I had been thinking a lot about the death of Sean Patrick Conroy last week. Conroy suffered an asthma attack, and died, after being jumped by a group of boys in the Concourse at 13th and Market. He suffered a very unfair and brutal death in a place I have spent a lot of time myself.
And just when I gathered my thoughts enough to write about it, something else happened...
Today's Inquirer has a story about Tyesha Tazwell, attacked underground at 8th and Market by a group of kids whose ages ranged from 16 to 20. Tazwell was jumped and injured, but is alive and likely to recover. from the Inky:
Tazwell said she couldn't explain the ordeal she suffered, but believes that the root of the problem extends beyond the teens themselves.
"It starts at home. They don't have strong foundations in their households, and that's why they come out and do senseless things."
I agree. And that is why the plan to charge the five Gratz High School students involved in last week's incident as adults seems ludicrous to me.
Of what practical use is it to throw the kids who attacked Sean Patrick Conroy in jail for the rest of their lives, or charge them with the death penalty? Or to encourage homicide investigators to dig up whatever evidence they can to make them stick?
How does it help us to have our DA find the most stringent charges she can in either case?
Is the logic here that punishing all of these kids as severely as possible will make the rest of us feel safe again?
Those that have developed a bloodlust for the 16 and 17 year old boys from last week, and maybe the kids from this week, are sadly mistaken if they think that life imprisonment, or execution, is going to end random acts of violence in this city. Or, make any of us feel safer in the Concourse.
I'm not saying that both sets of attackers shouldn't suffer the consequences of their actions. And obviously, we have to deal with these kids inside the confines of our current system, but we need to quickly develop a bigger, concrete response that gets down to the root of the problem here.
And not just because this is the "liberal" thing to do. My concerns are selfish: I have been jumped before, and I did not like it. And I don't want it to happen again. To me, or anyone else. And I don't think sending these kids to jail forever will help all that much.
So rather than demagoguery and hysterics, I'd like to see a response by our city's leaders that makes a difference.
I think these incidents are proof that we need to act urgently to improve our city's schools, access to jobs, and, perhaps less practically but equally important, offer a sense of hope to those whose reckless behavior comes, in some part, not from inherent evil, but a real sense of hopelessness.
If we can't move beyond panic, and actually hear the clarion call sounded by these incidents now, well, then when?
From the title
I thought maybe you were going to talk about something else...
I agree with all that.
But I'd also add that there are huge infrastructure and design problems with that center city subway system. Design sure doesn't fix social problems, but bad design can exacerbate them. Huge sections of the concourse need to be permanently closed off, and what is left has to be redesigned. No more dead ends and confusing labyrinthine passageways lined with empty dark retail. I know so many women who have been followed down there and panic-edly couldn't easily figure out which way to turn to get to the street most quickly.
I am sorry though
that is really an aside.
Yea I don't disagree
In fact, at some level the fear of the Concourse, that maybe a lot of us have, is part of what makes this story compelling.
However, don't let the design flaws in the Concourse obfuscate the fact that random acts of violence happen all over the city in sometimes the most public of places. And without addressing the causes of violence in a serious way, well, they'll never stop.
Yeah
it is hard to talk about without sounding like hand-wringing, but all of this--it's evidence of social breakdown. I've been thinking about the victim side, but I guess both are sides of a coin. I am reading bell hooks' books on love, and she talks very painfully and compellingly about what it is like to live in fear and anxiety because you are in a place (geographic, social, familial) where you are not safe. And talks about the causes and effects of that. In short: fear and domination make it impossible to either give or receive love, love more or less being taking action towards the well-being of people other than and above oneself.
Re: "Sense of hopelessness"
They weren't all kids:
That's five out of up to twelve people who took part in this attack. There were probably more among the remaining seven who are over 18 years old.
That said, it doesn't seem that, despite the fact this woman's purse was stolen, robbery was the motive and it clearly wasn't the motive in the first incident. There are people who rob, steal, sell drugs because they can't think of any other way to earn a living or because they themselves have developed a drug habit and I would agree that the "sense of hopelessness" plays a big role in the choices they make.
These incidents, however, seem to come from a bunch of kids - and young adults - just being flat out jerks. It's behavior that's no different than the rich, white suburban kids who trashed that house in Jersey (if I remember right), intimidate people for kicks or destroy property for the fun of it.
I often agree with the things you write, but now that this reckless teen behavior is becoming more and more dangerous to folks, like me or my wife, who walk those concourses all the time, I'm not so against sending a pretty firm message that that kind of crap is going to get you in a lot of trouble. I also think that you hurt the cause of more liberal policies towards juvenile criminals, drug offenders and poverty-related crimes when you lump these recent incidents with those other problems.
Be more specific
I don't disagree that these kids are "flat out jerks." And as much as I'd like to be hopeful, not all of them are probably redeemable. I also know 16 year old boys who do some pretty dumb stuff, especially at the behest of others, and I fail to see how charging them as adults in the Conroy incident and killing them or locking them up for life makes any of us safer.
Do you really think someone with so little impulse control as to attack someone at 2 in the afternoon in the first place is gonna stop and rethink their behavior because someone else got charged as an adult with murder?
I am also not sure where you are going with this statement:
First and foremost, do you actually know that "reckless teen behavior" is any worse now than it has been? And second, come on Dan, this exactly the kind of dichotomous thinking about crime and poverty in our city that has us all so twisted up.
