We are just beginning to understand the emotional and social costs of the pandemic. Isolation, fear, and uncertainty have increased violence among us. Anger and rage seem to have displaced compassion and care in much of our lives.

This dynamic is most clearly seen in the increase in deaths among young people. Recently, thanks to careful Free Press reporting, we learned that “the number of juveniles shot and killed in Detroit this year already has tripled the number slain in 2019, as a pandemic youth violence surge worsens.”  Statewide, “nearly twice as many have been killed by gunfire since 2020 compared with the three years before the pandemic, while adult gun fatalities rose 28%.”

Nationally, homicide is the third leading cause of death for all young people ages 10 to 24 and the leading reason among African American youth. Emergency departments treat more than 1,000 children a day for physical assaults. Sexual minority teens are more likely to experience violence than their heterosexual counterparts.

From 2020 through the middle of September 43 children died in Detroit accidentally or intentionally. The deaths include children killing others because they find guns, loaded and unsecured. But the majority of shootings of young people are intentional, police data shows. Thirteen of the 18 deadly cases this year were deliberate.

The Detroit Police Department responded to the compiled report as “concerning.” Chief James White had little to offer in a recent Town Meeting to discuss ways to reduce violence.  Rather, the police depend on this violence to bully city council members into spending more money on technologies of control and larger police budgets. White and the Mayor continue to push the idea that the only way to stop violence is more money for police. This use of the death of children to intensify fear and increase feelings of powerlessness in the community is a cynical abuse of authority.

Accepting these killings as normal fosters an atmosphere that makes people think nothing can be done. But this is simply not true. Communities are constantly evolving new ways to create safety.  In the process they are developing languages, concepts, and skills to help us better understand the ways violence grips our culture.

Much of this work is being done by those who have taken responsibility to advocate to defund the police. For example, the Building Accountable Communities video series on transformative justice moves beyond earlier models of restorative practices, explaining that that “restorative practices address a specific instance of harm between two people and how to resolve it, whereas transformative justice looks further at the conditions that allowed that harm to become normalized.”

According to Generation FIVE, the goals of Transformative Justice are:

• Safety, healing, and agency for survivors

• Accountability and transformation for people who harm

• Community action, healing, and accountability

• Transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence – systems of oppression and exploitation, domination, and state violence

These ideas echo the findings of the much less radical or visionary Center for Disease Control (CDC) which developed A Comprehensive Technical Package for the Prevention of Youth Violence and Associated Risk Behaviors pdf icon[4.09 MB, 64 Pages] to help communities use the best available evidence to prevent youth violence. The CDC advocates healthy families, quality education, skill building, intergenerational connections, community activities and guided interventions.

These are all in our power to create. Building these new ways of being are critical for protecting our children and creating communities of care.