A good month is one without gun shots.
I've been mugged coming out my front door by kids with knives.
An elderly woman was tortured to death during a home invasion.
A fight breaks out, police break it up and leave without arresting anyone, only for the fight to occur again 10 minutes later this time with gunshots. Police show up the next morning and pick up casings and then leave. Little kids were right in the middle of that 30 person brawl too.
Non-stop fireworks to cover up gun shots.
Mom moves into her new boyfriend's place, then break up and leave the kid. So you have kids growing up in a home with zero parents.
Garbage everywhere.
The attitude of always wanting to fight even when they mess up big time. Hitting a car, going through the garbage. Good things stay hidden. Vulgar violent things stare you down because they like getting grounded up.
When something really bad happens, like a home fire, they turn into panicked cowards. All that thug life goes right away on the slightest adversity.
Attorneys and corporate leaders have abandoned the people who got them here just to win at all costs. A vet who fought so they don't have to kills themselves every day. That's not going to last. WTC going down in a fireball should have taught them all something. Can't escape it, no matter how rich you are.
The leaders really are out of touch. They see the violence as like how mechanical bolts preload. People are killing each other. I don't feel it. That's good! It means I'm that far removed.
How can you help people when they don't help themselves. Police just keep a cap on it all so it doesn't take us all down.
Those are really hard things to tackle, and even talk about. So most people don't.
The people reading your post here are not the ones you need to tell this to. You need to tell it to the criminals in many areas of the US who do indeed think that all their conflicts and problems can be resolved with violence. And then get them to believe it. Good luck.
1. It's not a priority area to be fixed. (Police aren't doing much to address the crimes that have been commited)
2. The police aren't getting a lot of cooperation from witnesses ("don't snitch" which benefits gangs and gang retailiation.. again supporting the cycle of crime)
3. Is it the police are being held back from the region (that would be a corruption issue)
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Anyways, police can fix the problem behavior instantly. Murders don't view their behavior as concerning. They tend not to have a lot of things stopping them on lessor crimes either. Programs take years to be fully affective. (If not decades)
Say you're the kid left at mom's boyfriend's place. Who's gonna take you in and be your role model? The kid with a knife, who will teach you to mug people on their doorsteps.
Alternatively, we could take funding from the admittedly ineffective police, and put those resources into service work. Fund support structures, and provide better role models to the neighborhoods that need them so badly. They're probably there already, but they keep their heads down and act tough when needed, because that's a survival tactic.
It's not that people want to live a life of crime, but when it's all you've ever known, it's nigh impossible to break that cycle on their own.
This whole comment seems to ignore how ghettoization of a population can be purposely done by the state through regular economic attacks amongst other things.
There is plenty US history that explains why that environment you are describing ended up the way it did but it is quite painful to see what % of the voting population is ignorant of it.
I understand there is an issue in internalizing the 2 main versions (Southern spin vs Northern spin) of 'whitewashed history' in the US. An objective viewer would consider them very sanitized, misleading, and often propagandized versions of history that are somewhat benign to people of European descent but toxic to non-white people that mainline it. It leads to a misunderstanding of how the world really works, came to be, and minimizes the role criminality played in the whole exercise, especially due its exclusion of unbiased economic history.
I think certain populations in the US have the unfortunate experience of being miseducated about who they are and why they are where they are, then spend the rest of their lives (if curious) unlearning/re-educating themselves about how the world really works and filling the gaps that were conveniently excluded from our prevailing historical narratives.
The mistrust of the information in some areas of study is based on intuition that isn't completely wrong.
"Miseducation of the Negro" touches on some of these topics though it is not an exhaustive exploration. We've learned a lot more about the layers of misinformation since 1933 (publish date), it would be interesting to read an updated version.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mis-Education_of_the_Neg...