Violent youths are killing our youth

This is a story I wrote in college a few years ago about youth violence in the black inner city. Although it was written a few years ago, 2012, I felt like the content was more relevant now that ever before.

Candlelight vigils, huddled groups of teary eyed teenagers and the tormented cries of mothers forced to bury their children.

These mark the end of young lives that ended far too soon.

Kortez McRae was described on a Facebook page created in his honor as a “regular teenager,” who liked rap music, basketball and girls.

Last March McRae was murdered during an argument at a friend’s house.

Joy Cranfield was an aspiring singer--she and her twin sister Jasmine were the rap duo “2much”--who had dreams of one day hitting it big in the music industry.

In 2008 Cranfield was killed by a stray bullet while standing on her own front porch.

Lennard Pinson was a talented baseball player and an A-student who planned on being the first member of his family to go to college.

Pinson was gunned down in 2005 while trying to run away from a fight at a friend’s birthday party.

McRae, Cranfield and Pinson.

They all grew up in the inner city, they all attended East Technical High School and they all died before getting chance to earn a high school diploma.

And all of their killers were under the age of 18.

These are just a few of the many instances of youth violence and crime that seems to plague poor and inner city neighborhoods.

The Scovill neighborhood between E. 55^th St. and Woodland Avenue where East Tech is located was  ranked the second most dangerous neighborhood in the country—the violent crime rate being 165.56 per 1,000 residents and the chances of being a crime victim are 1 in 6, according to a report released in 2010 by ABCNews.

It’s also the neighborhood in which McRae, Cranfield and Pinson lived—and died.

But it isn’t the only inner city neighborhood feeling the effects of youth violence.

The Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, located on the southeast side of Cleveland, once was a stronghold for African American businesses—rooted in religion and community.

Now it’s virtually a wasteland—abandoned storefronts covered in graffiti and littered with shattered glass stand on nearly every corner.

Unruly groups of teenage boys terrorize residents who’ve lived in the community for longer than these boys have even been born.

The real danger begins when the day ends—nightfall gives way to street corners overrun by young drug dealers, gang members and teenage prostitutes who have barely hit puberty.

Last year 111 juveniles were arrested in the Mt. Pleasant area on charges ranging from misdemeanor drug possession to aggravated murder, according to a report released by Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas-Juvenile Division.

Among all inner city neighborhoods in the city there were 2,169 total juvenile arrests—1,641 of them for violent crime and 1,649 for aggravated or armed robbery.

“Every time I walk down the street, I’m afraid,” said Aurelius Smith, a 16-year-old high school student who has lived in the neighborhood for nearly 3 years and knows firsthand how dangerous the streets of Mt. Pleasant can be.

Smith has been robbed twice and almost beaten up more times than he cares to remember—barely escaping groups of boys who wanted to take what he had, whether it was the money in his pocket or the shoes on his feet.

There may be many causes of youth crime, access to guns and drugs, severely underfunded and understaffed public and the allure of easy money by relatively easy means.

In his book “Streetwise” Elijah Anderson, noted sociologist, professor and current director of the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University, argues that the most direct cause of youth crime in the inner city is poverty.

“Due to the change in the economy, the largely unskilled and seriously educationally deficient

youth of today are left to participate only at the lowest levels of the emerging service-oriented economy,” according to Anderson.

“In response, many have become attracted to the underground of crime and drugs.”

Anderson is not alone in his assessment of how profound an impact poverty, unemployment and underemployment have on inner city youth.

PBS recently aired a video “Left behind by the recovery, inner city teens struggle to find job,” which shed a blinding light onto the struggles that face jobless inner city youth.

In the video Andrew Sum, director of the Center for labor market studies in Boston and professor of economics at Northeastern University, remarks on the fact that the unemployment rate for certain inner city youth is nearly 100 percent.

“Take a young black high school dropout low-income male, you're talking five percent employment,” Sum said.

Sum also argues that this lack of employment only leads to other “negative behaviors.”

“Young kids who don’t work are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. Young women who don’t work are more likely to become pregnant,” Sum said.

Ronnie Dunn, professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, argues that the pregnancy rate for inner city teenage girls is nearly double the national average.

“Many of these young women don’t understand the real life consequences of having a child at such a young age,” Dunn said.

“So when reality hits and the bills start coming in, the money has to come from somewhere—most of the time either from the grandparents, the government, or the streets.”

The reality—more crime leads to more criminals and more criminals leads to more crime.

Eradicating inner city youth violence will no easy task, but hopefully—someday—the violence and crime that led to the deaths of McRae, Cranfield and Pinson will be no more.