Is it getting better or are police just not arresting but detaining and releasing?

From the USA Today article:

“We’re not facing an epidemic of girls gone wild,” says J. Robert Flores, chief of the department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which spent $2.5 million on the first U.S.-funded effort to explore girl delinquency.

Read the full story here:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-19-girlscrime_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

One thing I noticed was that girls consistently write much more graffiti than boys on the walls in the bathrooms. The messages are much more nasty and aggressive towards each other, too. Sometimes a specific strain of graffiti would appear over a short period of time which would indicate an escalating conflict between students. If schools actively and routinely tracked this type of communication, I believe some conflicts could be headed off.

Nextset’s grave and persistent warnings about gangs, their symbols, and their goals are absolutely valid. Rival gangs consider each other to be “mortal enemies.” There is too little information provided to parents and teachers by the district about this topic.

As for Latino parents, they are oftentimes newcomers to Oakland’s urban culture who are working an excessive number of hours and who aren’t doing online research about US urban gangs in their spare time. They are naïve about the obvious signs which would indicate that their children are interested in gangs, and don’t truly understand the seriousness of it. Sometimes they suspect that something is going on, but they are too weak to confront their kids. Sometimes the parents are gang members.

Of course, many other types of parents fall into a similar trap of failing to recognize danger signs in their children about all kinds of things, or failing to act on it if they do. The problem with the Latino gangs, as I see it, is that they are well-established, extremely organized, and highly aggressive. Search for Norteno or Sureno on YouTube and find out for yourself.

One reason why the comments here may have gone off track simply demonstrates an intensity of concern, triggered by a sentence in the original article. There are few places for the gang-informed members of the community to express their concern about what is going on these days. A clear, proactive approach to this increasing problem is not presented to the community by OUSD for our reassurance. I can tell you with certainty that many school staff, teachers and parents are clueless. The high turnover at schools contributes to the problem.

Last April I attended a special gang awareness workshop because I am interested in this topic and how it is impacting the school climate in our public schools. If you are interested in reading a summary of that presentation, it can be found at
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2008/04/gang-awareness-workshop-commentary-and.html

Alternative schools maybe be a good idea, but I doubt it will happen.

He eventually left his high school before graduation because of specific threats to shoot him after some encounters with local gang members attending that school. There were other issues also. He did get the school’s diploma.

I told the parents all along it was wrong to think that combat training alone could overcome a ghetto school environment. They told me they wanted him to be comfortable with all kinds of people. Well now he is very comfortable with druggies – his preferred companions. He’s declined to stay in college more than a few classes and works part-time at unskilled labor at age 22 and has never left home. Both parents were licensed professionals.

Brave New World.

OR

The good girls could be bused to a school in Orinda, Moraga, Lafayette, or Walnut Creek.

Give peace a chance!

Now I’m gonna do a Sue and drag a family member into this discussion! During a milder time my sister sometimes got mildly picked on by other girls so my parents enrolled her in judo school where she learned to use her weight against others instead of letting them use it against her. She excelled at sumo and could push a high percentage of the (judo class) boys out of the contestant ring before they knew what hit or pushed them. She specialized in head locks. No one messed with my sister after that! She attended Laws Judo School on upper Lakeshore Ave. I think the owner died of natural causes, unless my sister got to him first.

Disclaimer: Sis, if you’re reading this thread please know how much I respect and appreciate you! Pleeeeeease don’t hurt me!

And I was thinking on the girl violence thread and a spillover into the public school campus closure issue. Years ago my paralegal complained to me that her then grade school kids were having problems with unruly/violent children – minority children – in her then urban school. She moved to a rural area and by some magic the kids just happened to wind up in an essentially all white school district.

That district snaps the whip on the kids and doesn’t tolerate unruly behavior. The kids that don’t fit in are removed to an alternative school where perhaps they can do whatever they want. So I haven’t heard any more complaints about fighting. Why the difference in attitudes on child rearing between the minority dominated district and the white district?

So are we now at the stage where minority schools don’t keep the lid on the violence and the white schools do? What does this do for the black kids and their socialization into mainstream society?

My parent’s generation has relatives who were school principals of segregated (all black) primary and secondary schools. As a child I visited them at work. OK they were rather heavy handed (as were their teachers). But their schools were orderly – very orderly. After Brown vs Board of Education the public schools were (somewhat) integrated and they still ran their schools in what today would be seen as an autocratic way. And the violence was kept out.

They were not overly concerned with free expression – it was a school not a gutter or a jungle. And they had ways of getting rid of people they decided were bad apples.

If a school cares about it’s students they are not going to have a dangerous, violent, dirty, unruly campus no matter what racial issues exist. I am of the opinion that the black kids specifically, not to mention all the others, are not cared for enough at Urban Public Schools.

Maybe it’s because of who runs the respective districts.

I believe the pre-revolution French aristocracy was also much better armed than their peasants, and that aristocracy was also very good at protecting their interests with one result being they too had much longer lifespans than the common people of their time.

“Say nothing of my religion; it is known to myself and God alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.” – Thomas Jefferson