Beating Crime Requires Strong Families and Neighborhoods

Adolph Mungo, Michigan political consultant and general observer of the Detroit scene, recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Detroit News that really nails the crime situation in Detroit. Mungo says that the real problem there are so many killings and other major crimes in our city is that: "Criminals are not afraid of the police and, worst of all, many of them have more firepower than the police." (I suppose it's also safe to say that criminals are not afraid of their victims.)

I agree with this observation and others in Mungo's article. However, Mungo fails to address the core problem. We are now on our second generation of inner city youth who have grown up without any parental control or a decent family life where two parents instilled family and community values. They drop out of school, mimic the thug life, join gangs, get illegal guns. As a result we have criminals running wild, attacking at will. Police can only respond after the fact.

The community does nothing about it. Oh, there are marches, and neighborhood meetings and sermons on Sunday. But the community continues to look to the police, the mayor's office, and other government agencies and institutions to solve the problem, when the solution lies within each and everyone of us as individuals to take responsibility for our children, our neighborhoods and our city. Too many Detroiters are accustomed to a culture wherein people wait around for "them" to fix the problem --"When are they going to do something about this crime?"

The police get blamed for their inability to stop criminal behavior that has become normalized in our city. According to FBI statistics, Detroit has the highest crime rate and murder rate per capita than any other major city. The police spend most of their time running from one crime scene to the next, rather than working to prevent crime. They can crack down in a certain area and cut crime for a minute in that area. But soon they will have to leave that area to crack down in another, and crime goes back up in the first area.

Community activists will tell us that the community's lack of any substantive response to crime is the result of poverty which creates single-parent households and other related issues, and certainly that's a part of it. But until citizens unite and as Mungo says, "rise up against crime," the killings and robberies will continue.