When three really stupid teenaged boys — and let’s face it, most teenaged boys are really, really stupid — crossed paths with a Cleveland cop at 11:30 pm on West 56th and Denison Avenue on a recent Friday night, the results could have been deadly. One of the youths was carrying a Crossman .177 caliber pellet gun, which, even in the daytime, closely resembles a real firearm. He also was wearing a red bandana covering his face as he approached the off-duty cop’s vehicle as it was stopped at the traffic light.
This clearly had all of the appearances of an armed robbery about to go down, no doubt about it. And just as clearly the cop could have pulled out his service weapon and fired, since he could have concluded that his life was in danger. Thank god he didn’t. Other cops, in the same circumstance, have handled such situations differently as we all too well know.
What the cop did instead was to back his vehicle up out of harm’s way and make a call for on-duty officers, who, when they arrived, spotted the youths a couple of blocks away. They were ordered to the ground, disarmed, and taken into custody. A tragedy averted.
But how the tragedy was averted is of interest. Did the off-duty cop simply do the smart (and in the end humane) thing simply because it was the right thing to do, or did he handle this potentially deadly situation in the manner in which he did because he knows the Cleveland Division of Police is under the federal microscope, being investigated by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department?
The fact is, we’ll never know, but I’d like to think the cop’s actions simply reflected who he is: A decent man who goes to work everyday and does a tough job … just like the majority of cops on the Cleveland force. He made an effort to deescalate the potentially deadly confrontation.
Day in and day out cops are confronted with similar situations around Cleveland, and they usually end without incident. In the three-day period immediately before and after the killing of Tamir Rice six pellet guns were taken from teenagers across Cleveland without incident — Tamir’s death was clearly an outlier.
But these incidents all have a fore story, and all will have a backstory. The fore story in this case has to do with why were three 15-year olds were out at 11:30 at night … not to mention that one was armed with what appeared to be a weapon, and was wearing a bandana over his face. If the parents or guardians have lost control of these youth to the extent they can’t prevent them from doing something stupid and get themselves killed, what should they have done?
We can go on and on about parental responsibility (my first reaction is that the caregivers of these juvenile delinquents should be horsewhipped) but how does that keep young people like these, who are already in the pipeline to prison or the graveyard, from reaching one or the other before they gain their majority?
Indeed, what’s going to happen to this trio of wayward youths … and the hundreds of others like them in Greater Cleveland? Of course these three will now enter into the maw of the overcrowded and understaffed juvenile justice system, from which they will one day emerge. But emerge ready to do what? Straighten up and fly right, or drift back into the same behavior that landed them in custody to begin with? The odds of a successful future are seriously stacked against them.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. What were these kids attempting to do with the pellet gun? Rob someone, obviously, but for what? Well, money, of course. But, what if we, as a society, provide these youth with an honest way to make some money, so they don’t consider robbing someone?
Years ago, my good friend Joe Sadie, a now retired captain who was in charge of community policing for the Cleveland Division of Police (he ran a wonderful, privately funded, program called Cops & Kids) told me flat out, “Mansfield, if you can’t offer these teenagers some way to make a few honest bucks, you really just wasting your time.” He was, and still is, right.
Now, some of these youth are already too far gone; they’re being raised in families where a father, uncle, or someone else of influence is already in the drug dealing thug life, so if they were offered legitimate, above minimum wage work, they’d laugh at it. They’re already dreaming gangster dreams of making “big” money following in the footsteps of the dudes they view as heroes. For these youth, the best thing that can happen to them is they become incarcerated until they come to their senses.
While that might sound harsh, statistics show that young black males who get involved in street/thug life are twice as to die in the mean streets than they are in prison. And I have zero problem with keeping them locked up until they finish high school and learn a trade. Why should we allow them back out into society when they are ill-equipped to do anything but go back to lives of crime?
Ask their mothers this: Would they rather visit their progeny in prison … or in the graveyard?
However, these youth that are already beyond reach are the exceptions, I personally believe the majority of kids from poor families would jump at the chance to make some pocket change … since it’s difficult in the extreme to be broke in a land of plenty.
By way of example: I (along with a number of other professionals) occasionally go into one of the best charter schools in the country — located right here in Cleveland — and speak to student groups, proving by our presence that they indeed have a real future waiting for them. I was asked to mentor a young man who had already graduated and had won a scholarship to one of the best Catholic high schools in the state due to his prowess on the gridiron; he also was pretty good with the books. But he got kicked out for stealing. Needless to say I, along with his parents, was greatly disappointed.
I took him to lunch to ask him why, and his answer opened my eyes. “Mr. Frazier, I could compete in the classroom and on the playing field, but I felt so out of place because all of the other students had everything … iPhones, iPads, MP3 players, you name it, so me and my friend (another student of color) felt like we were sticking out like sore thumbs. So we broke into some lockers, trying to have what all of the other students had.”
Now for some of you his answer is not going to fly, but indeed it resonated with me. Not that I had an impoverished childhood, in fact, I was the kid who had everything; but my best friend dropped out of school after the 9th grade because he was embarrassed to go to high school looking so down-at-the-heels. He was a much brighter student than me, but he was also dead before age 21 from an overdose.
I asked the young man I was mentoring to write a letter explaining why he stole. It was a moving testament to childhood angst. I gave it to the administrators of the charter school and asked them if there was anything that could be done to not place another bright young student from a poor background in a similar situation. So much had already been invested in him; why not invest a little more so that he could feel comfortable in his school environment? I don’t know if they ever acted on my conversation, but I did.
A big part of the reason I, along with some others, grabbed hold to the urban agriculture movement is that, once we properly get it off the ground we know that we can provide summer and part-time jobs for youths from financially disadvantaged families. We can put a few dollars in their pockets, and in most cases a few dollars can make a great difference.
Will it be a panacea? No. No, it won’t save all (or even half) of poor inner-city youth. But we’ve been doing this long enough (albeit on a very small scale) to know that it will save some of them.
We’re still feeling our way, trying to figure out creative ways to make urban agriculture pay … but we’re getting a handle on it. This year, and for the coming few years, we’re going to be expanding on our efforts, helping more kids avoid the wrong path due to abject poverty … and in future writings I’m going to explain how ordinary citizens can help us try to reclaim some of these youth from the streets. Stay tuned.
[Photo: daveynin (Flickr)]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.