ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Every summer crime wave should remind us that we continue to ignore the elephant in the room regarding the reason so many Black youths get involved in criminal activity: how we raise our children.
As a youth counselor, I know that it starts here because I talk to the kids and I see firsthand the living circumstances that lead to violent rages. There’s little concerned about innocent individuals caught in the middle. As long as police departments continue to defund anti-gang units (which could prevent more kids from getting involved in gangs) this will continue to expand, as we have seen so far this summer.
Our youth are in desperate need of our guidance. We must increase social workers’ abilities to visit chilren’s homes and provide resources to those in need. When a 13-year-old has eight criminal charges against him, that is a plea for help. If a child wants to get out of a gang but doesn’t know where to turn for help, there is something horribly wrong with how we are raising our kids. When see young girls increasingly getting involved in more violent crimes (which is the new trend of the summer of 2021) then we as ‘experts’ are falling behind.
There need to be more severe penalties for those providing guns to young kids. We can reward our youth for assisting officers with information and ask our entertainers to stop lambasting such efforts as ‘selling out’ and demanding violent retaliation for them. Instead, we need professional athletes and entertainers to financially commit to funding sports events and supplies that encourage our kids to stay away from criminal behavior.
If our youth can stop feeling left out or ignored, it would ease the high level of hostility and tension. If we learn anything this summer it should be that the causes of youth violence are much deeper than they appear on the surface — and this will not end when schools are back in session.
GREG RALEIGH
Washington
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