You can't stop a random bullet when your hands are tied.

Two women are dead. One a lawyer for Kansas Dept. of Education who was traveling down Cleaver Blvd. after seeing a show at Starlight. The other woman was sitting at a bus stop on Troost. The two women probably had little in common on the surface other than the apparent random bad luck of being in the exact wrong spot at the worst possible time. I had two reactions, which I'll readily admit. It's the same reaction most people had, even though most won't admit it. The lawyer heading home to Lawrence, who caught a bullet with her mother and daughter sitting inches away in the same car, drew a surprised reaction. The lady on Troost, probably a black woman, whose death was just as tragic, just as random, and who is just as dead, ....well it was on Troost, not that big of a surprise. I don't make this admission absent of the knowledge that it's wrong headed, or the automatic assumption that one woman was a successful white woman, the other a less fortunate black woman. Both deaths are equally senseless, equally tragic, and should be equally shocking, but they aren't. Hold that thought, we'll get back to it.

GANGS and The Police. Lets just blame it on gangs, and guns of course, throw drugs in for good measure, call it war between rival gangs over drug turf, slap a bow on that box O bullshit and call it a day.

"I've heard there are gangs going on that are in disputes," says Melba Curls, the Third District At-Large city council woman. Really? No shit? You could stand a dozen council people, activists, and columnists in a line, and they would all readily buy that bullshit about "Gangs, turf battles, drugs, and guns". Ask those same people why it is so easy to catch a stray bullet, and they will blame the police. They will also be quick to do a hatchet job on the KCPD for buying cars, racial profiling, lack of manpower, complacency in relation to the urban core, the east side, and black folks in general. People want it both ways, and they want to shift the blame away from their own part in it. Is there a gang problem in Kansas City, sure. Do the police target random young black guys who just happen to be rolling through the hood with only their parking lights on at 2 in the morning, yep, you betcha. A 21 year old kid in a 60,000 dollar car rolling down prospect, is probably going to get stopped. There in lies the problem. The catch 22.

I can say with 99.999 percent certainty that stray bullets coming from 59th and Walrond, or 34th and Troost were not fired from the barrel of guns owned by pasty white guys preaching door to door for the Mormons. I may be off a little on my figures, feel free to jump in and correct me right after you call me out as a racist middle aged white guy, but I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of the 60 something homicides in this city were committed by young black guys, with an equal number of the victims being, young black guys. The problem with making the statement, if you are white, even though it's an undeniable fact, it will be deemed racist.

Groups and activists are calling out the police for complacency, for doing too little, for not giving a shit, because it's black folks being killed. These same people would scream racism, and do, if the police did what was really necessary to stem the flow of blood in the streets. You need look no further than the City of Los Angeles. When gang or drug related violence was reaching it's zenith in L.A., folks raised hell, pointed fingers at the cops for not doing enough. When the police put the hammer down and started kicking in doors and cracking heads, the violence tapered off and the cries of racial profiling were followed by lawsuit upon lawsuit. We want it both ways. We want the streets to be safe from rolling predators. Animals who think nothing of squeezing off a dozen rounds while rolling down a major road less than 3 blocks from the police station, or in a residential area intersected by a major highway. In the same breath we don't want the police to be too rough or insensitive.

The problem isn't gangs, drugs, or racism. It's fear. The police are afraid to take a really hard stance, to really apply pressure. That shit will get you sued, cost you your job, and in some cases get you tossed in jail, which isn't an attractive proposition for your average law enforcement type. If the police would go back to the police that I grew up avoiding, the ones who would peel your cap back for you when they caught you dirty, we would have a lot less violence in the street. If they would go back to those mass raids on strings of dope houses, rounding up known drug dealers, and suspected gang members, violent crime, especially these random killings of innocent bystanders would cease to be so commonplace. I'm not suggesting that the cops go all Rodney King and start beating down young black males in the street, just the ones who are dirty. Look, it's simple, do the math. A small number of young, black, thugs, have created an environment that is unsafe, be it sitting at a bus stop or a stoplight. Absent fathers, piss poor schools, lack of jobs, racial disparity, all of these factors play a role in breeding the predatory criminals who are running the streets of this city. All of these issues need to be addressed, shit needs to be fixed, that's how you deal with preventing crime in the future. To deal with the here and now, you need more cops in the streets, more drug house raids, and taking a hard stance on the current school of sharks who roam the streets, who would kill you just as soon as look at you. Pretending that you can reason with these guys is moronic and only enables them to continue destroying the lives of innocent people, their own people. YOU CAN'T ALTER THE FUTURE IF YOU DON'T DEAL WITH THE PRESENT. Period.

