A 17-year-old Staten Island girl stabbed her younger brother with a steak knife, says The Post. “Their mother got between them, pleading for calm,” and convinced her daughter to drop one of her two knives. But the girl “darted around her mother seconds later, stabbing her brother in the chest with the other knife.” Quanaya Tyler now faces assault and weapons charges.
You have to start early to stop criminal behavior–or, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” This is a favorite quotation of Tom Dunn, an Atlanta lawyer who left a practice defending death row inmates to teach middle school, and who is featured in today’s Times.
It’s very Bunny Colvin, this move from criminals to middle schoolers. But forget Baltimore; maybe Detroit is a more ominous cautionary tale of post-industrial urban misery–at least according to Michael Bloomberg. This weekend, Rudy Giuliani warned voters about what might happen if the mayor weren’t re-elected. The Times writes:
[Mr. Giuliani] said that not long ago many parts of the city were gripped by “the fear of going out at night and walking the streets.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Mr. Giuliani said at a breakfast sponsored by the Jewish Community Council in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction — it could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership.”
This was not looked upon kindly by Democrats, and Councilman Bill de Blasio accused Giuliani of race-baiting. Bloomberg declined to say whether he agreed with the former mayor:
Instead, Bloomberg invoked Detroit as an example of where “gains are always in danger of being turned around.”
“I think that was really because of economics as opposed to some other things,” he said. “But Detroit went from a city where it was a great city with lots of good-paying jobs to a city that’s basically holding on for dear life.”
It seems like Detroit has bigger problems than muggings, but O.K.
