Is homicide toll high enough to spur concerted action?
The year began on a frightening violent note in Youngstown, and events have borne out our prediction that the city was on its way to recording more homicides in 2007 than in recent years, none of which were years you’d want to write home about.
At this writing, with less than a day to go until 2007 fades into 2008, Youngstown has had 39 homicides.
That is an increase of seven over 2006, and put it in rather elite company, with nearly 50 homicides per 100,000 population. That is nine time sthe national average.
That Youngstown is above the national average is not surprising, since virtually every urban area comfortably exceeds the national average of about 5.5 persons per 100,000.
Indeed, Youngstown exceeded the national average for the year in January — and nearly equaled it in just one night that month, when three men and a woman were murdered in a house on Evergreen Avenue.
But we had hoped that such a scene of carnage — or the midsummer murder of a young pregnant mother and her 8-year-old son — would be horrifying enough to spur the community to action.
It was not.
Little has changed
At the very beginning of the year, while recapping the 32 homicides of 2006, we took note of the city’s extraordinarily high homicide rate and said it implies that there is a subculture of (primarily) men — from late teens to 30-somethings — who are armed and dangerous. They have weapons, and they have no compunction about using them.
They’ve come from broken homes, attended broken schools, grown up without role models and are now on the streets, making their own rules.
We also suggested that the city’s black community should be particularly alarmed because 90 percent of the victims and 90 percent of the perpetrators were black — and in some, though certainly not all cases — the victims were not themselves part of the drug-fueled culture that took their lives.
Unless the city uses all of the resources it can muster, unless the people of Youngstown ban together to change the culture that is tolerating — if not actually encouraging — an epidemic of homicides, we can predict that at this time next year an editorial very similar to this one will be appearing in this spot.
If the governmental, civic and religious leaders of this community aren’t galvanized into action, a year from now another 25 or 30 or 40 men, women and children who called Youngstown home will be in the ground, put there by a combination of drugs, guns, hopelessness — and apathy.