I know people are freaked out--I am too--but we need to think a bit more clearly about this.
Continuing to get my butt handed to me but...
I didn't say that the "reckless teen behavior" isn't worse. I said specifically that it is becoming "more dangerous." In terms of quantity, there are probably just as many incidents as there ever were. The difference is in the quality of these incidents. What may have been a group of kids throwing eggs at random passersby or dumping a cup of water from the top level of the mall and then running has been replaced by actual physical assault on complete and random strangers.
What would you see as an appropriate consequence for four 16-17-year-olds whose willful actions resulted in the death of another human being?
I agree that life in prison is too much and I've never been a fan of the death penalty but they didn't "accidentally" kill this guy. But they consciously made the decision, to some degree premeditated (in the legal sense as I understand it), to assault the guy and that resulted in his death. There should be some penalty and it should include some amount of incarceration with rehabilitation, education, learning a trade, etc.
Anyway... I still don't agree that they did this because of some "sense of hopelessness" and saying that they did just makes it harder for people to have sympathy for folks who have a justified sense of hopelessness. I'm not sure that sentiment fits into the dichotomous thinking about crime and poverty that you refer to.
But if you mean that I'm saying that one can be poor or one can be a criminal but they can never have anything to do with each other... no I don't believe that. Yes, poverty is a cause of crime. I'm never going to disagree with that and I'm never even going to qualify it with a "but x also has to be present." I just think that in this particular case, the socioeconomic status of these kids or their families had little to do with this particular crime.
As for the impulse control thought: I wonder how many kids who have "rolled up" or "jumped" someone just for kicks - as these guys seemed to be doing - are thinking "damn, that sucks for those" and that "it just as easily could be me" facing these charges. If even 50 kids had that thought cross their mind and it changes their thinking about this supposedly "fun" activity, that's a start.
Since I'm just a visitor to this site, I'll concede you the last word. Let me just say, I made myself suffer through all 55 pages of Philly Blog comments about this incident and our little back and forth looks like Lincoln-Douglas compared to them. (And yes, you can be Lincoln.)
Shameless plug time. Ben, who wants it known that he doesn't agree with me, has written about this incident from the budgetary perspective including numbers for the cost of SEPTA police, how many there are, the ratio of police to riders and how that compares to city police to residents. You can check it out on the It's Our Money blog.
My take is short and maybe too simple
... but my opinion is and always has been that there are good reasons why we try juveniles as juveniles and adults as adults. This does not mean that juveniles don't commit heinous crimes and that they shouldn't be punished strongly. But it does require different considerations at trial, at sentencing, and in the institutions you use to mete out that punishment. Opting out on a case-by-case basis is not only arbitrary, but it casts those considerations to the winds.
If the juvenile system needs to grow and change to deal with more violent crimes, then it needs to change. But phantom toughness doesn't fix our systems, or our kids.
Finally, I'm not exactly sure where Conroy was attacked, but there is a part of Suburban Station that is nicknamed "Sherwood Forest," because it is essentially unpoliced. In addition to design changes, there's a serious need for better deployment of security and police. Right now our transit police are basically doubling as school/juvenile police, fanning out when school lets out -- which ultimately hurts everyone.
(If SEPTA and the city can't get it together, perhaps the Center City District could help contribute additional security, a la the University City District.)
PA has more juveniles on death row than any other state
which is all the more reason I ditto tcarmody's take that we have a juvenile justice system for a reason. One of the considerations is that when we talk about "impulsive" most developmental psychologists agree that juveniles simply do not have a developed understanding of consequences and right and wrong as adults do. It doesn't mean there's a free pass on anything a child does, but it does mean that the juvenile justice system is supposed to provide that youth and their families with specific services. It's supposed to be a completely different mindset than locking them up with adults and throwing away the key.
Clarification
Pennsylvania has the highest proportion of people on death row who were convicted as adults for crimes they committed when they were juveniles. I think that's stated correctly.
We're number one!
Woo... has the state motto changed to 'Kill 'em all, let G-d sort 'em out?'
Or is that just the national motto?
I prefer 'Take Me out to the Ball Game,'
-Z
Youth Violence
This type of quasi-impulsive assault is not uncommon from what I've experienced. I've been on Chestnut St and watched a group of early teens push a lady "'Cause she looked at (them)funny." The van driver in my complex was attacked by a small group of early-adolescents (10-14 yo) and had to go to the ER 2 weeks ago. This past week a young man walking with a group of young men didn't alter his path because I was standing at a bus stop and he walked into the book I was reading. I think he was expecting a response but I gave none and they didn't respond either. Because of my work I am privy to hearing many accounts of how such behavior often starts as a "dare" then escalates into some image-related assertion of status. Much of these behaviors occured in that 3-6 timeframe where young people's time is not closely supervised. Most of the kids I spoke to on the Conroy attack suggested that the teens were either "bored" or that he looked like someone they could target with a low degree of risk (ie he won't fight back).
In terms of what kind of consequences are appropriate in these violations, I agree that they should be case-by-case. I think most young people are OK with the idea of "doing time," but there is a trend in other states called "Balanced and Restorative Justice" that addresses issues like making amends and showing empathy for the people who have been hurt. It is built into the court order, usually, and the case cannot be discharged until it is complete. If someone breaks into my home or beats me up, I don't see how cleaning a playground for community service is balanced or restorative.
Obama 2008