sun
Chorus
It’s the Ludovico Technique.
The Summer is over, so watch how this program succeeds. By December, there will be almost no one falling in the snow banks from gun shot wounds.
“Many teach that saying someone is evil is prejudiced thinking. It’s a
way of belittling someone already in pain for some reason. Such people
must be embraced and taught to shed their fears of their fellow man
and then they will not strike out in violent ways.
“They are dangerous to everyone because they embrace evil with their
teachings. In so doing, in trying to be kind, to be unselfish, in
trying to be nonjudgmental, you allow evil to become far more powerful
than it otherwise would. you refuse to see evil, and so you welcome it
among you. You allow it to exist. You give it power over you. You are
a people who have welcomed death and refused to denounce it.
“You are an empire naked to the shadow of evil.
“These people think of themselves as enlightened, as above violence.
They are not enlightened; they are merely slaves awaiting a master,
victims awaiting killers.”
– Terry Goodkind, Naked Empire, 2003
COLTUS INTERRUPTUS
I spoke to Sigmund (Sig) Sauer, head of an outreach organization called Coltus Interruptus. When I asked if the organization was geared to stopping gang killings, he said no, we’re geared to interrupting killers, with a Colt or whatever comes to hand.
He scoffed when told crime’s a disease
And said if that’s the case
Then vaccinations held the keys
And crime would take its place
With Dodos and Neanderthals
And soon would cease to be
And frantic nine eleven calls
No longer come to me
I have a scanner in my car
And when the shots go down
I’m off no matter near or far
It’s my Chicago town
I always get there ‘fore the cops
The shooter still be there
I shoot him then until he drops
I think that’s only fair
For he’d just killed another boy
A gang hit it is true
And I believe if one is dead
Then why not make it two?
We interrupt their lives, you see
Dispatch them with a Colt
I tell you man it’s guys like me
That love to feel the jolt
That comes with doing social good
And putting bad guys down
We’re cleaning up the neighborhood
It’s my Chicago town
Remember that Chicago was the home of at least three major gang organizations that predated the crack epidemic and the invasion of Salvadorans and Mexicans in the 1980s to ’90s. On the West Side and the near South were the Latin Kings, on the South Side and West were the Devil’s Disciples with a distinctive trident tattoo on the shoulder, and finally on the South Side were the Blackstone Rangers. The Rangers started out as Jeff Fort’s gang on Blackstone Avenue in Woodlawn just off the University’s campus. Tens or hundreds of thousands of Great Society dollars flowed to them. Around 1970 they metamorphosed in to the Black P Stone Nation and faced off against the Disciples on the Midway. The University Police locked themselves indoors and Edward Levi went out and bought the gangs off. The campus became a safe neutral ground. Students were not targets and incredibly the gang members, mostly Disciples, could use the gym and would allow a geeky student (guilty) to play along unhurt. By the late 70s the Rangers had eaten the local Disciples and moved North into an old movie theater in the depopulated wasteland of Oakwood. There they transformed into El Rukn and were hired by Moammar Ghaddafi to shoot down an American airliner. Afterwards they were prosecuted but not destroyed.
Only a complete idiot or deliberate accomplice would confuse modern criminal gangs with the dancing delinquents of West Side Story. No one can sort out the politics of Chicago, yes I mean the South Side where Barack H. Obama made his deals and started his improbable rise, without considering the gangs as players on the same level as the Police or the Mayor or the University. US Steel is gone and Sears is tottering but the gangs are there.
Sowell’s quote reminds me of Chris Rock’s note about how “drugs destroyed the ghetto”: “Yeah, like everybody in the ghetto had a yacht and an inside olympic pool — until drugs came along and washed it all up”…
Walter, Gilbert and Sullivan is the best.
Here is something almost as good, only a little more current;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5qdFZP7p54
Like an animal, on the dance floor
Silent murderer, haunting after you
She’s untamable, but you never know
Make one move, she now out of control
Come on danger girl, let me volunteer
I’m all bulletproof, let’s get out of here
Shawty you’re the one, but incognito
Kill the lights, let’s get loose on the floor
She’s the lady I wanna know
Kind of chick, out of control
She’s a diva and she knows why the club goes wild
She’s an animal, whoa
She’s the lady, I wanna know
Kind of chick, out of control
She’s a diva and she knows why the club goes wild
She’s an animal, whoa
Here is pirates, or at least the first part;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8g4Q0N3b-g
I have a theory. Modern audio-visual art is shorter then the days of yore because modern technology compresses the data. More info in a shorter time. The Yoots can understand it. Too fast for my old brain. Both cells overload.
