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A street vendor and a newborn baby were killed Sunday in a vicious immigrant gang shooting in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Here's the background, from the Los Angeles Times:
The signs of progress are hard to miss in the streets around MacArthur Park.
A few aging buildings have been reborn as luxury lofts, new restaurants and an art gallery have opened, and a renovated band shell has brought concerts and family festivals to the park.
There's less graffiti on the walls, more police on the streets and crime is down significantly compared with a decade ago. Gone are the chalk lines on the sidewalks where gang members once marked their turf.
But the teeming neighborhood of mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants remains mired in poverty and urban crowding. The streets are filled with people day and night -- residents, shoppers, street vendors, drug dealers, transients and people selling fake IDs to illegal immigrants. And gang members, despite aggressive crackdowns, remain a powerful force in the district about two miles west of downtown L.A.
Los Angeles prosecutors on Tuesday charged a reputed gang member, Luis Silva, 19, for his alleged role in the shooting at an outdoor marketplace Saturday night on the corner of 6th Street and Burlington Avenue, injuring a vendor and killing a newborn. In the criminal complaint against Silva, he was charged with murder, attempted murder and extortion. An arraignment is scheduled for Oct. 2, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said members of the 18th Street gang tried to extort money from outdoor vendors Sept. 1. One vendor refused to pay. The gang members returned Saturday and opened fire, they said. A law enforcement source said the assailants were seeking $50 from the vendor they allegedly shot.
The shooting, residents and police say, is a reminder of the continuing pull of gangs, who prey on immigrants, many of whom are here illegally and therefore are reluctant to report crimes.
Read the whole thing. This is another brutal reminder of the new urban underclass developing in the nation's immigrant communities. See Heather MacDonald's "The Immigrant Gang Plague" for a full discussion of this growing threat.
There's been more attention to immigrant crime in recent months, in the aftermath of the Newark schoolyard murders, where the main suspect is illegal alien Jose Carranza. See also Michelle Malkin on immigrant crime and illegal alien sanctuary cities. Plus, see this Washington Post story on illegal alien crime and deportation.
This morning's Los Angeles Times details the findings of the paper's "Homicide Report," a study of the distribution of homicides in Los Angeles County for 2007. Here's an excerpt from the main summary:
An online project of The Times called the Homicide Report has tracked Los Angeles County homicides, as they have happened, since the beginning of the year. The project has yielded a vivid statistical outline of the county's current homicide problem -- at least 520 killings by early August. It also has chronicled some of the damage that rippled through families and communities rent by deaths that happened before their time.
Homicide is not fair, hitting hardest among Latinos and especially among blacks. Latinos are killed at more than three times the rate of whites, while blacks succumb to homicide at three times the rate of Latinos, the Times analysis shows.
Adult males are the eye of the storm. The national homicide rate is about six deaths per 100,000 people each year. But for Latino men in their 20s in Los Angeles County, the rate is 52 deaths, and for black men, 176 deaths. In human terms, that means that losing a son to homicide, a remote possibility in some neighborhoods, looms as a daily threat in others.
In South Los Angeles and Athens this year, for example, there have been at least 20 homicides within a single ZIP Code in just seven months. A few miles away, in the Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Brentwood ZIP Codes, months go by without any.
People living close to frequent violent death find refuge in denial. On the same streets where sidewalks are stained by the melted wax from homicide shrines and young men loiter in wheelchairs, people talk about being "caught slippin' " (letting one's guard down) or about friends having "passed" (not having been killed). Bereaved parents describe years of obsessively protective behavior -- children locked indoors, hourly cellphone calls to check in. Then, in the next breath, they avow that they never thought their child could be murdered.
Be sure to read the story, and check out the chronicles of the victims at the homicide report blog.
I recently posted on the tragedy of America's urban crisis.
I am deeply troubled by these statistics. Urban violence is a national crisis, and the 2008 presidential hopefuls need to address this issue more forcefully. Remedies to the crisis are not to be found solely in the realm of law enforcement, but must also come from changes at the family level.
I was very moved by this story of Maria Hicks, of Pico Rivera, who was killed last Friday when she confronted a youth graffiti tagger in her neighborhood:
Maria Hicks lived in her quiet Pico Rivera neighborhood her whole life -- two houses down from her mother, and across the street from her daughter and three grandchildren.
She believed in keeping up the neighborhood, and few things bothered her more than newly scrawled graffiti.
On Friday night, police said, Hicks, 57, was driving home from visiting her sister in Whittier when she noticed a teenager spraying graffiti on a cinder-block wall two blocks from her house near San Gabriel River Parkway and Woodford Street.