The urban core isn't made up of drug dealers , crack heads, and extras from Boyz in the Hood. The people in the most crime ridden neighborhoods are by and large, honest, decent folks, who want the same things as the next guy. They want to sit on their porch in the evening without fear of catching a bullet. they want their children to have the life they never knew, never will know. What keeps them from realizing this most basic of desires, is a small minority of thugs, who operate with impunity. Most of these folks would welcome whatever it takes to clean up the streets, short of targeting innocent people, or just taking the perp to an alley and putting one in their brain pan. The bleeding hearts, over educated white folks who take it upon themselves to lay all the blame at the feet of the wealthy, or the complacency of the police. The activist groups who put ex cons on the payroll in the hopes of guarding the chicken coop with a reformed fox. The community leaders who march up and down the street screaming racism because the cops don't do enough, or because they went to far. They all have blood on their hands. They saddle the cops with the burden of "protect and serve", then wait to pounce when they don't approve of their tactics. They want it both ways. You can't go hand fishing for piranhas, unless you want to pull back a stump. You can't rehab a predatory criminal through hugs, drum circles, and candlelight vigils. The problem isn't oversized white T shirts in the Power and Light district, it's the guy who is dressed like that who is slinging dope from some rundown shit hole while making his neighbors lives miserable. It isn't hard to tell one from the other, and I'm not advocating going after the countless young black kids who dress that way, just the criminals.

I realize more than a few people will say that this post is full of racism. Just the ramblings of an out of touch white guy. The problem with that view is these people either go out of their way to blame it all on the cops or white folks in general, or they get all of their opinions from some book on societal ills and racial disparity. I watched these young guys walk the prison yards, I've seen them in action both in prison and on the streets of Midtown. Blaming it all on the typical bleeding heart rhetoric, or denying it's existence altogether, is a huge part of the problem, and it's largely the reason the streets of Kansas City aren't safe. I'll retract every single word that I've put in this post, just as soon as someone can show me one instance of a drive by being perpetrated by pasty white Mormons on 10 speeds. You can't develop your way out of the problem, you can't pray your way out of the problem, and you damn sure can't just politely ask the bad guys to stop killing each other ,and whoever happens to get in the way. You have to deal with hard cases in a hard way. If you combine support for the police with education and development of the urban core, then you might see a turn around. In the meantime, you might want to avoid this city altogether, because it ain't gonna happen anytime soon if ever.

It's that time again, let me get out my soap box.

Once upon a time in a quaint little Kansas City suburb called Grandview people felt safe and secure. That's how fairy tales often begin, but the truth is Grandview has just been a smaller version of the inner city, for the last 15 or 20 years. You need look no further than last nights shooting at the IHOP in the old Truman Corners shopping center. Four teenagers, count em, 4, where shot in the parking lot. The cops found about 40 shell casings. What was it, 3 or 4 months ago when a shooting occurred at the VFW hall, again young African Americans the victims and shooters. Grandview isn't alone in the surge of gang related violence, Raytown, Hickman, Ruskin, Independence, and the once exclusively white bread south Kansas City have slowly been inundated with urban gangstas. The last great bastion of polo shirts and overpriced cramped subdivisions, JOCO, is also starting to feel the heat.

The trickle down effect of gangs from the urban core to the once safe burbs, begs the questions, why is the problem spreading and who is responsible. Tough questions , call for tough answers. I may, no, I will piss off more than a few people with this post, but it's time people got a little pissed off, kids are dropping like flies. Young black kids, and more and more, young Hispanic kids.
White flight from the city proper, really took off in the 80's, by the 90's the problems these people ran away from, had come to roost, and bit the suburbanites in the ass. You can run, but you cant hide.