Simple answer: make gang members outside the law. Allow anyone who wants to do anything to a gang member, up to and including killing, entitled to do so without fear of legal reprisal. I couldn’t care less if they choose to kill each other so the more of them engaged in that action, the greater the casualty figures. If making intergang strife legal will increase their death rate, let’s go for it.
Call the truth what it is: these people are deadly parasites on our communities and our nation. We can’t afford them anymore and they need to go away. Since they probably can’t be reformed, and we have better things to spend our limited resources on anyway, whatever it takes to eradicate them is justified.
One more thing: repeal EMTALA for gang members. If they show up at a hospital wounded and don’t have insurance, too damned bad. Cash and carry service only for them. We should repeal EMTALA for everyone, but stopping it for gang members first would be a good start.
Well, it’s science based you see, and who can be against science? …and it’s combined with outreach and workshops. Oh, and there is intervention and investment. It just needs more money to make it all work.
#2 “So what is the payoff mechanism in THIS scam?”
Good question. It’s probably one of 0bama’s cronies.
@12. mac
Simple answer: make gang members outside the law. Allow anyone who wants to do anything to a gang member, up to and including killing, entitled to do so without fear of legal reprisal.
There’s a problem with that. What you suggest is a Bill of Attainder, which is a legislative finding of guilt. This is one of the abuses practiced by the Crown, and against which we revolted in 1776. Its abolition was considered so important that it was written into the body of the Constitution, even before the adoption of the Bill of Rights:
United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 9: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
So years ago I was walking through an airport. I saw a tall black guy in his 30′s with dreds and a “no snitch’s” t-shirt sitting on a bench reading a book. We glanced at each other as I walked past, me noticing his shirt with the large no snitches surrounded by the usual circle and line over it. I thought to myself, I wonder how he would feel if a group of 3 klan members, all decked out in robes and pointy hats, appeared and suddenly threw him a serious beating. Didn’t kill the guy, just a serious busted ribs, broken nose, black eye, beating. In that instant I wondered what he would have thought as, after standing back and watching the beating, he lay there on the ground, hurting, bleeding and in pain, I wonder what he would have thought as the police rushed to help him after the klan members ran away. I wonder what he would have thought as the ambulance attendents gently lifted his head up, and asked if anyone saw the assult. I wonder what he would have thought, as he slowly lifted his only good, unbroken arm and pointed to me. I wonder what he would have thought as I quickly replied by pointing to the design on the front of his bloodied shirt, waggled my index finger and said, sorry no snitches.
These schemes always contain just enough of a altruistic sounding Pollyanna-ish “hook” so as to appeal to those of a certain liberal disposition. That generally provides the political cover for a taxpayer funded business plan designed to enrich its proponents to a level that would shame a Robber Baron.
Better still:
(From West Side Story –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq28qCklEHc ):
GEE, OFFICER KRUPKE
ACTION
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!
ACTION AND JETS
Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that ev’ry child oughta get.
We ain’t no delinquents,
We’re misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
ACTION
There is good!
ALL
There is good, there is good,
There is untapped good!
Like inside, the worst of us is good!
SNOWBOY: (Spoken) That’s a touchin’ good story.
ACTION: (Spoken) Lemme tell it to the world!
SNOWBOY: Just tell it to the judge.
ACTION
Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
They won’t give me a puff.
They didn’t wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!
DIESEL: (As Judge) Right!
Officer Krupke, you’re really a square;
This boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care!
It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He’s psychologic’ly disturbed!
ACTION
I’m disturbed!
JETS
We’re disturbed, we’re disturbed,
We’re the most disturbed,
Like we’re psychologic’ly disturbed.
DIESEL: (Spoken, as Judge) In the opinion on this court, this child is depraved on account he ain’t had a normal home.
ACTION: (Spoken) Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived.
DIESEL: So take him to a headshrinker.
ACTION (Sings)
My father is a bastard,
My ma’s an S.O.B.
My grandpa’s always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress.
Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!
A-RAB: (As Psychiatrist) Yes!
Officer Krupke, you’re really a slob.
This boy don’t need a doctor, just a good honest job.
Society’s played him a terrible trick,
And sociologic’ly he’s sick!
ACTION
I am sick!
ALL
We are sick, we are sick,
We are sick, sick, sick,
Like we’re sociologically sick!
A-RAB: In my opinion, this child don’t need to have his head shrunk at all. Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease!
ACTION: Hey, I got a social disease!
A-RAB: So take him to a social worker!
ACTION
Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schumck.
It’s not I’m anti-social,
I’m only anti-work.
Gloryosky! That’s why I’m a jerk!
