The Desperation and Hopelessness in the American Inner City.

“A young man had been shot at by another teen. He was willing to let it go. Only now he is hanging with buddies who tell him, ‘Man you’re a bitch. You let them pop your ass, and you ain’t did sh— about it.’ They’re harassing him every day, and it’s psychologically destroying him. Now, he’s got to show his friends he’s a man. So one day he gets in the car and goes looking for someone to aggress against so he can come back to his buddies with a story. He sees a group of kids, talking loud. The boy shoots at them, the kids scatter, and now he can go back to his friends and say, ‘We aired them ni--as out.’ But in the process, he accidentally kills an innocent child. That isn’t gang violence. It’s desperation, hopelessness, despair, cultural confusion.” – Essence magazine. July, 2013.

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Black America's Invisible Crisis by Lois Beckett.

In America, violent crime is down significantly since 1993, when the nation’s gun homicide rate hit its peak. But there are still neighborhoods in cities like Oakland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark, New Jersey, where shootings are a constant occurrence and where the per capita murder rates are drastically higher than the rest of the country. Some 3,500 American troops were killed during the eight-year war in Iraq. Within the same time period, 3,113 people were killed on the streets of Philadelphia. According to FBI data, between 2002 and 2012 Chicago lost more than 5,000 people to homicide—that’s nearly three times the number of Americans killed in action in Afghanistan…

Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 inner-city residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.



Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs. Though most people with post-traumatic stress are not violent, PTSD is also associated with an increased risk of aggression and violent behavior, including domestic violence. The Atlanta researchers found that civilians they interviewed who had PTSD were more likely to have been charged with a violent crime and incarcerated than other people of similar backgrounds without PTSD—but the cause and effect behind this wasn’t clear. For some people, PTSD symptoms may have contributed to their involvement in the criminal justice system, while others may have developed PTSD later. “Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety,” the researchers wrote.

Culled from Essence, October, 2014.

 

The American Crime Rate.

Without two groups of people, the crime rate in the United States would have been reduced by about 50%.

The first group consists of the dumb.

The second group comprises of those who have taken the phrase, "it's a free country" too far. Sadly, some people do belong to the two groups simultaneously. And here is an example:

While parking on a street, a guy stepped out of his car, leaving behind and openly, a cash-filled wallet on the driver's seat. He was on a rush to keep an appointment nearby. 

The car was soon broken into by some unknown thief. The man soon came out to start "crying" like a baby over the theft and vandalism.

And when asked (by the law enforcement officer who responded to the man's 9-1-1 call) why he left the wallet so carelessly on a major street, he exclaimed stupidly, "but it's a free country!"

Well, the cop felt like telling the fool; Why not "tell that to the Marines"...or better still, tell that to the "crack-head" who broke into your car...that is if the thief is ever found!