Will the Real Violence Interrupters Please Step Forward?

 

Murder on the streets of Milwaukee has become a weekly event.  By the second week in July there had been 73 homicides.  84% of the dead had been shot.  77% were Black and 75% were male.  44% were younger than 30 and charges have been filed in only 40% of the cases. This beautiful city beside the beautiful Great Lake can be lethal if you find yourself in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time.

 

James Causey is a journalist who writes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  He happens to be Black and the paper gives him a lot of ink.  In the Sunday edition on July 6, he wrote about murder in Milwaukee in an extensive article called “Ending Gun Violence Takes More than Law Enforcement. We Need Community”.  He described his research on Milwaukee’s murders as “a mind-numbing array of stories about carnage. The victims are younger and the senselessness staggering”. On that we can agree. 

 

Throughout the rest of his article, Causey got it wrong. He promotes the liberal ideology that characterizes all his writing, making everything about race and oppression and never venturing near the hard truths that are the only path out of this darkness.  This type of liberal “advocacy” is a death sentence to freedom and personal responsibility.

 

Causey cites some sobering statistics as he makes the case for his proposed solutions.  “African Americans are 12 times more likely to be victims of gun homicides compared to white individuals.  The disparity grows even wider for young people: Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 are nearly 23 times more likely to die from firearm homicides than their white male peers.  Additionally, Black males under the age of 18 are 14.5 times more likely to die by firearm homicide compared to their white counterparts”. 

 

Causey concludes that “Gun violence is a racial justice issue that disproportionately impacts Black communities across the United States. Although they represent only 14% of the population, Black people account for 60% of firearm homicide victims each year”. 

 

According to Causey, “Many people do not see how the death of a young Black teen impacts them”, a stunning pronouncement of presumed indifference.  Assuming the community at large is hardened to all of the killing, he tries to make the case everyone should care about these murders because they are a financial burden to taxpayers. He references the work of researchers in Milwaukee that quantified the cost of each murder at $2 million, taking into account things like health care costs, investigative expenses, incarceration costs, victim compensation and social service support.

 

Causey thinks Milwaukee should address its murder problem by pouring money into social programs which according to Reggie Moore, Director of Violence Prevention Policy and Engagement at the Medical College of Wisconsin, are understaffed and underfunded.  The programs described utilize “violence interrupters” who are “credible messengers” because of their own rough backgrounds, to try to find peaceful solutions to the conflicts that are producing so much killing. Moore acknowledges it’s tough to get buy in to sinking money into social programs because “the challenge lies in demonstrating how a program has prevented a shooting or homicide, especially when the only evidence is a person coming forward to say, ‘I was going to shoot this person, but thanks to this program, I chose not to’.” We will not find the answer to what is wrong in Milwaukee by flushing money down the sewer of liberal social programming.

 

It isn’t the color of people’s skin that makes them lost and broken and destructive.  There are countless individuals living good lives across all races, genders, ethnicities and every other attribute used to define meaningless differences among people. If we are going to reverse this downward trajectory, we will have to speak the truth about what is making a good life impossible for so many loudly and clearly.

 

Cavalier Johnson is the Mayor of Milwaukee, who happens to be Black.  He is a sleezy politician who has neither the skill nor the character to provide effective leadership to any community.  He has no relationship with the truth and deflects responsibility at every opportunity.  He attributes the homicide problem in Milwaukee to the intersection between the many guns available and the people with criminal records who acquire them, and his answer is more gun laws.  “We don’t control gun laws at the local level.  That’s a state level…and a federal level responsibility”.  When Kendall Corder, a 32-year-old Black police officer was ambushed and murdered responding to reports of gunfire, Johnson’s contribution was to urge Milwaukee residents to ask state and federal officials “What are you actively doing to make the job of policing safer in Milwaukee?”  “That’s where the power lies”.  Cavalier Johnson will never be part of any real solutions. 

 

In Milwaukee, 87% of Black children are born to single mothers. Well over half of the Black students in the Milwaukee Public School System are chronically truant, defined as missing more than 10% of scheduled school days.  Just 9% of Black 4th graders and 15% of Black 8th graders read at grade level and just 12% of 4th graders and 8% of 8th graders can do math at grade level.  Given this level of performance and the fact that half of the students in Milwaukee’s schools are Black, the 69% graduation rate reported for Milwaukee Public Schools is highly suspect and evidence that students are passed along and turned loose without acquiring the skills they need for productive, successful lives.

 

Boys need a father in the home to teach them how to become men.  Girls need a mother in the home to teach them how to become women.  Two married parents in the home have their hands full with the primary responsibility of teaching their children how to live.  Parenting and reproducing are not even close to the same thing. Society cannot compensate when the nuclear family fails to do its job.

 

Make no mistake.  The societal decline of recent decades is by no means an exclusively Black problem. Wherever children are taught how to live we find success.  Wherever children are deprived of the fundamentals of life we find brokenness and despair.  James Causey’s mischaracterization of the disparity in the number of Black homicides as a racial justice issue demands rebuttal.  The numbers coincide with the disproportionate number of young Black children who are deprived of two parents teaching them how to live.

 

We are now generations down the road from a time when there was a shared understanding of the rights and responsibilities that come with living free.  The damage from our decline is deep and pervasive and it would be naïve to think that all of the broken people who have no regard for life and are living lives of lawlessness and despair will find their way out of the wilderness.  But we are in an urgent moment and reembracing the fundamentals of how to live is essential to changing course.  During the Kenosha riots of 2020 James Ward, a Pastor who happens to be Black, attended a community round table hosted by President Donald Trump. He spoke the truth about the abysmal failure to teach morality to our children.  He said a pencil in the hands of a bad man can become a lethal weapon; yet you can give the code to our nuclear arsenal to a good man and we will all be safe.  He knew what he was talking about.  He was willing to lead.  Milwaukee is experiencing an epidemic of killing.  Violence interrupters are urgently needed.  Their work is endless and sometimes thankless. They’re called parents.