When the sound of gunfire is too close to rationalize away

Right around bedtime on a night late in May, I was lying on my bed with my laptop, checking up on my Facebook community. All of a sudden there was something happening right outside my window, in my real community.

Through my open window I heard about a dozen gunshots rip through the quiet of the evening, followed by the pealing of tires as the shooters left the scene. Without even finishing the word I was typing, I switched off my bedroom light and crept to my front porch to see if I could tell where the shots came from and whether anyone needed help.

Living at the north end of North Minneapolis, I've become pretty good at dismissing the pop-pop-pops in the night as just some kid playing with firecrackers, or at least as something that was happening in not-my-backyard. But these shots were too close to home to dismiss. Checking with the neighbors over the next few days, I confirmed that we all had heard them. My neighbor on the corner even found a bullet hole in the side of his house.

Two days later, Cedric Hunter Jr. was shot less than a block from my house.

Before you chalk this story up to, "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there," let me just affirm that I love living here in North Minneapolis. I have some of the greatest neighbors you could ever wish for and I couldn't be happier to see people of all ages, sizes, colors and creeds passing in front of my house on their way to the basketball courts at the park or to enjoy the walking trails or just on a stroll around the neighborhood. I love Minneapolis for exactly the experiences that I couldn't get living in the suburban or rural areas of Minnesota.

But in the seven years that I've owned my home, I've never been this worried about the future of my neighborhood.

For the past year, we've been hearing about the problems of the Metro Gang Strike Force and its dismantling. The Star Tribune reports that federal authorities have set up a new "Safe Streets" task force of investigators from the FBI, Minneapolis and St. Paul police and the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and that their "aim is dismantling these gangs as organizations from the top down, not at the street level."

I also like to approach problems in a systematic manner, and -- to use a medical metaphor -- it makes sense to eradicate the disease instead of trying over and over again to relieve the symptoms, but I think we're going to have to find a way to do both. In this case, the street-level symptoms are homicides.

There are greater forces at work here than just the loss of the task force. The phrase "perfect storm" gets tossed around a lot, but we are at a convergence of social, educational, economic, housing and fiscal challenges that no one governmental agency can handle alone. I applaud the efforts of the police and sheriff's departments, and I call on leaders and individuals to help them through whatever means possible to address the livability of our neighborhoods.

I have immense respect for our law enforcement officers and I often think about the dangerous and difficult jobs to which they report day after day. Whereas Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek says his department did not rely on the strike force, "and now that they are gone, we do not miss them," there are some of us who are missing the results they achieved.

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Bryan E. Cichy is an educational consultant and a Ph.D. candidate in educational psychology at the University of Minnesota.

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