Turn that camera off!

Most people — indeed virtually everyone except those caught in the white heat of embarrassment as they are being arrested or making an appearance in court — just love TV or film crew cameras. Usually when the cameras start rolling normally reserved folks can sometimes be seen mugging, waving, or making damn fools of themselves. The minute a city is selected by a Hollywood production company as a movie locale, some group of local wild-eyed film buffs begin touting the city as the next hot location for Hollywood-type of moviemaking. They are always wrong, of course.

But this type of welcoming is not quite the case with the filming being done by a production company working for A & E Television. Base Productions obtained permission to film in Cleveland for a year for the new reality show “Crime 360.” One of the first crime scenes they captured was the killing of a petty drug dealer on W. 25th Street, outside a church. A number of acquaintances have asked me how I feel about city officials essentially allowing our city’s dirty linen to be aired on national TV for the whole world to see.

While I share their embarrassment in the fact Cleveland was probably one of the first cities that came to the producers minds (Detroit has steadfastly refused to allow such filming inside the city limits) when the series was proposed, I’m more concerned with doing something about the startling statistics that attracted them to Cleveland than I am about sweeping them under the rug. If we’re embarrassed (and we should be) let that embarrassment inspire us to do something about fixing the systemic problems, not simply deny or hide them.

The trouble is, too many people in the region don’t see the problems of the inner-city affecting them, so they don’t care ... and the others who do care don’t quite know what to do. I attended a rally on Public Square a few weeks ago that was called by Black community activists who are way beyond being tired of the violence that plagues inner-city Cleveland.

However, their efforts, while certainly heartfelt and well-intentioned, put me in mind of lines from an old John Prine blues song, “Angel from Montgomery”

If dreams were lightning,
And thunder were desire,
This old house would have burnt down
Oh, a long time ago.

If hoping and praying, wishing, and saying how much we want a cessation to the lawlessness in our communities could be effective in bringing about change ... the job would have been accomplished years ago. Praying for gangbangers to quit their violence is akin to those backwoods religious sects handling rattlesnakes in the belief this practice will cure what ails them. Gatherings such as the one on Public Square — again, while well-intentioned — are little more than exercises in communal onanism ... everyone leaves feeling good, but no seeds of change are actually planted. The fact that we’re still faced with surmounting deaths and seemingly ever-increasing chaos is proof that we either don’t know what the hell we are doing vis-à-vis youth violence, or we lack the resources to bring about solutions to the problem. Personally, I think it’s both.

One thing America is not very good at is staying the course when it comes to the problems of minorities — and this goes back a long way ... all the way back to Reconstruction. If we as a nation had better solved the problems and faced up to the challenges of the four million Blacks that were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — if those families had gotten the promised “forty acres and a mule” — we would not be faced with the poverty we see today in urban communities.

However, when southern landowners vigorously resisted efforts to assist the former slaves the federal government soon abandoned its efforts and turned its attention to western expansion. Again, when the Civil Rights era dawned and efforts were made under Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program, to “end poverty as we know it,” opposition from conservatives derailed efforts to enact solutions to urban problems. The notion that America’s inner-cities are broken beyond repair is one of the unstated core beliefs of neo-cons and they are quick to point to failed efforts of the past as proof.

But what if we had abandoned our space program every time we hit a bump in the road, where would we be now in terms of achievement? When NASA encounters a problem — be it unforeseen, unplanned for, or the result of the law of unintended consequences — they go back and fix it and then fix it again if necessary and then move forward. The same “can-do” spirit should apply to our nation’s urban problems.

With a new local election cycle soon to be upon us, politicians of every ilk and stripe will soon be promising to fix the “crime problem” if we put them into office — but they will be lying. Not intentionally, they really would like to fix the problem, the trouble is, they can’t ... for the very reasons I mentioned above: They don’t know how, nor would they have the resources to do so upon taking office even if they did.

Cleveland is not alone in facing urban violence; every major metropolitan area faces similar challenges. The only ones that are able to confront the challenges to any degree are the cities where the economy is creating new jobs at a brisk pace ... and that certainly aren’t cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. We have to try something different.

But in large part we Americans don’t like to “get off into people’s business.” We like to live and let live. (Except in word affairs, as my brother Thomas who resides in Jamaica pointed out how we can’t seem to stop meddling around the world). Nonetheless, we have developed this kind of hands-off approach when it comes to dysfunctional families. The national school of thought seems to be that unless a child is in clear and present danger of physical harm (or at risk of serious and severe neglect) we tell social workers to back off and let the family work things out. Clearly, judging from outcomes, this has proven to be a mistake.

Asa Coon’s mother was allegedly leaving him and his siblings with drug dealers when they were smaller; and three generations of the Holliman family were known to social service agencies as ticking time bombs... yet we allowed these parents to raise children in environments that we knew — or certainly should have known — would produce monsters. That simply has to change. But I’m not advocating a wholesale effort to take the children of bad parents from them — there is another way.

For dysfunctional families (they are fairly easy to identify, by the way) we need massive mentoring and child-rearing programs that begin at birth and stay with the family 24-7. Head Start programs alone won’t work. We can break the cycle in one generation if only have the political will to do what it takes ... or we can stick our collective head in the sand and yell “Turn that camera off!”

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
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