Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 2, 1993 TAG: 9302020331
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
VIOLENCE: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY
THERE IS an epidemic of violence among our young. The TV screens and newspapers of our major cities are filled with its victims, mostly young males, mostly black, slain over drugs or turf or just a pair of sneakers.The individual reasons don't matter. The cause of the epidemic is a widespread willingness to kill or die over something insignificant.
But not here. Not yet.
We're seeing signs of the social disease, yes. Percy Johnson died from it. He was shot to death in Roanoke the other day, reportedly after he got mad over a $5 bet and stole a coat. The guns came out and, at 17, Johnson became the victim of an adolescent dispute.
Even one such senseless killing is appalling, and there have been others. But we can assure ourselves that this is Washington, D.C., where 482 people were murdered in 1991. That was roughly one of every 1,200 residents. In Roanoke that year, 13 people were killed, about one in 7,700.
Does this mean we needn't worry? Not at all. Smaller cities enjoy no immunity from urban scourges, they just tend to catch them later. Sharieff Omar, a D.C. transplant who owned the coat that Johnson apparently died for, predicts Roanoke's streets will get meaner. "It's going to get to the point that people are going to get used to it," he said in relating his account of the slaying.
That might be so. But it doesn't have to be.
Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, former public health commissioner for Massachusetts, offers some encouraging advice in a book she has co-authored called "Deadly Consequences." Prothrow-Stith urges communities to approach teen-age violence as a public health problem. It is not inevitable in minority communities, she argues. She knows too many black men who are calm, moral and self-controlled (among them her father and her husband) to believe that.
Prothrow-Stith says that if all parts of society work in a coordinated way - the schools, the courts, the media, the churches, the entertainment and business communities - we can reach children at risk of being drawn into a culture of violence and teach them that there are constructive ways to cope with anger and aggression.
She points to Mothers Against Drunk Driving as an example of this kind of coordinated social response to a public safety threat.
Perhaps what is needed is a combined strategy: a more organized approach by institutions to intervene with at-risk children, along with a common determination by ordinary citizens that violence will not be tolerated.
There's evidence the latter strategy can be effective. In Roanoke, students are now turning in classmates who bring guns to school. They don't want to be afraid, and they aren't tolerating them. Meantime, law-abiding residents are cooperating with community policing efforts to fight crime in some of the city's tougher neighborhoods. They don't want to be unsafe in their homes and on their streets, and they aren't tolerating it.
Even so, more than mutual self-protection is needed. Omar's view from the street is that violence is escalating, and it has less to do with the nature of the disputes (which tends to be trivial) than with the need to feel important, to have self-respect (which is anything but trivial). "Everybody's got something to prove," he said.
Which points to the sort of messages an entire underclass of people must be receiving practically every day of their lives. A teen-ager who is willing to take a life or give up his own for a coat apparently doesn't think he's worth very much. We should ask ourselves why.