Pond James Pond
New member
You are saying that gang members don't engage in criminal behavior and that DV killers don't abuse and harass their victims for months or years before they kill them. Is that correct?
No...
I'm saying that applying that one process to everyone so as to refute a claim in a report is unrealistic.
You basically said that criminals go on an escalation of crimes until in culminates in murder and I think it's probably a bit more nuanced that that...
Not every gang member is the same, nor will they all behave in exactly the same manner, any more than everyone else does.
I'm not casting doubt on whether or not you know what you're talking about, nor that what you described happens a lot. What I disagree with is the notion that this study has to be bunk because it doesn't match what you've experienced nor that what you've experienced is the only way things can pan out.
Are you open to the possibility that the methods they use can work some of the time and that this is not a one-pill cure for all violence?
Because that is all I'm taking from this report: that some members of the community are receptive and when that happens it interrupts what would otherwise become tit-for-tat reprisals all down the line.
The point is, no community program can work without the people in the community wanting it to work. I think THEY are the ones more deserving of the credit.
They do deserve the credit and as I understand the methods, they are indeed the ones recruited to be the mediators and de-escalators.
This is how I visualise it:
I see street kid A who gets in to a disagreement which starts to spiral. From that point on it may be that he shoots someone whose friends then shoot him , whose friends then shoot them etc. I then imagine one of those local community activists getting wind of this and going to try and calm things down. From that point on, if successful, that set of reprisals has been cut. X, Y and Z who would have been involved will have now avoided becoming a statistic.
It may well be that street kid A later doesn't exercise restraint or doesn't heed the mediators advice at a later date and then people get shot, but those in that first "chain reaction" event won't be among them. And those interventions are happening all over the place with all sorts o street kids.
So not perfect, but the more it works, it seems the more it works. For me, what the project devisors did right was isolate the behaviours or events in the chain that were the point of interception for those mediators.
That is why I like it and find it encouraging.