Recent Newark slayings illustrate urban America’s increasing violent crime problem
Marc H. Morial
The horrifying triple murder of three college-bound teenagers in Newark, N.J., provides a startling illustration of the grim realities faced by urban youth nationwide, according to a recent U.S. Justice Department report.
In an analysis of violent crime rates from 2001 to 2005 released earlier this month, the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that blacks made up a disproportionate percentage of homicide victims — 49 percent — despite accounting for only 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Of black victims, more than half were in their late teens or twenties (51 percent), male (85 percent), from urban areas with a population of at least 250,000 (53 percent) or killed by firearms (77 percent). It is the mixture of illegal drugs, easy access to handguns, and young men feeling locked out of economic opportunity that explains these recent tragedies and statistics.
The three Newark victims — all headed for Delaware State University in the fall — appeared to be on a direct track for success. They were rising stars whose lights were extinguished much too soon in a schoolyard in urban America. The tragedy, combined with similar ones around the country — including Philadelphia and Baltimore — has sounded alarms among not only the affected urban areas, but also the nation’s police chiefs.
The New York Times’ Bob Herbert reported in a recent column that Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton has warned of a “gathering storm” of violence that threatens to spiral out of control if the issue isn’t put back on the nation’s radar the way it was in the 1990s.
As Herbert explains, the situation is not quite at the “same degree as the crack-propelled violence” of the late 1980s and early 1990s that drew major federal support through community policing and other crime-reduction initiatives, but has risen to "frightening numbers, nevertheless.”
Much of the federal government’s commitment to the war on crime shifted to the war on terror following the World Trade Center tragedy in 2001. Since then, the violent crime victimization rate for black men of all ages has seen a modest 5.3 percent increase, undermining some of the progress made in the late 1990s due to increased federal attention and a flourishing national economy, according to the BJS report.
From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime victimization rate for black men fell by 60 percent. But from 2001 to 2005, the rate among black males between the ages of 20 and 24 increased by more than one third to 51.4 victims per 1,000 blacks.
“We have to get the feds back into this game,” Bratton observed to the Times’ Herbert. “They have the resources. They can help us.”
Public outcry over the Newark slayings has prompted Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey state legislators to propose bold reforms on gun control. It has also motivated officials to eye tougher immigration measures in light of revelations that the ringleader of the group of six men held in the brutal murders was a wanted man living in the country illegally.
That is all well and good, but the trend toward higher violent crime rates will not be reversed by law enforcement alone.
It requires a holistic approach that invests as much into the enhancement of economic and educational opportunities for minority youth in urban America as into crime reduction efforts. As the National Urban League concluded in our 2007 State of Black America report, that investment should include improvements in public education of urban youth, revival of the federal summer jobs program and creation of more second chance opportunities among other initiatives to lift the sense of hopelessness that threatens to permeate our inner cities and to drive the perpetuation of violence.
The greatest mistake our nation could make is to allow the scourge of violence that plagued urban America in the late 1980s and 1990s to make a comeback. That’s the last thing we need.
Marc H. Morial is the president and CEO of the National Urban League.