Hicks honked her horn and flashed her lights at the teenager. As he walked away, she followed him in her car. Suddenly, another car pulled up behind her and someone fired several rounds through Hicks' rear windshield. She was struck in the back of the head and died Monday at a local hospital.
"You think about it, and my mom died over a can of spray paint," said Hicks' daughter, Melinda Wall, 34. "She was not one to hold her tongue. She felt strongly about keeping your community nice."
Sheriff's detectives arrested three people Wednesday in connection with Hicks' slaying, which has touched a nerve in Pico Rivera and beyond. Residents took part in a community candlelight vigil Wednesday night, and her death has sparked discussions in communities around Southern California dealing with a rise in graffiti and other gang-related vandalism.
Read the whole story. I was amazed a couple of weeks back with all the graffiti in New York, some of it in fact demonstrating tremendous creative artistry. But stories like this one remind me that graffiti is a sign of crime, social breakdown, and the loss of order in a community.
I send my condolences to the family, and hope and pray that her killers are brought to justice.
Stanley Crouch, in his column up today at the New York Daily News, argues that the crisis of violence in urban America cries out for public debate and discussion. Yet, the issue is a hot potato on the presidential campaign trail:
We have now developed an urban badlands which is national and troubling because of the incredible numbers of people who are murdered or suffer the physical and psychological effects of violent crime. Our presidential candidates are quick on the draw when asked about the war on terror or homeland security, but the American people have not heard a peep from them about the concrete killing fields of our cities. Perhaps, because so many of the perpetrators and the victims are "people of color," the donkeys don't want to be seen as bleeding hearts while the elephants are afraid of being called racists.
In the 19th century, murderous cowboys, rustlers and bank or train robbers had neither the arms nor the occasions presented to them that could have resulted in the kinds of carnage we now take for granted. The mob wars of the 20th century left numbers of dead that would be pointed to with pride by a mayor today as proof of how much better things have gotten.
Addressing a dilemma tantamount to terrorism, a few months ago Ben Stein wrote in the conservative American Spectator that, "In the five and a half years since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities." In his book, "The Devil and Dave Chappelle," William Jelani Cobb writes: "Between 1976 and 2004, African-Americans, who are 13% of the population, constituted nearly 47% of the homicide cases in the United States."
Besides all of the human costs of these murders, the burden is estimated by the World Health Organization to cost an annual $300 billion. That amounts to about 150 weeks in Iraq, or three years.
This would seem a good subject for presidential debates, right? Wrong, apparently.
But just last week the news media were often given to breast-beating as they reported on the three college students who were lined up against a wall and killed execution style in Newark. Newark youth worker Shamonique Jones, who lives in the area where the three were gunned down, told The New York Times that the tragedy was a matter of "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" because the Crips, who ominously trouble the neighborhood, do much of their recruiting in the summer months. On CNN those murders were put in the context of slaughters taking place at nauseating rates in many other American cities.
One Newark man interviewed by CBS seemed to speak for all of those living under the oppression of violent crime when he said that the neighborhood where the three young people were murdered is under siege. There seemed to be more robberies, burglaries and carjackings. But Newark Police Chaplain John McClain, who is the great uncle of one of the three victims, said that the killers should be thought of as what they are, terrorists.
A New Jersey resident asked a fundamental question, "Will these knuckleheads have to join the Ku Klux Klan before this country wakes up and faces the horror of what they are doing?" I think that question should be answered by every one of those running for President because the corpses will not have stopped piling up throughout our concrete killing fields when the next commander in chief is sworn in.
Croach is perceptive in his point that those on the left avoid the bleeding heart tag and conservatives hestitate to speak truth to race politics for fear of the racist label.
I've commented before that the Democrats, at a recent debate, missed the chance to seriously address the crisis of black underclass crime. Both parties, however, have an historic opportunity to make urban policy a major platform during the 2008 race. This shift would be especially smart for the GOP, as it moves to reestablish itself as the party of competent government and the champion of traditional values.
Steven Malanga, over at City Journal, pins down the root causes in last weekend's triple murder in Newark, New Jersey:
The horrific, execution-style killing of three teens in Newark last weekend has sparked widespread outrage and promises of reform from politicians, religious leaders, and community activists, who are pledging a renewed campaign against the violence that plagues New Jersey’s largest city. But much of the reaction, though well-intentioned, misses the point. Behind Newark’s persistent violence and deep social dysfunction is a profound cultural shift that has left many of the city’s children growing up outside the two-parent family—and in particular, growing up without fathers. Decades of research tell us that such children are far likelier to fail in school and work and to fall into violence than those raised in two-parent families. In Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when the traditional family comes close to disappearing.