BABY JOHN: (As Female Social Worker)
Eek!
Officer Krupke, you’ve done it again.
This boy don’t need a job, he needs a year in the pen.
It ain’t just a question of misunderstood;
Deep down inside him, he’s no good!
ACTION
I’m no good!
ALL
We’re no good, we’re no good!
We’re no earthly good,
Like the best of us is no damn good!
DIESEL (As Judge)
The trouble is he’s crazy.
A-RAB (As Psychiatrist)
The trouble is he drinks.
BABY JOHN (As Female Social Worker)
The trouble is he’s lazy.
DIESEL
The trouble is he stinks.
A-RAB
The trouble is he’s growing.
BABY JOHN
The trouble is he’s grown.
ALL
Krupke, we got troubles of our own!
Gee, Officer Krupke,
We’re down on our knees,
‘Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease.
Gee, Officer Krupke,
What are we to do?
Gee, Officer Krupke,
Krup you!
Also well put:
http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2012/09/funny_how_the_only_folks_who_d.html
“Funny how the only folks who don’t believe that establishing law and order is worth the violence it requires are those who live where law and order has already been established violently …”
Chicago and other Big Cities are what you get when you think that ends don’t justify the means. The best response to such people is not to join them in throwing up their hands in relativistic despair, but to tell them, “Find ends that do.”
I remember the Chicago gangs very well. The article reminded me some something that happened when I was there. A little off topic but here goes.
In the mid 70′s I was a high school age student in Chicago in a Yeshiva (Rabbinical school). I didn’t stick with it but that is another story.
One night I snuck out of the dorm and went downtown with a friend, a girl I knew from my hometown, to go to the top of the Sears tower. We made a mistake getting on the train home and ended up going South instead of back to the Northside. By the time we realized it we were smack in the middle of the worst part of the South side of Chicago at night. Two girls looked at us and laughed “You had best be getting home. You all are in the wrong color neighborhood”.
While were were waiting on the platform for a north bound train I saw about a dozen gangbangers charging up the stairs. I reached into my pocket and my hand closed around my Kippah (Yarmulke) which I had taken off earlier so as not to attract attention.
I put it on, not really thinking about it or knowing why. I had no other defense I guess. I knew we were in horrible danger. The gang members formed a semicircle around the two of us and the leader stepped forward and looked me up and down. I do not think he had ever seen a Jew before.
“What is that thing on your head”? he asked. They looked ready to pounce.
“I am a Jew” I answered. “I study the bible and holy books”
He stepped back a little.
“So why you wear that”?
“It is a sign of respect. It is a reminder that God is everywhere and always with us.”
I saw some doubt in his face. The gang seemed to be waiting for his decision. He asked me a few more things. Where I was going, I said back to my school. What about her? Is she a Jew too? yes she is. He no longer seemed threatening, just curious. The train was finally arriving.
Then he gathered up his posse and just walked away.
“Outside the law”? Remember Alexander S’s Gulag where he pointed out that the government was the criminal?
Well the TSA is steadily getting outside the law, supposedly testing people’s drinks for explosives (”Sir, is that an explosive you just swallowed?”, and practicing obedience training, to wit:
http://www.infowars.com/confirmed-the-tsa-is-ordering-travelers-to-freeze-on-command/
I sent a copy of that link to my congressman (might help) and hope Clubbers will do the same. This is beyond silly, beyond funny; this is spooky.
There’s a worthy pedigree here.
The idea that crime is a disease — and that disease is a crime — was satirized long ago by Sam’l Butler in Erewhon, a novel of a dystopian world of luddites and wafflers, lost somewhere in the New Zealand mountains. Murder is treated, unsuccessfully, with intensive medical care, whereas pulmonary consumption is a capital offense.
Inevitably, the book has dated some (written 1872), but Butler’s ideas are firmly in the tradition of Swift and Orwell. He is, of course, a dead white man ignored by correct-thinking academics everywhere.
Erewhon, pronounced as three syllables, is an anagram of Nowhere. That it ain’t — it’s disturbingly familiar.
“How did it come to this?”
“Yeah, like everybody in the ghetto had a yacht and an inside olympic pool — until drugs came along and washed it all up”
Well, you might have seen those pools and yachts Chris, but between the time of Thomas Sowell and you, this event happen – Desegregation. One of unintended side effects of desegregation was not only White flight, but also middle and upper class Black flight. While the media of the time lambasted the former, it ignored the latter and the consequences. These were people who were creators and makers of their own wealth. When the numbers necessary for role models and a critical mass to keep destructive human behaviors in line disappeared from the community, that’s when the rot began to set in. The old bourgeois wouldn’t tolerate the behaviors and actions in their midst. They accepted the principle that it was the man in the mirror who was largely responsible for his success or failure, as they had made it for themselves. They would be replaced in the community by a new strata composed largely of politicians, patronage bureaucrats, cronies and hustlers who made their status by taking. All of whom were interested more in maintaining their positions by pandering and blaming others rather than fixing.
