Gun play among youth worries police.
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8 Comments:
'Gunplay' among youths worries police
Minneapolis police, concerned about violent antics by young robbers, want to combine efforts with community, school and church groups to get guns out of the hands of the youths.
By Chao Xiong, Star Tribune
Last update: May 16, 2007 – 9:28 PM
Emboldened robbers are increasingly thrusting their guns against victims' heads or clicking the trigger for "kicks" as the volatile mix of guns and youth becomes a growing problem on Minneapolis streets, said Police Chief Tim Dolan.
The perpetrators of this "gunplay" are most often men in their teens to early 20s on the prowl for cash and credit cards, police said.
It's a trend that has threatened Dolan's own officers. Between April 20 and May 14, police said there have been an unprecedented five officer-involved shootings, meaning either an officer or a suspect fired a firearm at the other. No one died, but in the last seven years it is the highest number of officer-involved shootings recorded from the start of the year to May 14.
In four of the 2007 cases, the suspects ranged from age 14 to 20.
"I know it's been on the lips of everyone I talk to," said police spokeswoman Lt. Amelia Huffman. "They just hope that it's not a portent of things to come."
Police and community activists said they're gearing up to brainstorm and roll out programs to discourage gun violence and take guns off Minneapolis streets.
"There are way more guns on the streets than we realize," said Shane Price, coordinator of the African American Men Project. "We have an epidemic on our hands where our young people are concerned."
Price is organizing a gun buyback program for late summer. He said two buyback programs last year, which were supported by other community groups, corporations and police, netted 352 guns.
Minneapolis police have seized 316 guns this year, mostly through search warrants, traffic stops, arrests and stops of suspicious people. In 2006, the department seized 995 guns, up 10 percent from 2005, according to police.
Dolan plans to meet with community activists and school and church leaders soon to discuss outreach efforts. Preliminary ideas include television ads, ministrations in church and encouraging parents to get rid of BB guns that mimic firearms.
Dolan also wants to create a set of guidelines for police precincts that would allow citizens to drop off guns anonymously, as they can at gun buybacks. There is no police protocol for the process now; Dolan said people are usually asked for their name if they stop in to drop off a gun. Precincts have accepted guns before, Huffman said.
Although statistics were not available, Dolan said the number of incidents in which robbers shoot live rounds near victims or butt guns against victims' heads and click the trigger without firing has been on the increase starting this past winter.
"I think it's for fun," he said. "For kicks."
Dolan said it doesn't appear that the robbers are using the gunplay to get victims to comply. It's unclear what has caused the escalation in aggression. Police and community activists fingered everything from TV to video games to popular music. One thing is certain, they said: Too many guns are falling into young and irresponsible hands.
"It's critical now that our community step up to the plate and say we can't tolerate this kind of behavior," said Al Flowers, a member of the Police Community Relations Council.
According to police, 10 people have been charged in Minneapolis' 21 murders this year. Nine of the defendants -- all in handgun-related murders -- are men under 25, police said.
In the officer-involved shootings: Monday night a 16-year-old carjacking and robbery suspect pointed a rifle at Sgt. Don Smulski. The officer fired at the suspect and missed. The teen was later arrested.
About 2 a.m. Saturday, officer James Burns shot and critically wounded Jeremy J. Harris, 27, who allegedly shot and killed another man at the 4th Street Saloon that morning. Harris had pointed his gun at Burns, police said. Harris was upgraded to serious condition Wednesday.
Three shootings occurred in late April. One incident involved a sawed-off shotgun and an exchange of gunfire. In another case, an officer was eating lunch at a bar when he shot at two masked robbers.
On April 20, a 14-year-old pointed a gun at an officer, whose gun jammed when he tried to fire. The juvenile fled; the gun was a replica.
"It would be really nice if it was an odd coincidence," Dolan said of the shootings. "But at this time, we have to treat it as a trend."
Chao Xiong • 612-673-4391 • cxiong@startribune.com
Hi All,
I am sorry to say the GUN, is part of the URBAN HIP HOP dress.
The Gun is like a fine piece of jewelry to sport with the cloths.It is the frosting on the sagging pants hanging below their belt line.
If there ever was a music that should be publicly chastised Hip Hop is it!
Humour based in fact- Cops don't mind these boys sagging their pants. It is a way to identify the wanna be trouble makers and these guys are easy to catch in a foot chase since their pants fall down around their knees.
The gun buy back is a freckin bandaide..
It's STUPID!
How bout if the police buy all the drugs off the street too? Now doesn't this sound ridiculious?
