As Seattle deliberates their gun purchase tax, a town in California is taking a different route. They are literally subsidizing criminals to keep them from committing crimes, as long as the “potentially lethal” criminal is a young, person of color.
Devone L. Boggan is the head of the “Office Of Neighborhood Safety” in Richmond, CA. He has penned an op-ed in the New York Times which highlights his genius idea of targeting Hispanic and black males in their late teens through mid 20s, assume they will be the ones committing crimes, then paying them off to stay out of trouble. (Note that the New York Times doesn’t allow comments on their stories.)
Excerpts of his op-ed include:
We modeled our approach on “Cure Violence,” a community outreach program in Chicago founded by the epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. The Chicago project evolved from the Operation Ceasefire program begun in Boston in the mid-1990s, since replicated in scores of cities across America. Many of these were successful at reducing gun violence, but we felt that they were too law-enforcement-driven and lacked the social services to help the most vulnerable in our neighborhoods.
A police liaison officer told us this startling fact: An estimated 70 percent of shootings and homicides in Richmond in 2009 were caused by just 17 individuals, primarily African-American and Hispanic-American men between the ages of 16 and 25.
We employed street-savvy staff members, whom we called neighborhood change agents. Think of their work as a kinder version of stop-and-frisk, more like stop-and-blend with the profile subjects, to build healthy, consistent relationships with those most likely to shoot or be a victim of gunfire.
Once we’d identified the city’s potentially most lethal young men, we invited them to a meeting (the first was in 2010). Then came the big innovation of the Operation Peacemaker fellowship program. We offered those young men a partnership deal: We would pay them — yes, pay them — not to pull the trigger.
The deal we offered was this: If they kept their commitment to us for six months — attended meetings, stayed out of trouble, responded to our mentoring — they became eligible to earn up to $1,000 a month for a maximum of nine months.
Of course bleeding heart liberal sites like Mother Jones laud the program, and seemingly ignore the blatant racism involved. Can you imagine the outrage from those same sites if some “right winger” called young minority males “potentially most lethal” and proposed the idea of paying them off in order to keep them out of trouble? One can also imagine how many people are now pretending to be hard in order to score some quick cash.
But the liberals also have to ask themselves why California, which is the Brady Campaign’s highest rated state for strict gun laws, has any “gun violence” at all. Are you telling me that all those laws, registration, waiting periods, assault weapons ban, magazine capacity limits, ammo purchaser cards, and other regulations have failed to thwart the violence?
I guess the final link in this chain is take the money from Seattle’s tax of legally purchased guns and use that money to pay the criminals.
Yeah, that’ll work!
