There are a host of reasons being speculated for why underclass fratricidal violence is coming back so hard core when it had declined alot in the 90s; one of them is that federal prosecutors worked really hard during the clinton era on prosecuting gun crime, and I do remember, among dealers and users and youths I knew in the neighborhood I worked in, there was a widespread perception that guns = federal time. Nowadays under bush federal prosecutors mostly prosecute democratic urban machine fraud graft, and voting while black. I'm a little surprised I haven't seen a single news analysis story probing the link between the urban homicide explosion and the gonzales prosecutor brouhaha.
But its hard to figure out where to stand on anything in the issue. I've spent much of my life opposing everything about our criminal injustice system. I used to think that nobody, no matter what they've done, deserves to get thrown into the corrupt hellish places that are our prisons. Now I'm not 100% sure. Of course incarceration isn't a solution to the root causes of violent pathology. I'm also no longer so sure about gun control, which I used to always be very against. It looks less and less likely that the working-class is going to arm itself for self-emancipation social revolution in my lifetime, and meanwhile, if we got rid of handguns, a lot of these disputes would be settled more traditionally, like with fists, and kids could scrap when they feel dissed without ending someones life.
Doug mentioned the Iraq war blowblack as maybe contributing, but I'd be willing to bet there's very little link this time. I just don't see it being vets in north philly, east cleveland and west las vegas shooting up blocks. Isn't the people vets mostly do violence to, their spouses and them selves?
Lastly, that philly mayoral race was AMAZING! Total watershed in political culture. The guy who won, a sort of black technocrat of legislation, progressive, with some green sympathies, Michael Nutter, has like zero political machine. Zero people picked him to win. Instead, the old-school white blue-collar machine collapsed (Brady), and the new-school black machine (Fatta) failed to turn out its votes partly because the black community is in uproar about the shootings (which is too bad, I like fattah and would have voted for him). The rich guy who tried to buy his way into the office failed by a slim margin. Instead, we wound up with this progressive who came out of -nowhere- to win, beholden to nobody! When I used to cover philly council politics, nutter was always a real wild card; not a flame-breathing lefty like cohen or ortiz, but with definite proggressive politics, an unclear relationship to the traditional black political machine class of the city, and an enthusiasm for problem-solving detail in legislation. Its a -little- like the whole cory booker phenomenon in newark. I'm totally baffled. But ready to be pleasantly surprised.
Plus, Philly has come back so well from the 80s (cept the violence, gentrification, and remaining 25% poverty rate, natch)--- and Street was kind of a motherfucker. It's cool to see that success story get inherited by a solid progressive now. Nutter's stop and frisk proposal is really popular with the public there (apparently fattah's attempt to paint it as a violation of black civil rights waiting to happen was a total flop in the black community), can't say I trust the philly pd as an institution to administer that without their usual jackboot mentality. But hopefully he will have other stuff come out of the governance pipe soon.
>
> philly's nuts with murders right now. this reminds me of the late
> eighties,
> a little bit, except the murders and violent crime have been moved out of
> downtown into outlying neighborhoods. i think it's so strange that the
> media
> haven't invented a magic bullet to explain it all yet. our presumed mayor
> elect [we just had mayoral primaries] wants to initiate a stop n frisk
> policy which i find really frightening and stupid. it'd be sad to see
> philly
> backslide into the climate of fear that gripped the city in the late
> eighties and early nineties.
>
>