So who is to blame for the spreading violence? It's a long list.
I start first with the parents. In the Grandview shootings, this occurred at 1:30 in the morning. Why are your kids hanging out in a parking lot at 1:30 on a Monday morning? By all reports there were at least 100 kids in the parking lot. That means a couple hundred parents were allowing their children to run amok. Yeah, I know, they are young black kids, they cant find work, nobody will hire them, it's because they are black. Sound about right? To me it sounds like bullshit, and a big part of the problem. These kids need direction and guidance, it is supposed to come from the parents. The problem is, that so many parents in the African American community have given up on themselves, and infected their own children with the belief that they have no hope of succeeding because of their skin pigmentation.

Minority community leaders are another guilty party to all of this. They perpetuate the same defeatist attitude. They lay blame at the feet of government, police, society, whites, racism and a plethora of supposed guilty parties. Rarely do you hear them decry the breakdown of the family, lack of parental involvement or the absence of father figures as the culprit. When the leading cause of death for young black men, is other young black men, these leaders blame the violence on the cops lack of action. They offer up this half truth, and avoid offending the parents and black community as a whole. They tell them what they want to hear, even while they kill one another in the streets. These supposed leaders are absentee landlords, they mouth words of absolution to the very people they should be chastising.

White Kansas Citians, thought I was going to let you slide, sorry. Whites share a big chunk of the blame here. You people fled this city at the first sign of trouble. You took an us against them attitude. You only came back to the city when you absolutely had to. You built up the burbs and told yourselves it was all the black folks fault and problem. You moved to the suburbs where your biggest problem was getting little Buffy to stop throwing up after she ate, and trying to keep Timmy off the Meth. You told yourselves, Those people are animals, and you did what you thought passed for protecting your children, lives and property. You turned your back on your neighbors. Sadly you still think it's a Black problem, while your children do their best to emulate the very people you sought to isolate them from. Now you find much to your dismay, the very people you fled from have moved in across the street. I hear Harrisonville is a nice place.

The City government, the people charged and sworn to serve its residents remains mute. They focus on the pockets of mostly white, mostly middle class areas of the city. Urban blight eats away at the neighborhoods, largely ignored until election time nears. Come election time you run across the tracks and blow smoke up the ass of the poor in hopes of getting their votes. This shows how out of touch you are. Voting isn't a priority to people who are trying to avoid getting shot or are busy burying their children or visiting them in prison. When the elections are over, nothing changes.

The police. The police haven't bothered to change the way they operate. You need look no further than the city of Los Angeles for a prime example of what happens when you ignore gang violence, because it's confined to a certain section of the city. There isn't a suburb in LA that isn't touched by gangs now. We are just a smaller version of that same domino effect. Yet the police employ the same tactics that have allowed gangs to proliferate in Los Angeles. A heavy handed approach alone wont curb the violence and it wont contain the problem.

The Kansas City school district, is a major player in this mess. It is your job to help these kids, and not to fuck them up. We have a school board that lacks any concern for the children in their charge. They spend all of their time blaming the Superintendent Du Jour or fighting over money and contracts. The result is a graduation rate of under 50 percent, one of the lowest in the nation.

So, we are really, in the end, all to blame. The problem is that nobody wants to shoulder their share. The blacks blame the whites, the whites return the favor, and the people charged to serve and protect stand idly by and piss in the wind. If you were hoping to hear how to fix the problem, I'm afraid you have come to the wrong place. I honestly don't think the problem can be fixed. I think we have painted ourselves in to a corner. Putting pressure on inner city gangs just redistributes the problem. The leaders who do have influence with minority communities continue to pay lip service to them, rather than actually lay a fair share of the blame at their feet. the white middle class will just keep moving, blind to the fact that the problem only follows them.

But all is not completely hopeless. There are still kids who defy the odds. They somehow manage to excel despite the shitty conditions they are forced to endure. They have their parents to thank, for not caving in and taking the easy route.