Thursday, June 26, 2008

Atlantic Article About Memphis Crime Now On-Line

The article in Atlantic that sparked our June 7 post is now on line here.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think transporting the gangsters out of the projects and into the greater community certainly would create more crime where they go, but I think there's a lot more going on, too.

I sort of think Memphis is like an economic version of the proverbial "canary in the cole mine" for the US, maybe. That we have the problem with violent crime, AND the highest infant mortality rate in US for a major city (my zip code being equal to that of many third world countries!)...I don't think that's a coincidence, and I think our history has a lot to do with it.

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=425&issue=118

6:43 PM
Zippy the giver said...

Mr Lipscomb knows better than the statement attributed to him in the article. I worked with him on a section 8 trouble house and it was indeed a hub of criminal activity. I asked where all the other section 8 houses were and dead silence occurred. A year later Janikowski started his study.
Section 8 is just the latest "hope" or form that was supposed to fix it all. Nothing is going to fix it all but the actual people themselves. The only "hope" is them, no knight in shining armor can move them anywhere their baggage and ghost won't go with them.
The trick would have been to train and retrain them to succeed. Now everyone wants to blame the latest form de jour, services. Services isn't going to change their attitude, only specific training will do that.
When we get serious about getting our heads out of our butts long enough to actually look at and think about this a little it will be obvious that yet another quick fix with nothing more required of the people in question than moving isn't going to fix it all either.
People have to be trained to succeed, especially if they have already been trained by their environment to fail miserably over and over for years.
Don't go thinking it's any other way, I lived in the very neighborhood in this article with people for years, they are as dead set that they are right about their views, suspicions, rumors, gossip, superstitions about others are true as the rest of Memphis is about them.
The difference?
They have generated stats via criminal records that the rest of Memphis is right about them.
Time for the retraining.

8:52 PM

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