Much soul-searching and speechmaking has followed the videotaped beating death two weeks ago of a Chicago honor student that has been viewed around the world on the Internet.
The sight of Derrion Albert, 16, getting whacked in the head with a wooden board and set upon by other black teenagers triggered heated discussions about the root causes of youth violence in the US and whether it is getting worse.
The uproar led US Attorney General Eric Holder to schedule a visit to Chicago this week with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Duncan was formerly head of Chicago’s 440,000-pupil school system and spoke movingly at some of the 34 funerals held for students slain in Chicago last year.
A thousand mourners attended Albert’s funeral on Saturday, where speakers decried black-on-black violence. Newspaper editorialists called the Sept. 24 attack a venting of black frustration over intractable poverty and social ills.
“Rage killed Derrion Albert,” Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell wrote. “It is the same rage that once led angry mobs of whites to lynch innocent blacks as law-abiding citizens watched. The same rage that once erupted into riots that drove young black men to burn and loot white-owned businesses, as residents hid in their locked homes.”
A Chicago Tribune investigation concluded that one of Albert’s friends delivered the first blow that knocked him down in a melee that grew out of rivalry between groups who attend the same high school but live in separate, poor neighborhoods.
Four young men and boys have been arrested and charged with murder, based on the cellphone video shot by an onlooker.
The emotional impact of Albert’s murder, a week before Chicago’s failed attempt to host the 2016 Olympic Games, struck a nerve. But experts say such violence is relative rare.
“Murder is still a relatively rare event, though more common here than in other countries, and murders by kids are even rarer,” said Melissa Sickmund of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.
The US murder rate of nearly six murders per 100,000 people per year is more than three times the rates of France and Canada, though well below El Salvador, Colombia, South Africa, Jamaica and Russia.
Last year, there were 510 murders committed in Chicago and 14,180 in the US, both down slightly from 2007 and well below peak years from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Most murders occur in poor neighborhoods of large cities, while other places are largely safe. While blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, 48 percent of murder victims last year were black. Fifty-eight percent of the 1,764 murder victims between 13 and 19 years old were black.
“Every generation of adults want to think their kids are worse than they were. But kids today are less violent than their parents — arrest rates are lower now than they were 25 years ago,” Sickmund said.
Still, residents of poor Chicago neighborhoods complain of nightly gunfire and police maps show the bulk of violent crime occurs in areas like Roseland, where Albert lived.
Roseland became notorious in 1994 for the exploits of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, an 11-year-old who wounded another boy and shot at rivals before his own gang executed him. Chicago has some 100,000 gang members in a city of 3 million.
Albert’s death dominated the airwaves in Chicago and on national cable TV networks for several days, amid discussion about the roots of the rage on display.
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