In the wake of the national publicity that accompanied the beating death of Chicago Public Schools student Derrion Albert, the issue of teen violence has come to the fore.
Violence toward students in the Chicago Public Schools is, however, neither new nor rare. Between September 2007 and December 2008, more than 500 Chicago Public school students were shot. Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’m guessing about 1 in 100 African-American male high school students gets shot each year in Chicago. Among the kids who have dropped out, no doubt the rate is much higher.
Back when he ran the Chicago Public Schools, current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued repeatedly and passionately that something needed to be done on this issue, but — and there is a lesson here — he couldn’t attract even a fraction of the attention generated by a YouTube video.
Now there appears to be the political will to try to address the problem, and I might be afforded the opportunity to play some small role in the process.
But how do we reduce the violence? The political reality is that any strategy has to reduce violence quickly. While early intervention into the lives of young children might lower future violence, more is needed in this setting. Shootings need to be reduced now.
I had a number of ideas, but after spending some time talking with a group of Black Soul gang members with the help of one of my heroes, Arloa Sutter, I’m not convinced that any of my approaches can work. The best quote of the day went to one of the older gang members: “If Li’l Wayne would rap the times table, that’s what they’d be doing.” By that he meant that the young kids follow whatever lead the hip-hop stars set. I don’t actually completely believe it, but I like the quote.
Thus, I turn to you, the blog readers. Assuming that you had access to some resources, what approach would you take to try to address this problem? Dare to be creative. Most of the obvious things have already been tried and largely failed. We desperately need fresh ideas.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
You say that most of the obvious things have already been tried and largely failed. There is one exception though that has been successful (albeit not a panacea). I’m a criminologist by trade so I can speak with a little bit of experience on the topic. The successful intervention for gun violence (particularly among young gang members) has been Boston’s experience in the mid 1990s with Operation Ceasefire (also often referred to as the Boston Gun Project). This was incredibly successful in Boston, and led to major declines in their violent crime rate during the 1990s. There’s been quite a lot written about it. I believe there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Robert Frank a couple of weeks ago that made mention of it. Here’s a link to a Dept. of Justice brief on the project: http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/188741.pdf. The project basically had several successful components. It used a community approach to policing, drawing in religios and community leaders to help tackle the problem. It also used an approach to policing referred to as “pulling levers policing”. In this approach, the community team met with gang leaders and laid out realistic expectations, including turning an eye to minor things in return for no violence. They made it clear though that they would “pull every lever” to hammer down hard on any gang who violated the clearly articulated expectations of no violence. Again, the data was pretty impressive in support of the approach. There are others that can speak to the approach much better than myself. I would recommend looking into it further. Of course there’s always the success story of the crime decline in New York during the 1990s, but this wasn’t really specific to violent, gun crimes. The commonly recogonized strategies that were used in New York include “broken windows policing” and the use of Comstat.
It seems that most Americans view a high murder rate as an acceptable trade-off for their gun ownership. You can come up with all the good ideas you want but the reality is that until guns are outlawed or severely restricted, not much is going to change.
I believe the shootings are a male expression issue. It’s a way to establish a reputation, street cred, etc. There are other ways to do this. Getting kids into individual tough sports, serious weightlifting (powerlifting/bodybuilding), wrestling, boxing, MMA – areas of competition that require a future to think about (competitions on the calendar that you’re training for). Beat home the msg that guns are tools of the weak. There are genuine problems such as the lack of male role models, the current accepted pop culture (hip/hop and violence) but rather than fight those battles, I think you need to use it. Funnel that desire to be the toughest into the gym, where a single male role model can work with many boys. Those most prone to violence will likely be most attracted to these sports. I can tell you from experience that when you’re focused on a goal and training seriously for it, you’re too exhausted to screw around, and you have less of a desire to mess up. As in Aikido you need to use the force/strength of your opponent to your advantage, because overcoming it directly likely won’t work very well.
Make them write a 500 words composition about anything before they can buy a gun.
There needs to be zero tolerance for any violence in schools. Fighting = expulsion.
I’m left with what Chris Rock said on the subject. “We don’t need gun control, we need bullet control.” If bullets cost $5000 you’d see gun crime come right down. More seriously though, where do the kids get their ammunition, and what can you do to disrupt that supply chain?
Paid School Activities.
Entice the kids to stay off the streets and spend more time at school, discovering that they can have a “family” that doesn’t have to come with a gun.
At the beginning of the school year, everyone enrolled in the school signs a pledge not to get shot. Every student on the pledge list gets a prize if nobody on the list gets shot.
The theory behind the idea is that if I am on the pledge list I may (1) choose not to shoot another student on the list that I otherwise would have shot, (2) choose not to engage in dangerous behavior that might have otherwise got me shot, (3) prevent someone from shooting a person on the pledge list, (4) discourage a student on the pledge list from engaging in dangerous behavior that might result in getting shot.