The media appointment of black leaders had a lot to do with it.
The media want the soap opera victim story, the politicians piggyback on that as a business arrangement, all to keep audience eyeballs to sell to media advertisers.
The only actual way to black dignity as a group is blacks doing something for poor whites.
Not sure if this is OT or not. Anything bashing 0bama has to be within a couple of degrees of ANY topic;
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/apr/30/new-obama-slogan-has-long-ties-marxism-socialism/
Anybody that in the future argues that Berry isn’t a socialist will get this URL force fed to them. Out of his own mouth. Although to me the Che’ poster or Tee is always a dead give away.I’ve long favored a shoot on sight for those wearing a Che’ Tee, figuring Che’ would approve.
D51 @ 23: The old bourgeois wouldn’t tolerate the behaviors and actions in their midst. They accepted the principle that it was the man in the mirror who was largely responsible for his success or failure, as they had made it for themselves. They would be replaced in the community by a new strata composed largely of politicians, patronage bureaucrats, cronies and hustlers who made their status by taking. All of whom were interested more in maintaining their positions by pandering and blaming others rather than fixing.
It’s even worse than that, it’s not just the taking that is the problem. The scenario you outline teaches people that they cannot trust their own decisions, they must take decisions from the government, the must defer deciding to the government. So anyone running for government office who talks about freedom, must be talking nonsense, he is breaking their world. So anyone running for office promising unicorns and skittles – well, why not?
Of course all societies impose ideas, and all democracies are subject to populists voting themselves all the money in the treasury or ten times more, but when you’ve eliminated individual decision making as a standard, well, you’re basically pushing people down that slippery slope.
Those doing all the killing and other bad stuff are really living in a state of nature, in a State in which civilization has fallen. These are precisely the ills which civilization controls by creating a culture and a society that reserves the legitimate use of force to the State and its agents and establishes norms for mediating conflict. The Left, in undermining mainstream Western culture has not succeeded in replacing it with a viable alternative culture. The Left is, after all, about demolishing, not about building, criticizing, not creating. For 50 years the institutions of civilization; courts, schools, churches, government, family, etc.; have been systematically undercut and their effectiveness vitiated. What, exactly, did we expect? It is nothing but organized evil.
Twenty years ago I worked in a Catholic based organization that was addressing the problem using a model similar to that of Ceasfire. Ours had three legs: 1. working directly with gangs and gang members; 2. setting up alternative schools to remove the worst actors from the general school population and drum some kind of learning into their heads (I think gang membership is like membership in a cult, members are programmed and must be de-programmed); 3. teaching the parents of these kids better parenting skills, which was my branch. The program was small, largely dependent on government grants, and highly effective. The IAF got involved in the mid 90′s, raised a ton of money to mass replicate the program all over Los Angeles, called “Hope in Youth.” As is their wont, they partially laid the foundations for expansion, looted the money and left town. I had the T-shirt, which was all that was left. The small organization on which it was based struggles on, but refuses to change it’s public funding model, which greatly hampers their effectiveness.
Is crime a disease? Thomas Aquinas says that those who choose to sin (Ooh, medieval!) do so because they misapprehend a good. So what is good? Because man is a mimetic creature, what is good is what everybody else is doing or wanting (to look at it teleologically). Culture and the family are what inform individuals what is of value. So what informs culture and the family? It used to be, in the West of yore, the Christainists, or at least Judeao-Christianity. Fortunately we can now replace those old nostrums with Ceasefire and the government we all belong to.
I have a cure for the disease! Remove all of the blood from the ill. The disease will never reinfect that person.
“CeaseFire’s bold vision that violence can be stopped if it is understood and treated in this way gained new ground from the historic event.”
And they were Democrats, all. Do these ‘Interrupter’s’ stand with the use of force behind them, and, if so, is this the first case of armed recruiting for the Party? Probably not.
This is brilliant community organization. Gather up the warring tribes and put them under one banner. If their monetary demands are not met then, well, they already have their own standing army. This is the kind of America that the Obamaites strive for, a well-armed and organized constituency.
Besides the vandals who can menace society on behalf of the community organizer, he also has the support of the moral anarchist, Madonna. The old dirtbag threw her support behind the Wonder Worker saying “I’m not going to show my a**.” Like anybody wants to see your old flea bitten Nazi prison guard a** anyway.
