Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Printed: Damming the Water

According to an article called Basketball Controveries: In the Name of Protecting Kids, There's a Movement to Take Their Sports Equipment Away, "the debate over whether basketball courts attract violence - or whether they're simply blamed because people are afraid of the young men of color they see playing ball - has been going on for years."

In the diverse-but-gentrifying Uptown neighborhood, where I live, the alderman recently removed the rims on the basketball hoops in a park, with the rationale that if kids don't hang out in the park, they won't engage in the gang recruitment or activity that can happen there.  However, as one resident puts it, "removing the rims obviously hasn't ended the problems, and... it will get worse because kids don't have a place to play."

In Oz Park, the rims have also been removed.  "Lincoln Park High School (across the street) has several highly regarded honors and arts programs, but 'it also has some issues around school discipline that makes some people concerned around going there,' Alderman Smith says.  What she didn't say is that while the neighborhood is well-off and white, the student body is neither.  Neighborhood parents typically send their kids to magnet or privates schools, and most Lincoln Park high sudents, commuting from other areas, are under a spotlight as they come and go."  So though eliminating groups of kids playing the park might make the white Lincoln Park residents feel 'safer,' will it actually change anything?  

While removing the rims may make parks less busy, what about attempting to give kids more productive things to do with their time, rather than less?  Build a YMCA, hire security to guard the parks so they can be usable, give schools more funding to hold after school programs - anything that will provide the millions of benefits that after school programs and sports are scientifically proven to give kids... 

Attempting to end gang violence by cracking down on symptoms of gangs is the same thing as attempting to stop water-flow by building dam after dam after dam, then getting frustrated and blaming the water when it continues to find places to flow.  The solution is to address the source of the issue.

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