According to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 32 percent of Newark children are being raised by their parents in a two-adult household. The rest are distributed among families led by grandparents, foster parents, and single parents—mostly mothers. An astonishing 60 percent of the city’s kids are growing up without fathers. It isn’t that traditional families are breaking up; they aren’t even getting started. The city has one of the highest out-of-wedlock birthrates in the country, with about 65 percent of its children born to unmarried women. And 70 percent of those births are to women who are already poor, meaning that their kids are born directly into poverty.
The economic consequences of these numbers are unsettling, since single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today. In Newark, single parents head 83 percent of all families living below the poverty line. If you are a child born into a single-parent family in Newark, your chances of winding up in poverty are better than one in five, but if you are born into a two-parent family, those chances drop to just one in twelve.
And the social consequences are even more disturbing. Research conducted in the 1990s found that a child born out of wedlock was three times more likely to drop out of school than the average child, and far more likely to wind up on welfare as an adult. Studies have also found that about 70 percent of the long-term prisoners in our jails, those who have committed the most violent crimes, grew up without fathers.
The starkness of these statistics makes it astonishing that our politicians and policy makers ignore the subject of single parenthood, as if it were outside the realm of civic discourse. And our religious leaders, who once preached against such behavior, now also largely avoid the issue, even as they call for prayer vigils and organize stop-the-violence campaigns in Newark. Often, in this void, the only information that our teens and young adults get on the subject of marriage, children, and family life comes through media reports about the lifestyles of our celebrity entertainers and athletes, who have increasingly shunned matrimony and traditional families. Once, such news might have been considered scandalous; today, it is reported matter-of-factly, as if these pop icons’ lives were the norm.
Malanga might have added that the break-up of the traditional family structure - especially the structure of the black American family - has been a focal point of social welfare policy analysis for more than forty years. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his landmark study, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" (1965), quotes E. Franklin Frazier to summarize his case on the "tangle of pathologies" arising from black family disintegration:
As the result of family disorganization a large proportion of Negro children and youth have not undergone the socialization which only the family can provide. The disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development. Because the disorganized family has failed in its function as a socializing agency, it has handicapped the children in their relations to the institutions in the community. Moreover, family disorganization has been partially responsible for a large amount of juvenile delinquency and adult crime among Negroes. Since widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in the family required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in the Negro and American society which will enable the Negro father to play the role required of him.
Frazier's quotation is from 1950. Things had not improved for the black family by the time Moynihan wrote his analysis for the Lyndon Johnson administration fifteen years later. The "Moynihan Report" generated a tremendous backlash in the black community, as it was seen as "blaming the victim," obviously not a popular reform avenue at a time when the civil rights redistributive regime was kicking into high gear. This is why single parenthood remains out of mainstream reform discourse: It's politically incorrect to focus on individual-level pathologies as the source of personal and social disorganization. Rather, structures and institutions must change - rights activists will argue - for there to be real progress toward equal opportunity and mobility.
There's something else important to note coming out of the Newark murders. I was in New York on the weekend of the killings, and this story from the New York Times mentions the phenomenon of witness intimidation in the black community as it relates to the Newark case:
Some residents told detectives that they saw a group of men running from the school just after hearing the shots, but no one saw their faces or knew exactly how many there were....
Witness intimidation and fear of retaliation has stymied law enforcement efforts to combat violence in communities across Essex County, and particularly in Newark, where drug trading and gangs fuel most of the crimes. Ms. [Essex County prosecutor, Paula T.] Dow’s office has been reluctant to file murder charges in cases with single eyewitnesses because so many of those cases have fallen apart.
The story notes that the fourth victim, Natasha Ariel, may be the key source of evidence for the prosecutor's office. As of Thursday, Ms. Ariel had identified a suspect from a photo lineup, although Ms. Dow is waiting to get a taped statement before proceeding further in the case.
I've blogged about witness intimidation here. The phenomenon represents an advanced condition of the breakdown of the black community structure. Black urban culture has deteriorated to the point where upstanding families - facing extreme threats to their safety - have little recourse but to let urban thugs take over entire neighborhoods. As long as these pathologies continue - and until black culture shifts toward privileging citizenship and responsibility over social neglect and chaos - there can be little hope for the success of more forceful public policies, at least for those social welfare approaches falling outside of aggressive anti-crime initiatives.
