The Commission believes there is a grave danger that some communities may resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The harmful effects of overreaction are incalculable. The Commission condemns moves to equip police departments with mass destruction weapons, such as automatic rifles, machine guns, and tanks. Weapons which are designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in densely populated urban communities.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
... we must stop seeing urban violence as an argument to be won and instead look at it as a problem to be solved. On the right, racist blame-shifting and fearmongering must be rejected. On the left, race-based mistrust of law enforcement must be addressed. A diverse new political constituency must be created to demand practical solutions to the pressing challenge of urban violence.
Anti-violence efforts are not a substitute for broader and deeper efforts to remedy economic and social injustice--they are, rather, an essential aspect of them.
We have been looking at gangs all wrong, and we have been doing so for decades. We fetishize gangs, obsessing over the details of their rituals, rites, and ceremonies. We exaggerate their numbers and their crimes. We stereotype them, grouping all gangs and gang members into a monolithic whole. And, despite all this attention, we have yet to find any specifically gang-oriented policy that consistently works to reduce crime or, more importantly, violence.
... while a glance at the evidence seems to show that gangs cause violence, a deeper look also reveals the opposite: violence causes gangs.
Police create gang units, prosecutors build gang cases, and politicians pass laws prohibiting all manner of gang activities. Nothing has worked. Some activists coo over gangs, mistaking them for nascent community groups. That has not worked either. We have been so wrong about gangs, for so long, that an entirely new approach is needed. We have to start over and refocus our efforts not on gangs but on gang violence. If a gang or gang member is violent, they deserve our anti-violence attention. If they are not, our time and energy are better spent elsewhere. With gangs, the issue is not the group's identity; it is the group's behavior. Gangs are not the problem; gangbanging is.
If you attack gangs, they get stronger. You must declare war on violence and trauma.