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More than 200 show at meeting on violence following shooting of 7-year-old
By adamg on Fri, 05/29/2015 - 11:35am
The Dorchester Reporter covered last night's meeting between city and police officials and Bowdoin Street residents.
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Comments
Really?
“We're here to have a conversation we should have had 20 years ago" Paulo De Barros.
20 years ago! Within the past 20 years how many community meetings have taking place regarding youth violence, i'd say at least 20. This conversation happens every summer.
Guess what, the shooter isn't from Weston, he's more than likely from the neighborhood. Start holding your neighbors accountable if you want to see substantive change. Its your neighborhood after all, unless you're cool with allowing the punks (i know how sensitive you are about the "T" word) to run the show.
Did we have these discussions during the Code of Silence?
I wasn't really immersed in Boston stuff back then, despite living here (but spending all day covering news in the suburbs), but were there people complaining about Townies and whatever you call them in South Boston not doing something about the punks and mobsters that were turning their neighborhoods into killing fields and drug dens? Did we hold the whites of those neighborhoods collectively responsible for the Bulgers of the world, or is it just minority communities that have to answer for every last sin of people who share their skin color or ethnicity?
A 7 year old was shot. Many
A 7 year old was shot. Many times children are injured just trying to get home after school, for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I am aware of the 70's & 80's Southie and it's reputation. Drugs were rampant.
I don't remember hearing about children getting shot at. I can't connect the two.
It's not a racial thing as much as it is a neighborhood thing, it seems to me anyways. You're trying to provoke a racial side to this. I don't see it.
I think it triggers the outrage when innocent children are getting hurt. I mean, can you imagine your child being shot? I can't.
Just my opinion.
(a) the kid wasn't shot at,
(a) the kid wasn't shot at, it was a stray bullet
(b) any account of Southie from the time period has stray bullets hitting people. And of kids getting shot.
Take one interview of Michael Patrick MacDonald:
LAMB: What's the story of Stevie?
MacDONALD: My little brother Stevie, in 1990, was falsely accused of murder and...
LAMB: What were the circumstances?
MacDONALD: His best friend was--who was 13 years old, died from a gunshot wound to the head. And Steven found him dying. And I got very involved in his case once the police--once I started to realize what the police were doing, once I found out that the police had falsified his call to 911 and so forth. He found his friend dying and called 911.
Did you even read the book?
If I remember right, the kids were playing with a gun and it went off, killing his brother's friend. His brother said that the friend had been holding the gun but the police were convinced that his brother had shot him and really did a number on him. I have no idea why you're using a random quote about an accidental shooting to make a point about how stray bullets were allegedly flying around Southie in 1990. All Souls is a brilliant book and a pretty unflinching story of a chaotic family living in a chaotic time but it doesn't support your point at all.
It's called grasping at straws
Now, if he just went through Bulger's hit parade, or noted the blood on the streets of Charlestown instead, the point of differing views of violence would be valid, but no, the very controversial gun death in Southie was the only thing he could come up with.
Yes people were complaining
Yes people were complaining in the 70s-80s about Southie being a festering oasis of organized crime. There was a lot of derogatory language about "Micks" and "Guinies"being hooligans best left to killing each other.
No community meetings though. The political establishment was in bed with the mobsters and local law enforcement was believed to be paid off to look the other way in mob related affairs.
We pretty much did.
Though I recoil at the tone of the post you're responding to, I'd say that yes--at the time and since then, we DO blame those neighborhoods. The very fact that we use this term "code of silence" implies widespread complicity. And the reporting and literature that focuses on those neighborhoods in that era addresses very directly the combination of fear, provincial insularity and distrust of authority that made both Charlestown and South Boston seem like havens for a certain kind of criminal. That said, we'd need to pull stats but I think comparing 1970s South Boston and modern day Geneva Ave is iffy. Maybe it's the proliferation of guns but the killing of random civilians, this now-weekly news about innocent women and children being hit with bullets is NOT what I associate with even the worst days of Bulger rule.
Why are you assuming the
Why are you assuming the shooter has the aame color skin as the victim?
All due respect, Adam
but I don't think you've ever woken up to a freshly wiped bullet on the doorstep in the hallway of your apartment on Walford Way.
Secondly, every time someone got clipped everyone in town knew who the shooter was within minutes. The impetus was then on the cops to make the case, which they usually couldn't due to those bullets on the doorsteps.
