Beyond Newark
By Bob Herbert
NEWARK: Cory Booker seemed tired, beleaguered, bewildered. The young mayor had been on the run with very little sleep for several days. Now, during a break in a private room at City Hall here, he leaned forward in his chair and said, “There is something going on in our country that people are not, for some reason, awake to.”
He then mentioned what he described as a “poignant” meeting he’d had with a top official of the F.B.I. “I asked him, ‘What is the solution to this problem?’ ” said Mr. Booker. “And he said to me, ‘It’s not law enforcement.’ ”
The mayor was talking about the violent crime that, like a dragon from some Medieval fairy tale, continues to devour the lives of young Americans, especially those in poor black and brown neighborhoods. This is a tale with no happy ending in sight. . .
As Senator Barack Obama said during a visit to a Chicago church last month, “From South-Central L.A., to Newark, New Jersey, there’s an epidemic of violence that is sickening the soul of this nation.”
More attention to this crisis of violence is needed, and more police resources, and more jobs, and better schools, and improved prison re-entry programs, and tighter gun controls. But more than anything else, a cultural change is needed.
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Bob Herbert New Jersey News Politics Barack Obama
