In Atlanta this past Saturday evening, a 12-year old child was shot and killed, and five others under the age of 18 were injured, in a melee on the 17th Street bridge outside the popular Atlantic Station shopping district.
According to police, “[t]he shooting happened after a group of young people were escorted off Atlantic Station property by security and off-duty Atlanta officers for unruly behavior and violating the retail area’s curfew.” Apparently two groups of youth who had prior run-ins with each other took their dispute to the bridge and shot it out. This latest tragedy comes in a year in which almost 60 children under the age of 18 have been shot in Atlanta, and almost two years to the date after 300 youth got into a brawl in the same location. Recently, a brawl involving 200 young people broke out in Douglasville. There have been too many similar events over the past couple of years.
What’s going on here? One hunch is that during the Covid school shutdowns, a lot of young people with too much time on their hands started doing what young people with too much time on their hands do: get in trouble. Whether the problem is that gangs were formally recruiting youth during that period, as recent reports allege, or whether these are just informal groups of rivals getting in fights, the result is the same: dead and wounded children, traumatized bystanders, a society that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket.
So what can be done? Here are three potential approaches. Let me know if you have other ideas.
First, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens pointed out one major issue: lack of parental control. Following the Atlantic Station shooting, “Dickens said he spoke with the parents of each of the victims, who he said were devastated but hadn’t known where their children were Saturday night or that Atlantic Station had a curfew for minors.” Adult caregivers must be responsible for ensuring that youth are engaged in healthy activities, although I’m sure that’s difficult for the grandparent who is working two jobs while raising her teenaged grandsons. We must find ways to help connect those families to nonprofits, churches, and other organizations that can provide structured activities for these youth. Such programs already exist, but we can do more to increase their availability and ensure youth are connected to them.
Second, it may be time to revisit juvenile justice reform. I’ve been a supporter of efforts to divert delinquent youth from incarceration, but one has to ask whether we have followed up by putting adequate services in place to monitor these youth in the community and prevent their going deeper into criminal activity. Juvenile detention may not be the answer, especially given the state of our detention centers; but neither is ignoring the needs of a youth who is going down the wrong road and who may end up in prison if not provided with the guidance, support, and discipline needed. Too often, we have seen situations in which parents or guardians of youth discharged from juvenile detention simply refuse to pick them up. Those youth often end up in DFCS custody. DFCS doesn’t have the knowledge or capacity to address the behaviors of these youth, so they often end up placed in offices or hotels with no services.
Third, we need to start holding adults responsible when they provide a gun to a minor and that minor commits an offense with the firearm. Knowingly providing a handgun to a minor is already a felony in Georgia; it’s time to start enforcing that law more stringently.
Thoughts? What can we do to end this vicious cycle?
Sadly, children today have more access to games and movies that promote violence. Guns are abundant. Many parents have “given up” feeling powerless to discipline their children due to allegations and DFCS involvement. Parents must have the responsibility and enforceability to discipline their children within reason. If we don’t get our hands around this, children will get worse and more parents will throw up their hands. We need more diversionary programs that can unplug youth from crime and replace this time with enrichment and expectations to hold themselves accountable. It will take some time, but the needle will move back to a more favorable time.
Well in Savannah you have the school district letting kids out early WITHOUT a parent and those kids get in trouble and most recently one murdered. No one seems to care locally.
https://www.savannahnow.com/story/news/2022/11/22/garden-city-police-arrest-charge-teen-murder-erick-davis/10696375002/