Poverty and crime, cont.

I want to follow up on that Hanna Rosin piece I’ve been touting for the last couple of weeks with two very disheartening stories, both of which reveal the deeper problems Rosin’s piece hint at.

The first is this story from the LA Times about Jose Munoz, an Anaheim gang member who won $2.5 million from the police after he fled from an arrest and was run over by a cop car in the following pursuit.* Instead of getting out of the ghetto and moving his mother away from the violence, as he said he would, he stuck around. Eventually Munoz, already on parole, was found consorting with known gang members–a violation of said parole. He was sent back to prison.

The second is this story about Javon Walker, a football player who recently signed a massive contract with the Oakland Raiders. Though once a very good receiver (he went to the Pro Bowl while playing with the Packers in 2004), Walker is arguably best known for holding Darrent Williams (his Denver Bronco teammate) as he bled to death after a shooting outside a Denver nightclub. Having not learned his lesson about flashing cash at nightclubs, Walker was found unconscious and with a broken orbital socket on a Las Vegas street this morning, the victim of an apparent robbery; the night before he had been spotted at a club spraying Dom Perignon into the crowd.

Why did these stories make me think of Rosin’s piece? Because poverty isn’t the problem, at least not the central problem. The real problem is culture. The culture that says the biggest sin someone from the ‘hood can commit is forgetting his friends. The culture that says it makes sense to go to a club and show off your wealth even after doing the same basic thing got a good friend of yours murdered less than two years ago. This is the culture that the people involved in the Section 8 program are bringing out of the projects and into the ‘burbs. And until they decide to ditch that culture, there’s no realistic way to help them.

*Don’t even get me started on this…