These gun buy backs waste tax payers money. Most the guns these programs draw in are JUNK. Somebody gets paid for a gun that could have been thrown in the trash.
How many of these guns get taken, out of the property room by police.
How many of these guns are sold to gun dealers.
HOW MANY?
Whether the gun is junk or not the fact is that it gets a gun off the streets that could result in an incident that could be deadly. Example would be a punk using the junk gun for as you say a piece of jewelery to complete his thug appearance gets into a confrontation with some other thugs and flashes his piece as a threat the end results could be deadly as the others may also pull out their piece and shoot, same goes for a law enforcement officer, a cop see's an individual displaying a weapon they are more likely to use force actions not knowing the gun is junk.
I feel every gun that is removed is better then having it out on the streets. Gun buy backs are not going to solve the issue by any means, it may lower the incidents by a fraction, it will take a lot more than gun buy backs to reduce the violence.
Nancy
This is the same mentality as holding the landlord responsible for the actions of the tenant. How about if we get the person off the street instead of the gun. Instead of fining the landlord for all these liveability crimes, have the police do their job and arrest the guy with the real issue.....this is the guy who is going to have the gun in his pocket. This is such simple logic a kid could figure it out.
I think they should have more guns on the street, just in the hands of different people. If everyone had a gun at the bus stop, these punks wouldn't dare to start shooting at anyone cause they'd be swiss cheese in 2 seconds. Problem solved.....next?
LIKE I SAID THE GUN BUY BACKS ARE FAILURES..This is just another tool of politicians to appear they are doing something. PERIOD!
Below is an article with numerous referances to studies that show gun buy backs do not work.
http://www.kc3.com/news/buybacks_fail.htm
Gun Buybacks Fail To Cut Crime, Killings
Programs Attract Wrong Weapons, Study Says
By Mike Dorning
Washington Bureau, Chicago Tribune
June 9, 2000
WASHINGTON -- Piles of weapons handed over to the police for a few dollars make compelling photographs, but repeated studies of politically popular gun buyback programs across the country have found no detectable effect on violent crime or n firearms deaths.
What's more, the guns and the owners that turn up for buybacks represent neither the kinds of weapons nor the types of people generally involved in gun crimes, said several researchers who have studied the programs. And some of those who participate in the buybacks are cashing in on spare weapons but keeping at least one at home--or they plan to use the proceeds to purchase another gun.
Gun buyback programs, in which local governments encourage residents to turn in firearms using modest cash payments or gift certificates as incentives, have become a recurring and highly visible feature of the American dialogue on violence. Just this April, when President Clinton announced a federal grant to assist the gun buyback program inWashington, he surrounded himself with a phalanx of police recruits and invoked the bloody chaos of a shooting three days earlier at the National Zoo.
Referring to the city's mayor and congressional delegate, Clinton declared, "When I called them, after that terrible tragedy at the zoo, and asked them what I could do to help, they said, `Well, why don't you help our gun buyback program?'"
The buyback programs have a potent political appeal at a time when gun violence is at the forefront of public concerns. On the one hand, they address gun-control advocates' desire to take weapons out of circulation. On the other, they generate minimal opposition from gun-rights defenders because nobody is forced to give up a weapon he wants to keep.
Among the largest buyback programs to date was one supervised last September by Cook County Sheriff's Department, which collected 5,347 guns in three weekends. The Chicago Housing Authority plans another gun buyback this September.
Still, independent follow-up studies of gun buybacks in Seattle, Sacramento, St. Louis and Boston found no evidence that the programs reduced gun crime. In Seattle, researchers also checked coroner's records and hospital admissions data for the six months following a buyback in 1992. They found no evidence of an effect on firearms-related deaths or injuries.
"The continuation of buyback programs is a triumph of wishful thinking over all the available evidence," said Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis.
The benefits may be too subtle to detect, said Clinton administration officials, who this year plan to devote $15 million to assist local gun buyback programs. While they concede the programs do not often directly disarm criminals or recover the types of guns preferred by criminals, they nonetheless contend that eliminating any gun ultimately reduces the risk of death or injury.
"The first purpose of this is not trying to stop bad guys from robbing banks or bad guys from shooting each other. The first purpose is to get guns out of homes," said Lee Jones, a spokesman for the U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds gun buybacks using money from an anti-drug program the department manages.
"We do think this can have a positive influence for reducing gun accidents and gun violence in the home. Or, for that matter, it prevents [the guns] from being stolen and used in crimes," Jones continued. But academic researchers--often divided by passionate differences over gun control--are in rare agreement in their conclusions. At a U.S. National Institute of Justice lecture delivered just weeks before Clinton's grant announcement, University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman, who headed a wide-ranging assessment of crime prevention programs, called gun buybacks "the program that is best-known to be ineffective" in reducing firearms violence.
