CRIME MOVES IN WHEN NOBODY CARES

The shooting went on for two days. Nobody noticed.

Well, that's not quite true. People who lived in the Triangle neighborhood
of Opa-locka, near Miami, were all too aware of the bullets crashing
through their windows and walls. They got away from the windows, bedded
down in the hallways.

And they called police repeatedly. Opa-locka's short-staffed and, some
would say, less than competent department sent out cops who took reports
and then went away. Residents also called the larger Miami-Dade Police
Department, but it declined to send officers for fear of offending
Opa-locka cops.

Last Monday, this started. Two days, it went on. Sporadic, indiscriminate
shooting, supposedly from a drug gang, angry for reasons not definitively
known.

And the larger world paid no attention. The Miami Herald did not cover the
story. Nor did the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Nor did the local CBS, NBC,
ABC or FOX affiliates.

Then, 5-year-old Melanise Malone was shot in the head. Now everybody's on it.

Melanise was killed after her mother decided to make a break for it. When
police responded to yet another call Wednesday morning before 1, she
gathered her three children into a van and drove off, a police cruiser nearby.

They had gone only a short distance when a spray of bullets peppered the
vehicle and Melanise was killed.

I am outraged by her death. But I am also outraged by the fact that I
cannot imagine the story unfolding this way in other parts of town. Cannot
envision some gang of punks holding tonier-than-thou Coral Gables hostage
and police just coming out and taking reports. Cannot picture tourist-mecca
Miami Beach being turned into Beirut Lite and it going unnoticed by the
Miami Herald, "Local 10" and "Seven On Your Side."

I am not complaining simply about the failure of Miami-area cops and media
to do their jobs, though that failure is galling. But in the largest sense,
this was a failure that reflects on us all. A failure to give a damn.

Most of us would never be so unenlightened as to say it aloud, but it's
plain to me that we don't get too exercised about violence in a place like
Opa-locka. Yes, we cluck pious platitudes, but the unsayable truth is, we
expect shootings, stabbings and drug dealings in certain neighborhoods -
neighborhoods where the people are poor and black, poor and brown or just
poor, period.

We say tsk-tsk and isn't that terrible and go on, untouched. I'm reminded
of Richard Pryor's line about a well-off couple passing through a poor
neighborhood and seeing people strung out on drugs. So awful, they say.
Then they get home and find their son strung out. "Oh, my God," they cry,
"it's an epidemic!"

Point being that expectation has a way of making us blind. Worse,
expectation has a way of fulfilling itself.

You think the gangsters in Opa-Locka don't know that they can get away with
things there they'd never dare try in places we cared about? You think the
people in Opa-Locka don't know this, too?

In the '90s, this nation experienced a record drop in crime. One element of
that drop was adherence to the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention,
which holds that in areas where it is perceived that no one cares,
criminals are emboldened. So you make sure there are no places where no one
cares.

It's an elementary lesson, but apparently it still eludes many of us. So
you'll forgive my cynicism about the attention paid now to the death of
Melanise Malone. Truth is, she might not have died had it not been decided,
tacitly and long ago, that her life was worth less.

Thankfully, she was too young to understand that the world works this way.
When police showed up at her door that morning, it is said that she gave
one of the officers a hug.

"She thought she was safe," her mother said.