UPDATE: Shooting victim Naji Love is in stable condition at University Hospital in Newark, where all four victims were treated, says Police Detective Lt. Angel Roman of the Montclair Police Department. “It looks like she’ll pull through,” Roman told Baristanet. “Thank God no one was killed.”
(Watch the replay on TV34 Montclair. Scroll down to “Public Meetings” then click on “Press Conference).
Police are still hunting for the suspect, described as a slim, 6-ft. tall black male, possibly with dreadlocks, wearing a white t-shirt. Roman says that according to an unconfirmed eyewitness account, the suspect came out from behind a bush or car, shot the victims, then ran to Elmwood Avenue, where he jumped into a dark-colored vehicle and fled the scene.
Regarding the connection between this shooting and the one last month on nearby Elmwood Avenue, Roman says: “This is not a random shooting. (After the first incident) the two victims who were involved in both shootings told police that they didn’t know why they were shot at. But now they’ve been shot at twice, and we’re treating it as a targeted incident.”
Roman says police haven’t yet been able to interview Love (because of her health status) or Vaxter–the two victims also involved in the Elmwood shooting. “Vaxter was released from the hospital without our knowledge, but I’m sure we’ll be able to track him down and talk with him.” (End of update.)
At a press conference this morning, Montclair police said that two of the four people wounded by a masked male suspect during the shootings on Mission Street just before one o’clock this morning were also targeted in last month’s shooting on Elmwood Avenue.
Police say the shooter’s motive remains unclear.
The most seriously wounded victim, Montclair resident Naji Love, 18, was shot in the chest and remains on a ventilator. Love, along with Terrill Vaxter, 20, of Montclair, were also shot at on Elmwood Avenue on July 24.
A third victim, Timear Haley, 18, also of Montclair and a 17-year-old Newark male were shot in the arm, buttocks, and leg, but their wounds weren’t considered life-threatening.
MISSION STREET MADNESS
The drug related violence around Mission Street is partially a full-circle payback from our own “liberal” passivity. It was created from the 40-year climate of political correctness and a continued unwillingness to see and confront our underlying social realities.
This needs to change. A new, updated progressive-liberal operating philosophy is required that starts to turn the situation around. We need to stop seeing everyone today as a victim and instead set-up interventions that require individuals in need to become personally responsible. We need to provide a real path to help people pull themselves up. Many of those solutions are known. What’s missing is the will to begin to implement them.
Today, everyone from the police, to the schools, to our community leaders have been pacified into accepting our current social reality – if only it stays relatively quiet. We essentially live with the blindness not seeing or trying to stop the madness around us, even when we know some of those problems are at crisis levels: youth unemployment, gang violence, drugs and and an increasing “moral” acceptance of teen pregnancy among parents and grandparents of low SES populations. There effectively remains government support still promoting teen pregnancy with on-going payments to single-parent families having more children. And this is despite the dead end cycle of dependency and despondency created as a result.
Is it any wonder some living in what are clearly borderline ghetto conditions around Mission Street with little hope to break out — slip into a culture of drugs and violence? Is is any wonder that an entire chunk of our local population still just glides through school today knowing their long term prospects are slim?
Conversely, look what happened before when the police previously stepped up more aggressive street confrontations and harassment against those with suspected criminal behavior in the 4th ward. They were accused of being racist and discriminatory for preemptive actions — hypocritically by some leaders now who will no doubt take the lead trying to turn the current level of violence around. But while more police action is certainly needed short-term at this time, it remains only a band-aid.
We spend millions educationally in Montclair today on special ed and programs trying to close the racial achievement gap. Yet, we make few real demands to follow-up and do little or nothing with the parents of those kids that need the most help when their low SES children fall behind. Do we “require” these children to attend special tutoring help during lunch or after school to keep them off the streets longer and away from a potentially dis-functional setting? Do we make demands on their parents or care-givers with a real remediation plan for the family as a “condition” of receiving special tax-payer help. No, we are legally prevented and PC intimidated from this kind of real social demand and involvement — all the time spending millions of tax-payer dollars to just mitigate the end results — from prisons to antipoverty programs.
Have you ever gone down to the Essex County government building and seen the resulting cycle of dependency and defeatism among those collecting their weekly checks? The continuing underlying social-worker message to these folks from the non-profit poverty pimp community and government workers being sustained is that everyone is a “victim”.
And to an extent they still are. They are trapped in a cycle of program dependency with a lack of skills and family support to help them break out. Why? Partially because they’ve been allowed to go through our school systems with continued “passes” even though they didn’t really have the skills to cope. Again, it was our liberal political correctness over the years afraid to offend and really deal with the populations who weren’t cutting it. This is now paying us back big time. We passed the problems on rather than actually confront them.
Yes, Montclair will no doubt deal in the short term stopping the violence and ultimately create safer 4th ward streets. But what are we going to do then about the underlying conditions that created the upsurge in violence?
A new liberal-progressive operating philosophy is needed. From our churches to our schools, a shift in the underlying mind-set has to take place. We must focus on individual responsibility today, not victim-hood. However, this should be handled not the way conservatives and the right-wing want it — just throwing people to the wind. We need instead to provide real ladders and real programs for those willing to pull themselves up. At the same time we must make demands that they actually start doing it with penalties and downsides for individuals and families who do not at least try.
There is an abundance of research on effective programs and policies that have actually generated results. They need to be sourced and implemented. The cycle has to be broken.
When our underlying philosophy shifts from a PC, coddling mindset that treats everyone as a victim dealing with today’s social issues — some of those symptoms and resulting negative behaviors on the street – will start to change.