The numbers of weapons collected--typically no more than a few thousand guns, even in the most successful buyback--represent a tiny fraction of the nation's arsenal, with an estimated 220 million guns now in civilian hands and another 4.5 million newly manufactured guns added each year.
"At most, they take 1 [percent] to 2 percent of guns out of a [local] community, and he guns collected are among the least likely to be used for violence," Wintemute said. Guns used in crimes most often are modern, up-to-date, semi-automatic pistols, one weapon of choice being the 9 mm pistol used in the National Zoo shootings. The weapons turned in during buybacks overwhelmingly are older guns, such as revolvers, which in some cases don't even work. A Harvard University study of buyback programs in Boston in 1993 and 1994 found that nearly three-quarters of the guns recovered were made before 1968. In Seattle, one-quarter of the guns collected were inoperable.
Also, the gun owners who turn in their weapons tend to be middle-age or elderly. Street criminals tend to be adolescents and young adults.
In any case, surveys of the people who turn in their weapons frequently find they have additional guns at home they intend to keep: in Sacramento, 59 percent of participants said they did so, as did 62 percent of participants in St. Louis and 66 percent in Seattle.
Sometimes, people also use the money they receive from turning in an old gun- one that would command a low price on resale- to help pay for a higher-quality weapon. In St. Louis, 14 percent of buyback participants said they planned to purchase a new gun within the next year. Another 13 percent said they might.
Said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who conducted the study: "We found that the people most likely to be planning to buy another gun are the respondents at highest risk for gun violence. They tended to be the younger respondents, they tended to be the respondents more likely to have arrest records."
HUD officials point to signs of success following one project in Pittsburgh, an annual gun buyback campaign that began in December 1994. That program also includes a firearms safety education project and free distribution of child trigger locks to gun owners who would rather not give up their weapons.
There has been no formal evaluation of the project. But Dr. Matthew Masiello, a pediatrician who helped organize the Pittsburgh program, collected statistics showing a dramatic drop in the area's firearms deaths, which declined 39 percent from 1993 through 1996.The drop is much greater than the 16 percent decline in gun deaths nationally during the time period.
But even Masiello attributes the apparent success to the fact that the Pittsburgh program was "much more extensive" than simple gun buybacks. He cites as other important factors the trigger-lock distribution, firearms safety education, and a campaign to mobilize church groups and other community organizations to reduce gun violence. Other researchers are skeptical of any correlation with the buybacks at all.
Jacqueline Cohen, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said gang violence in 1993 nearly doubled gun homicides from the previous year and "on any basis, you would expect this unusual peak to be followed by a decline."
Cohen states otheer factors as probably more important in the decline in Pittsburgh's firearms deaths. Among them were an aggressive police campaign to combat gun crimes during that time period and a major federal prosecution that"basically decimated" Pittsburgh's LAW youth gang, which was heavily involved in gun violence. Also, large Northern urban centers similar to Pittsburgh generally experienced especially steep drops in gun crime from 1993 through 1996.
She said Pittsburgh is considering a program that would offer financial rewards for anyone who turned in another person for illegally carrying a gun in a public place. Such a program may be a more effective use of money than a buyback because "it's targeting the guns that are the cause of the problem," she said.
Rosenfeld, who has been hired as a consultant to evaluate the ongoing HUD-funded buybacks, said the concept of buying back guns may yet be proven an effective tool in reducing violence. "There is no evidence that they directly reduce gun violence in the form of gun assaults or gun homicides," he said.
But he theorized that programs more narrowly focused on public housing projects could potentially have a bigger impact, because they might lead to a bigger drop in the local gun supply.
Also, he said, the buyback programs may be used as a vehicle to foster closer long-term relationships between local police and residents to reduce crime, an effect that is difficult to measure but one that Rosenfeld believes has long-term benefits in controlling crime. But, countered Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at Florida State University, "It's not like we have infinite resources and can spend them on anything. We should focus on something that has some measurable effect."
Kleck argues that free distribution of trigger locks would be a much more cost-effective way of reducing accidental shootings.
In contrast to the typical $50 that buyback programs pay for a gun, he said, "A trigger lock will cost you $10 per gun. Not everyone will use them, but if you think about the type of people who participate in gun buyback programs, they're voluntary participants too."
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
-Thomas Jefferson
Hey, brain flash, I can buy a bunch of junk guns and sell them at a profit to the police.
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