Kyle Bush
Professor Varner
Adv1103
September 29, 2008
Second Reaction Paper
As the days accumulate, so does the number of killings of individuals in the inner city streets of Philadelphia. While fingers are being pointed as to who is to blame, more lives are being lost. Violence continues to increase within the inner city of Philadelphia. The violence has increased in the area due to the lack of education, strategic programs of combating violence, and the disregard for the well being of poverty stricken people, who live in these areas.
This has been an ongoing issue that clearly needs to be taken care of. Many questions have arisen from this issue. However, I have three questions, if answered, could help this ongoing issue.
· What current programs are in place to stop the crime rate?
· Is the lack of education and or poverty stricken environment attributed to the increasing crime rate?
· If violence had increased this much in suburbia Philadelphia would there be more efforts to stop violence?
I feel as though these three questions can help, they are not the complete answer for solving the issue at hand. Being that I live in the area, I already have my answers to the questions, but after doing some research I found that my answers were close to others. After going through the articles, I found the following answer to my three questions.
Since the crime rate as sky rocketed in the past couple years, programs indeed have been implemented to combat with the increasing crime rate. These programs include Operation Safe Streets, Stop and Frisk, and Mothers United Against Violence. Operation Safe streets place a strong police presence in high risk violent communities and Stop and Frisk allows police to randomly frisk residents, if they seem to be acting suspicious. On the hand, Mothers United Against Violence is a more grassroots driven community program aimed to unite people, who have lost someone, and to stop the violence in Philadelphia. These programs are not the only answer; education needs to be included with.
In areas stricken by poverty, the dropout rate is at 45%. These areas also account for the most violent areas, which goes to show that education is a key to stopping the increasing violence. Education needs more funding in these areas, as more and more kids dropout and look to the streets to find their survival. In other areas of the city of Philadelphia, this survival psyche is not present simply, because there are better resources and opportunities.
In suburban Philadelphia, the education is clearly better. There is definitely a strong police presence everywhere even though crime is subsequently low. In suburbia problems are stopped before they even start, there is no way over 400 people would be killed in a matter of a couple years in this area. The efforts to combat violence in suburbia Philadelphia are better than those in the inner city, even though there is a rarity of crime in that area. It’s apparent that this violence would not take place in suburbia Philadelphia.
In conclusion, to stop these people who are clearly oppressed, there is much to be done. It starts with education, there needs to be more funding to bring people from the streets to the classroom. There needs to be a more equal playing field with suburbia Philadelphia, there needs to be no favoritism when it comes to controlling violence and giving people more resources to succeed.
After finishing my paper and searching through Wikipedia, I realized that my issue wasn’t a part of the erroneous information plastered on Wikipedia. So, I elected to create my own Wiki on my issue. Before entering the information I felt excited because this issue means a lot to me. Since I’m from the area where the issues lie, I feel as though I give a different perspective on the issue. I felt credible entering the information, because it was the truth and have well respected people to back my ideas up. Also, as I have already stated I feel as though I bring a different perspective to the table about the issue, which needs to be heard.
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