[Update: Last night, Springfield's sixth homicide this year happened. No details yet.]
Kevin Gomez, sixteen years old, was shot in the back and killed two nights ago. He was Springfield’s fifth homicide victim in 2011. At this rate, a 50% increase over the previous two years’ rates (which were already extraordinary).
Last week, Leonard Lee, Director for Child and Youth Violence Prevention for the MA Dept of Pubic Health (right); and Lori Nelson, Governor Patrick’s Community Affairs Coordinator (right) came to The Springfield Institute to hear from twenty-four members of AWAKE (Alive with Awareness Knowledge and Empowerment); James Villalobos, Governor Patrick’s Youth Council Representative for Hampden County; and City Councilors Tim Allen and Amaad Rivera about 
what is going on. AWAKE’s gang intervention and street-level youth violence prevention is unrivaled (for example, they’re the ones getting the next targets out of town). And so when Springfield’s already exceptional homicide rate spiked, DPH and the Governor’s office went right to the source. This heroic group of dedicated residents and community leaders knows what needs to happen:
- Make resource allocation more accountable, transparent, data-driven, and impact-oriented
- Build trust with law enforcement
- Support structured open gyms programs
- Use evidence-based community engagement strategies
- Youth leadership development
More background on AWAKE here (PDF).
That same morning, Felicia “Snoop” Pearson—notorious assassin from the reality-esque drama, The Wire—was arrested in Baltimore in the context of a large scale drug raid. Creator of The Wire David Simon evokes some the larger forces that explain violence and crime in distressed cities like Baltimore and Springfield (from Slate 3/10/11): “…the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass, that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens….”
