- beautiful
- Speck Fitted
- PA Job Numbers Out, The War On Unemployment Insurance, and Inequality
- Pennsylvania Hunger Games Diet: Cash for Corporations, Cuts for Kids
- The Incredible Shrinking Mayor
- Multi-tasking with the 1% … killing the schools AND making the poor pay for their funeral.
- Council Can Give the SRC the Money to NOT Privatize the System
- Predatory Payday Lending Bill Flies Out of Cramped PA House Committee
- Let the Games Begin: PA Senate Announces Details of Budget Proposal
- Good News on PA Revenue But Don’t Count Your Blessings Just Yet
What Happened at Willard Street Near G in Kensington, or, Women Criminals Are "Revolting"
Submitted by jennifer on Sat, 08/18/2007 - 2:21pm.
"Violence isn't unusual on the gritty blocks around Willard Street near G in Kensington." But it maybe could have been prevented.
Today the Daily News opens its depressingly lengthy homicide-shooting-violent crime rundown with this sickening story:
Violence isn't unusual on the gritty blocks around Willard Street near G in Kensington.
So when Gary Caldwell began scuffling with his son's mother outside her rowhouse late Thursday, several neighbors relaxing on their stoops nearby merely looked on curiously, if a bit cautiously.
"He smacked her in the face three times, and she said: 'If you hit me again, I'm going to kill you,' " neighbor Tysheka Moore said.
The woman disappeared into her house for a moment and re-emerged, announcing: "Go ahead, hit me again!" Moore recalled.
Caldwell obliged, and the woman responded with a savage and fatal swipe of a knife that neighbors hadn't noticed in her hand, Moore said.
"Everybody was just shocked," Moore said yesterday, adding that the woman's children witnessed the incident.
Back in May I posted a long, boring summary of a Bar Association panel on women's issues that the mayoral candidates should care about. The most startling and pressing-seeming topic discussed there was the gendered aspects of the crime wave: women being killed and shot by partners, women being caught up in the drug trade, the collateral effects on children and neighborhoods for women being incarcerated for drug-related crimes in large numbers.
This popped back up in the news just yesterday, in a report from a press conference where Lynn Abraham was rightly gloating over the fact that the much-vaunted state-local Gun Violence Task Force had actually done something. In gloating over those 17 arrests, she harshly singled out the women involved:
And in a development she called "revolting," Abraham said the arrests showed women playing a larger role in buying guns for men who could not do so because of a criminal record.
Six of the 17 arrested by the state-local Gun Violence Task Force were women, Abraham said, and six of 14 people arrested in April by the task force were also women.
"We have seen the same revolting picture over and over again, which is that women have been providing guns for their drug suppliers, their boyfriends, their former boyfriends, the father of their children," Abraham said. "They are incapable of lawfully purchasing guns anyplace, and so the women do it for them.
Organizations including Women Against Abuse, the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and the Pennsylvania Prison Society have been constantly working to research and advertise and advocate around the particular ways that violence and crime affect women in the city of Philadelphia. They have even partnered with the DA's office in analyzing the role of domestic violence in the murder rate. But it seems like little of this has reached a DA who is happy for cheap rhetoric and arrests at whatever collateral cost.
That public-private partnership I just mentioned resulted in a phenomenal 130-page report analyzing all women's deaths in Philadelphia, "focusing on 2002 - 2003 and describing trends between 1997 and 2003. Among other findings, 27% of female homicide victims had known domestic violence histories. 40% of the total deaths were caused directly by intimate partner violence."
A key idea that emerges from this report is that most of the domestic-violence-linked murders and stabbings and shootings involve couples who have been in and out of the system. Women Against Abuse has figured out how to "identify repeat calls to 911 that are coded as domestic violence, creating an opportunity to target resources to those individuals."
Back to the Daily News story about the knife-murder of Gary Caldwell. The woman, who is not even named but rather identified by her relationship to him--she's "Caldwell's son's mother"--did not die. She's not the statistic, the murder one-hundred-and-whatever for the year. Instead, she killed, and she'll be another sort of statistic, as likely her children will be as well.
Caldwell and the woman who bore and raised his son could almost-surely have been identified as at risk at some point before Thursday, and him hitting her, and her killing him:
He had gone to the white-shingled rowhouse to confront the mother of his young son about the boy's care, Coan said. The children, who ranged in age from 4 to 15 and who witnessed the incident, told police - and neighbors confirmed - that the pair had an abusive relationship.
Now he's dead, her kids saw it, she's fled, and "detectives were preparing a warrant for her arrest yesterday." Try to measure the collateral damage of this sort of deep, pervasive, failure in policing, providing services, and prosecuting.
Crazy.
Crazy.
Recommendations
Sam always says, be positive. From that report.
I'd be real interested to hear what's been picked up since publication last July.
Awful Violence, Awe-Inspiring Women, Awesome Report
So intensely moving, the whole thing.
All that gun violence again and--oh--the aching horror of that family we can only call Caldwell even though we don't want to. Can you imagine how those kids are sleeping tonight? Their young lives are part of our city somewhere right now; their stories will likely play out and help define our city for decades to come. Does the need for human services ever come more stark?
But so moving too are the brave, wise heroines who came together and produced that amazing report. How does the heart not quail at just their name? The Philadelphia Women's Death Review Team! The document they produced is truly horrifying, but it brings necessary hope. The authors did what heroes are always needed to do: they looked with clear eyes at problems others less strong were incapable of dealing with, and they used special skills to come up with answers to the problems. As a community, we all owe thanks to Michelle Henry, Diana Levengood, and Jennifer D. Keith (who, I think, works with my good friend Howie Kahlenberg over at PHMC).
There are certainly no easy solutions to problems webbed in networks of poverty, homelessness, and the seemingly endless social and psychological nightmare of domestic abuse. But to breach the labyrinth of society's worst problems, and to employ hard-earned skills to solve those problems: that's what heroes do.
The report's four pages of recommendations are moving because they suggest so many gut-wrenching layers of problems and the authors' boldness in combatting them. Calling for judicial education regarding domestic abuse probably ruffled some feathers, but think about the problems it implies. Bold solutions are what desperate problems call for.
I hope when Michael's mayor he not only takes their report to heart, I hope he takes the example of their alliance as a model. I remember hearing about these wonderful women at the Department of Public Health who are waiting to be listened to, from a planning meeting I attended last year at Jobs with Justice. What a great idea to partner them with the District Attorney's office and concerned women in the nonprofit community, like those at Women In Transition and PHMC.
When you face a night's news like the one above, you need women like these to give you hope that tomorrow can be better than today. That's how great progressives like James Baldwin defined the progressive goal and the American ideal: that tomorrow should be better than today. Thanks for finding them, Jennifer.
Their solutions are just the kind of thing progressives should be working for.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. Robert Kennedy
And today's article hits some of the same notes
Daily News again:
Plus four other shootings yesterday and six wounded.
More and more of the same
Oh, yeah: "Johnson called the slaying of two mothers on one day 'very upsetting.'"