We have spoken often of the courage shown by people in the Ferguson protest movement, but it took a different kind of courage for Donnitta Turner to stand up at M.V. Market in North St. Louis on Tuesday and talk about violent street crimes.
“The street knows,” Turner said of the shooting of her daughter, Latasha Williams. “We know where the police get their leads.”
However, “the street” is not talking to St. Louis police about that shooting – or many others. Latasha, 14, a freshman honor student at Vashon High School, lost an eye when she was victimized in a drive-by shooting on September 12 at the market, located at 4300 N. 20th St.
Nor is the street talking to police about the fatal shooting of Jared Elam, 17, one of four people fatally shot in the city on September 4. Since August 9, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, the City of St. Louis has recorded 24 homicides and 137 incidents of aggravated assault with a gun.
“People on the street do know,” Jared’s sister, Aigner Elam, told The American. “But people are scared to say anything for fear of retaliation if they go against the snitching code.”
This is one place where the protest movement sparked by the Ferguson police shooting of Michael Brown and the chronic epidemic of street violence in low-income black neighborhoods converge. If African Americans in low-income neighborhoods distrust and fear the police, they are not likely to cooperate with the police when the police investigate crimes committed in low-income black communities.
This is where the wider community – of all races and all income brackets – has a stake in how police conduct themselves in black communities. If police show abusive “patterns and practices” (as the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice terms these matters) in black communities, they will not get the leads they need to solve many of the violent crimes that are committed. And that means violent criminals whose dangerous conduct endangers us all and damages this region will remain, armed and dangerous, on our streets.
We have often been asked why black people don’t seem to get as motivated to protest by street crime as they do by police abuse. We think it should be self-evident that it is peculiarly cruel and unacceptable to be targeted as innocent civilians by the very public officials who are paid to protect us. But if you are from a demographic group that is not targeted by police and can’t understand that rationale, then you should at least appreciate the bitter wisdom of Donnitta Turner and Aigner Elam: people on the street often know who commits street crimes, but they are afraid to tell the police what they know.
Why? Because they have good reason to doubt whether the police will protect them. So as long as black people distrust and fear the police, none of us will be safe and our region will never get past its crisis with violent crime.
Donnitta Turner addressed the media alongside state Senator Jamilah Nasheed and city officials. While we commend Turner for her courage and join her in encouraging the public to cooperate with the police when they investigate crimes in our community, we reject the suggestion made by these officials. They recommended the enactment of stiff mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of gun-related crimes.
We reject this “one size fits all” approach to fighting crime. What we need are better resources devoted to researching what kinds of programs and punishments are most likely to be effective with different categories of offenders and implementing them appropriately. An enactment of new mandatory minimum sentences would be a leap in the wrong direction, which is particularly wrong-headed to suggest at a moment when we face such a difficult fight to move forward in improving community and police relations to protect public safety better.