Spindok,
I’m not surprised by your story. I once talked to a fellow who had been a Mormon missionary in 1980′s Detroit. He said he and his companions, all white, worked in the worst neighborhoods in the city trying to get people to hear their message. He said they were surrounded by drugs, alcohol, prostitution and violence, and had very little success with the locals. However, he noted they were looked upon and treated as preachers/men of God by the locals and never came to any harm in his two years there.
Divine intervention in both cases? Maybe.
I’m tired of it, not just in Chicago; everywhere. Just issue a case of 40s and a .40 S&W with a couple of mags to every non-white male in the US on Friday afternoon and we won’t have a gang or race/ethnicity problem by Monday morning.
I am so confused here.
Weren’t we told ‘ we all belong to the government”.
So how come all these poor wretches are treated so poorly by our government. They is supposs’d to take care of us n all.
The government must be fallin down on the job somewheres. I just don’t understand how our government could be so mean and evil to let this happen and be so – well – racist, because we all know most of these down and out folks are our black brothers.
Baa WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Years ago I used to drive through Harlem (Adam Clayton Powell Blvd to Central Park North, get off at CPW) every day. In the morning there would be adorable little children in uniforms going to school. In the late afternoon, people would be coming home from work. It was the shortcut into the city and I didn’t think twice about it. One of the best nights was when I was driving through and Harlem Nocturne came on the radio. (I’m sure at midnight it was different but I was home by then.)
Wouldn’t drive that route now.
So, they figure out where the hotspots are and go to cool them off a bit? Hmm, could those hotspots be gun-free zones?
We need to have a procedure for labeling certain career criminals as violent predators who are beyond any rehabilitation and simply removing them permanently.
“make gang members outside the law”
Shall we include both political parties? The Supreme Court? How ’bout the LA police Dept?
m @ 12: make gang members outside the law. Allow anyone who wants to do anything to a gang member, up to and including killing, entitled to do so without fear of legal reprisal.
No, you can’t do that. You know why? It breaks the monopoly of force by the government. That’s a crucial matter – up until you want to break the government.
Otherwise it sounds like a good idea. Much the same issue of how we treat terrorists in Iraq, what Geneva conventions they are entitled to. And you know what else – it takes gang-to-gang shootings out of the court system. I was once empanelled for one of those, and fortunately got out, because I was ready to rule that the victims needed shooting, if that was argued and proved, contra the law. Glad I didn’t have to.
But y’know, in Los Angeles they have ruled against the entire gang (as if it had legal standing), that gang members of XYZ are not allowed to congregate, etc. Never did understand how that could be valid. Probably isn’t.
Don51 #23
It was not just “desegregation” per se, but the way in which it was promoted, specifically:
1. As a right delivered by the government as the result of legal action. Among other things, this led to the lawsuit crisis. The government and the courts became the only valid definers of morality.
2. The seemingly inevitable march from “We as a group are as good as everyone else” to “We as a group are better than everyone else.” Unless it has a strong basis in traditional values, every “rights” movement turns into a version of Nazism, complete with a Master Race complex. The feminists are the most extreme example of this today; as described by Christina Hoff Summers, they moved from an equity-based focus to gender-based focus.
I am truly not sure whether the general opening up of standards of decency promoted these ideas or if it was vice versa. In any case, a key part of desegregation, the “peace” movement and other 60’s ideas was the delegitimization of the old order, and once those walls were breached it was all over for the “poor.” Bigotry had its uses: teaching people who are too stupid to figure it all out what was acceptable.
CS Lewis wrote on the difference between the Humanitarian (Therapeutic) Theory of Punishment and the Retributive Theory
“The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.”
http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html
Wretcherd describes the Humanitarian approach quite well.
Whatever happened to the “Chicago Way”? They’re all in DC.
I’m old enough to remember when these things were “sins”. Now if you point a finger and say anything is a “sin” you are a bigot and ostracized.
Where are the churches in all of this? Cowering in silence. Just look at Carolyn Kennedy’s speech against the Catholic church. Who of us can remember a church being condemned by name at the convention?
These charlatans never give up do they? There is absolutely no merit whatsoever to any of these old, outmoded, more-harm-than-good travesties. With the return of Keynesiaism (and not even good Keneysianism), massive government programs and punitive regulations, and psychobabble “crime” nonsense, it seems we have learned NOTHING over the last 50 years. More precisely, what we call the “left” in America and the western world has continued to increase its stranglehold on the institutions and the narrative that emanates from them.