15-20 years ago, the shooter
15-20 years ago, the shooter probably wasn't old enough to have been influenced by any community meeting. Kids grow up, and the cycle and discussion has to begin again.
I know, huh?
Take, for example, the recent biker shootout in Texas. The silence from the moderate white leadership, and from the white community generally, has been deafening. It's time for whites to start owning the biker gang problem, acknowledging that it's theirs to fix, and holding their own accountable, rather than expecting society at large to deal with it.
Thank you!
Thank you!
I'll try;
I'll try;
The biker incident was a "one time" thing. Shootings in urban areas are not. In the last 10 years, how many innocent children and passer bys were harmed, or worse, killed just going to or from school? How often do those crimes go unsolved, too many. At least the biker groups were rounded up and arrested and the bar was shut down.
I don't think these bikers are "innocents" and unfortunately I don't see an end to the shootings, do you? I wonder what kind of weekend Baltimore will have this weekend? Hopefully better than the last. It's a small number of people ruining countless lives.
Again, like Adam equating the two doesn't work for me.
Victory!
Yes, I am glad that biker incident was just a one-off.
http://www.amazon.com/Hells-Angels-Strange-Terrible-Saga/dp/0345410084
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/19/us/biker-gang-history-of-violence/
Different types of crimes.
White biker gangs are bad news (although even those arrested in Waco were not even close to being all white). I'd still say the random killing of innocent people in gun battles by white biker gangs are dwarfed by inner city black on black male outdoor shootings.
Still apples and oranges.
No one is defending "biker gangs" or claiming that these guys were just a bunch of good old boys blowing off steam. By definition these guys are outlaws and criminals, not remotely to be confused with your Uncle Harry who likes to ride his Harley to work. The police had an eye on them for good reason and busted up this meeting for good reason too--seems lucky that no bystanders were hurt. But again, these are societal outlaws; they're not embedded in any one community or neighborhood. We've gotten to a point in Boston and a lot of other neighborhoods where a shooting doesn't even raise eyebrows unless it affects a "civilian" and even then, there's too much silence, IMO. I've had one-degree-removed personal connections to two of these young shooting victims, both of them innocent bystanders, and it still makes me sick to my stomach to think about.
Yes, Pete and Sally said it
Yes, Pete and Sally said it better than I.
Why do you believe...
... that people who have the misfortune to live in a neighborhood plagued by gang violence, or people who are of the same racial background as the criminals, have any greater responsibility than you or I do, to "hold accountable" the criminals?
Well I wasn't really talking about that.
But in general, I am more involved in things that happen in my town or neighborhood than I am in places where bikers or urban gangs are problems. I obviously pay taxes which fund a lot of programs in other parts of the state and country, and I chose a profession which is directly involved with urban violence, so I am responsible for that end.
But there isn't much I can do about biker gangs in Texas or murders in Baltimore. I can't help victims there, or help the cops find the bad guys.
I did go to Tito Jackson's Turkey Fry though for the 3rd straight year. It was awesome.
I didn't see anyone condoning
I didn't see anyone condoning biker culture or complaining about the profiling of bikers.
Not quite
A bunch of meth-dealing white trash thugs shot at police, police returned fire and killed nine of them (or less, assuming some of them shot each other.) Do you see any "no justice, no peace" rallies? Hear any calls to crucify those cops? Anything else of that sort? Nope, just a bunch of articles about violent criminal biker gangs in the news, and vast majority of the white population siding with the police.
Wow. Just wow.
Umm... seriously?
Here on my planet, the "no justice, no peace" rallies, etc. were not in response to the police shooting violent criminals, which, generally, nobody complains about, but instead in response to incidents like this
this or this or this
Nobody?
I wouldn't mention any of the usual suspects that would cause admin's knee to jerk uncontrollably, but weren't there plenty of complaints when that fine friendly lad got shot by cops around here not too long ago? You know, the one that put a bullet in a cop's head?
No, there weren't
The night of the shooting, yes, there were some angry people at the scene, but surely somebody as well read as you would recall that there were no protests once it became clear what actually happened.
Strange...
Funny, where I come from, you should hold the police accountable for rampant gang violence, rather than randomly assigning blame to neighbors and possibly single mothers. But that might just be my latent socialism...
There will be more meetings
There will be more peace marches
There will be stores giving out free ice cream.
There will be more cries for the madness to stop.
And next year the process will be repeated.
Meanwhile people will tell you the crime doesn't happen in their neighborhood and Dorchester is a huge place.