What's at the root of Boston's rise in murders?
When Bus No. 22 takes Marlon Thompson home from school each day, it also takes him on a tour of Boston's swelling crime wave.
It rumbles past the grassy fields of Harambee Park, where he says a classmate was stabbed last year.
Then it rolls past Franklin Park, where a young woman's body was found badly burned last month. Later, as the bus approaches his home in Roxbury, Marlon points to a corner where a friend, while on a double date last year, got chased by a group flashing a gun.
"There are a lot more shootings that I've been hearing about," says the senior at Codman Academy Charter Public School in Dorchester, a Boston neighborhood. "It is crazy how it happens."
After years celebrating a dramatic dip in murders in what was hailed as the "Boston miracle," residents have been shaken by a resurgence of homicides and shootings concentrated in the city's poorer neighborhoods. Last week alone, police reported seven murders in seven days.
While Boston's murder rate remains lower than those of many major American cities, its 75 murders in 2005 marked its deadliest year in a decade. This year, 21 murders have already been recorded, two ahead of last year's pace, according to the Boston Police Department.
In response, Boston police have moved aggressively this week, beefing up patrols and installing surveillance cameras across crime hot spots. Last month, Mayor Thomas Menino joined 14 other mayors at a gun summit in New York aimed at stemming the tide of illegal guns.
The violence is felt most deeply by young people. In Boston and across the country, they are disproportionately the perpetrators of the crimes and its victims, according to the US Department of Justice.
The crime wave here is not solely attributed to young adults. But experts say that small bands of young men are playing a major role.
Criminologists and community leaders see several factors fueling the violence:
• Demographic shift. Typically, younger populations correspond with higher rates of crime. And Boston is experiencing somewhat of a boom of young people. As its segment of 15-to-24 year olds expanded, so has the area's violence.
• Funding cuts. Critics say that many of the federal, state, and local programs designed to allay violence among at-risk youth in Boston were cut back after the 2001 recession.
• Complacency. Boston's success in dramatically reducing violence a decade ago diminished the sense of urgency and vigilance among activists, allowing old problems to resurface.
• Violent street culture. Youth violence is often associated with turf battles between gangs or drug peddlers. But in Boston, experts suggest, many acts of aggression seem to be the result of petty disputes that take on deadly stakes when pride and reputation are on the line. "What you get is the rise of street culture in which respect and reputation ... and standing is everything," says David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a leader in Boston's anti-crime effort of the 1990s, dubbed "Operation Ceasefire."
Youths turn to guns today, he says, to deal with the normal social frictions that arise in their lives, a behavioral pattern learned during the drug epidemic of the late 80s. Of the 21 homicide victims this year, nearly half are under age 25. Last year 39 of the 75 residents murdered were also under 25.
It's a statistic not lost on Marlon and the students at Codman Academy. To memorialize last year's victims, Marlon and three classmates created a public art display as part of a school project. On a street fence, they hung 75 pairs of shoes on painted red boards with plaques bearing each victim's name. They had feared that the display might be vandalized, but instead, people have placed flowers, notes, and teddy bears. Relatives of victims have stopped by the school to express their gratitude.
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