We need to step up to end Harrisburg gangs by building up families | PennLive Editorial

PennLive’s Christine Vendel has revealed a sad and difficult truth about the gun violence in Harrisburg. It’s mainly being committed by kids -- kids with guns.

When a bunch of these youngsters get together, as they do often on the streets of Harrisburg, they call themselves gangs. They have names like RDG, TNL, ABM, SA13 and 600. And they can be dangerous.

Because even one kid with a gun can be deadly.

In her story “Gangs of Harrisburg,” Vendel says the youth popping off guns in broad daylight on the streets of Harrisburg aren’t members of the organized, brutal, top-down command structures like the Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings or MS-13, They’re mainly unorganized neighborhood youth who grew up together and started getting into trouble -- like kids anywhere are prone to do when they have no adult guidance or supervision.

Kevin Maxson, who served time in prison and now mentors youth, says these kids spend their time hanging with their friends, selling drugs and doing whatever comes into their minds – like breaking in cars, petty theft and shooting their guns.

Vendel’s reporting has pointed a laser at a troubling reality in Harrisburg and in many points beyond. Hundreds of kids in our communities have no one to nurture, encourage, chastise or discipline them. We could ask where are their parents? Why aren’t they in school? But we know. And we know why.

There is no father asking them where they’re going, where they’ve been and if they’ve done their homework. He may be in prison or dead, a victim on the same violence that is claiming his kids.

There is no mother making sure they’re in before dark, putting food on the table and tucking them into bed by 10 p.m.

It’s not that there aren’t many good and hard-working mothers. But they’re working late into the night, holding down two jobs because the wages of one are so low. And the powers that be see no reason to interfere with the minimum wage.

Some of these kids don’t have even have a mother struggling to keep them alive. They are victims of the same Opioid crisis that has claimed so many lives, even in the pristine suburbs surrounding Harrisburg’s poverty.

And make no mistake, there are problems in the suburbs with drugs and gangs. But the poverty and breakdown of family structures in Harrisburg makes the problems even more severe and tragic for its children.

Vendel’s reporting has done the Harrisburg community a valuable service. She has focused a laser beam on a painful truth. We are losing a generation of children who have been ill-educated, neglected and left for the streets to raise.

It only makes sense they would band together, toughen up and threaten the community that has left them to fend for themselves.

Vendel’s reporting should be a call to action for the Harrisburg community. It should be a call to action for elected officials, business leaders, educators and religious leaders, anyone who cares about Harrisburg and its children.

At a recent community prayer service, Police Commissioner Thomas Carter pledged to get the guns off of the streets and out of the hands of the kids. But Kevin Dolphin, of Breaking the Chainz, rightfully asked, “Then what?”

Even if police take their guns, they’ll just get new ones. Eventually they’ll go too far and kill or be killed. But the cycle of misery and brutality will continue; unless we act.

At the very least, city officials should summon community leaders to a town hall to begin working through the difficult issues at the root of the youth problem in Harrisburg. And the governor and state legislators should support them, because these are also Pennsylvania’s youth and Pennsylvania’s problem.

We call on Mayor Eric Papenfuse and the City Council to take the lead and create a city-wide task force to address the problem of unsupervised youths who have easy access to weapons.

And we call on every church, synagogue, mosque and temple to join with educators, elected officials and community leaders to create a plan of action to save the children of Harrisburg. They can’t be expected to simply save themselves.

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