Quote:
“I’m here because, it may sound foolish, God loves you, and so do I,” Dr. Victor Garcia said. “I’m a surgeon at Children’s Hospital. As a surgeon, should you come to the hospital, regardless of who you are or what you’ve done, I will take care of you as if you were my brother. But you’re here today because of a crisis that we have in our city, a crisis that affects us as human beings, and because of me, as a black man, it’s a crisis that affects us as a race. Before you, you have representatives from law enforcement, you have representatives from community services, you have representatives from the community itself. This meeting is not about you. It’s about an important message that I’m asking you as a surgeon ... to listen to what is going to be told to you today. You’re all going to go home. And I want you to take what you hear back to the people that you run with.
“The killing has got to stop. We are doing more harm to ourselves than the KKK has ever done. You think about that. For the first time in history, we as a race are potentially coming to an end because of what we are doing to ourselves. It’s got to stop. God, it’s got to stop.”
Quote:
Not everybody gets how Ceasefire works or even likes it. One problem is that it’s too simple, seems too good to be true. It’s too far away from how we think about issues like gang violence, the old conviction that they’re huge, massive, tectonic, need huge, massive responses. It strains credulity that one-hour meetings can cut homicide in the worst places, that five years after the meeting it’s still changing the lives of gun criminals. It doesn’t change anything else—or so it seems—doesn’t fix the economy or the criminal-justice system. There are too many data points now, too many evaluations, all the cities where it’s worked, all the closed-down drug markets. It’s getting harder to say, on principle, That can’t work. Resetting community standards, undoing toxic norms and narratives, getting the community and the police on the same page, is real change.
It’s still not welcome, in some quarters. It’s too soft for some, too hard for others. There’s the camp that believes in individual accountability, thinks crime is about bad character and bad choices, society has to take a stand about right and wrong. There’s that in what we do—We’ll stop you if you make us—but it’s not just that. It means that it doesn’t work to say, any longer, Those are terrible people, hold them accountable, lock them up. There’s the camp that believes in social accountability, that society has to take a stand about what it has done to troubled communities. There’s that in what we do—We’ll help you if you let us—but it’s not just that. It doesn’t work to say, Those people are victims, they’re not responsible, they need programs, support.
The old duality is simple, and it may be comforting, but it’s wrong. We need to find a new, more complicated logic, and we have. It’s a logic that says no amount of law enforcement will ever work, that law enforcement as we’ve been practicing it is part of the problem. It’s a logic that says no amount of traditional social investment will ever work. It’s a logic that says, someone can be doing terrible things and still be a victim; someone can have done wrong and still deserve help; someone can have been the victim of history and neglect and it’s still right to demand that they stop hurting people. Not even remotely radical ideas: a good parent says, all the time, You’ve broken the rules, and I’m going to do something about it, and I love you and of course I will continue to care for you and hold you close. But radical when it comes to talking about crime, where commitment to accountability seems to crowd out room for caring, and commitment to caring seems to crowd out room for accountability.
Adapted from Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America by David M. Kennedy. Copyright 2011 by David Kennedy. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury.
