In Detroit, a crusade to stop child killings

Sitting in the summer sun watching boat races from the beach at Detroit's Belle Isle, Sandy Gary keeps her daughter Shaliesha close by.

It's become something she does all the time. It's the way Ms. Gary helps ensure that the smiling 9-year-old with bows in her braids is safe. Keeping kids out of danger has become an overriding concern for many parents in Detroit. Since the beginning of the year, 15 children have been murdered in the Motor City – almost as many as were killed in all of 2000.

From neighborhoods to pulpits to city hall, the trend is fueling a determination that Detroit, for decades virtually synonymous with violent crime, not become the murder capital of the US again.

The spate of child deaths – some innocents caught in gun crossfire, others unintentional victims of revenge – is part of an overall hike in the homicide rate that has ticked up in dozens of US cities in the past year. In a handful of them – Detroit, Boston, and Memphis, Tenn. – the number of child victims has struck a deep chord, renewing fears of the rampant, indiscriminate killings that beset many American cities during the late 1980s and early '90s.

The reason criminologists cite for the hike in the overall murder rate is a combination of the economic slump, a demographic bulge of teens in their peak crime-committing years, and a large number of felons now back on the streets after serving their time for crimes going back to the '80s.

But in Detroit's distressed neighborhoods, parents, grass-roots activists, and civic leaders are looking for deeper answers. What they're finding is a community in crisis due to several leading causes. The first is a broken criminal justice system that cycles felons in and out of jail, angry and unrepentant. Then there are sex- and violence-obsessed music videos, blockbuster movies, and the like, with their hard-edge rap lyrics and glorification of guns. Finally, they've found a dangerous ignorance when children have children and are left to raise them on their own in isolated poverty.

Combine them all in neighborhoods where drugs and guns are easily available, and you get what criminologist Carl Taylor of Michigan State University calls the rule of the hood.

"We have a culture that has normalized violence and ignorance," he says. "Many kids here see having sex and being violent as a way of getting notches on their belts."

But Detroit is also a community full of people determined to heal. And they're now looking inward for both the causes of the killings, as well as the solutions.

"We're dealing with a cultural problem here ... and the only way we're going to solve it is to get the community to step up in a mighty way and wrap our arms around our children," says Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. "What we need to have here is a spiritual movement in the city of Detroit."

This is the once-powerful Motown, the country's automotive engine that's now sputtering. In 30 years, half its population has fled – most of the middle class, white and black. Well-maintained brick homes now sit beside boarded-up, abandoned houses and vacant lots, knee high with grass and weeds. Teenagers openly roll blunts – the thick, potent marijuana cigarettes – while filling up their SUVs at the corner gas station. Top-of-the-line assault weapons are as easy to buy as Saturday night specials at a body shop just a five-minute drive from downtown.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3