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Q&A with District Attorney William Fitzpatrick: DA sees community reluctant to be outraged by gang violence

At the sentencing of Saquan Evans for the murder of 20-month old Rashaad Walker, Jr. in a gang related incident, District Attorney William Fitzpatrick noted an irony in community response to crime locally. He had not received a single letter or e-mail relating to the toddler’s death, but got numerous expressions of feelings about the destruction of swan eggs in Manlius.

At the time of the shooting, Fitzpatrick had hoped that the incident would provide a watershed moment for the community in terms of gang violence. What he saw was what he called the community’s reluctance to be outraged, and a lack of political courage or will to deal with a problem he sees as getting worse, characterizing the local scene as “Lord of the Flies redux.”

You said the outcome of the Evans trial had no impact on the gang situation. What had you hoped for?

The immediate impact is that Saquan Evans will never be on the streets again. That’s a good thing. What I had hoped for in 2010 at the time of the shooting, was that there would be some type of public reaction to the death of a 20-month old baby, similar to what we see with the death of Trayvon Martin. To be fair, the facts there have not been fully established. But this one wasn’t a mystery. This was the assassination of a 20-month old baby, who was victimized because he was in a car that was erroneously believed to have in it the killer of Kihary Blue.

I thought, and I think justifiably, that this is what we need. In New York City, if you think back, the murder rate in the late 80s, early 90s, was over 2200 people a year, six a day. Now it’s less than 600. What happened? You might argue we got Giuliani instead of Dinkins. But one thing that we did have, there was a case where a family would come from Utah every year, and a young kid got killed protecting his mother during a robbery. It didn’t have racial overtones, but it was everything that was wrong with New York City.

The economic heartbeat of New York City, aside from Wall Street, is tourism. You kill that you’re going to bite your nose off to spite your face. That really galvanized people, probably helped Rudy get elected, and it just changed people’s attitudes about crime. In Syracuse there was zero. You had your usual panoply of clichés. Let’s have a dialogue. Let’s have a rally. Let’s have a candlelight vigil. Let’s have an anti-violence march. Let’s put some ribbons where the baby was shot. I don’t even know if we had that. We’ve become so inured to it.

Sometimes I get tired. I get prosecutorial fatigue. When I do say some things I guess I’m a lightening rod at this point in my career. But they need to be said.

In 2004, when you took members of Boot Camp off the street with RICO (federal racketeering charges), there were ten year olds in the street chanting, “We’re Boot Camp.” Are we seeing the next generation of gang activity?

Yes. I’m now prosecuting kids of people that I prosecuted ten years ago. We’ve locked up over 100 gang members just on RICO. Some of the sentences are five year sentences, and they were seven or eight years ago. So some of those people are back. I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but people need to understand the problem is that you can lock up the hundred, and if there’s 200 waiting to take their place you’re really not accomplishing anything for the long term. I don’t want to minimize that. Those hundred people needed to be taken off the streets. That reduced the crimes that they would have committed, as sure as I’m sitting here, had they been allowed to remain on the streets.

But ultimately, you need to address, why are there gangs? Who are the gang members? What is the common denominator? And I think the answers are easy. And when I say it, people say, “Oh that’s too simplistic. It’s complicated. We need more money. We need more training. We need more job opportunities.” But at the same time the country’s going bankrupt. It’s frustrating to me, because when people come into my office, invariably the first words out of their mouth, “I need a grant. I need a program. I need money to address this.” The next time somebody walks into this office and says, “I’ve got a great idea. It’s not going to cost anybody anything, but I need your help, I need the support of your office,” I’ll probably pass out.

Is there a great romantization of gang culture in the community?

I saw it in the trial. It was the place to be for a week. We had to put up a restraining barrier like you were at a movie theater waiting to Hunger Games at midnight. The judge had to throw people out periodically. There were a couple of ejections a day on average, which is pretty sad. But ultimately, you’re romanticizing Saquan Evans, somebody that is so moronically stupid, that he commits a crime while he’s wearing a GPS ankle bracelet that can tell authorities where he is, who makes the mistake of hiding the gun in his grandfather’s back yard, and then makes a series of phone calls.

Even with that, the case was problematic because nobody would say, “Yeah, that was Saquan Evans who fired the shot.” In fact, more people said it was another guy, who we proved wasn’t anywhere near the scene of the crime. You can’t tell me that there aren’t a dozen people that know darn well Saquan Evans committed this crime, because he either told them, or they saw him there. Yet not one of them testified at trial. If you’re not going to testify for a 20-month old baby, what is it going to take? Let’s say I go to a community meeting tomorrow, the first thing I’ll hear is a litany of complaints. Not solutions. Not ideas. Not we need a new approach.

We need to start teaching family values. I don’t care if it’s a nuclear family, mom and dad, dad and dad, just loving people nurturing children that they’re responsible for, supporting them financially, emotionally and in other ways. Until we get our society back on that track, we will continue to have gang problems. And the gang problems are getting worse. They’re getting worse in New York City. They’re completely out of control in the Southwest. There are neighborhoods in Los Angeles that are run by Mexican gangs. That’s usually a precursor to what makes its way to Syracuse.

Are there no clear alternatives to gang involvement for youth in our community?

I got to sit down with a number of gang members during the trial. Some were witnesses. Some were potential witnesses that I interviewed. The common thread was if anyone came to support them, it was a mother or a grandmother. Of probably 20 gang members, I never met any fathers, didn’t get the impression that dads were a big part in anybody’s lives. There was one young woman, very bright, just a rotten person with no concern about bettering herself. She likes the gang, the lifestyle. Her mother, sitting across the table from her, is shaking her head in bewilderment. We only have limited resources. Do we want to put all our resources in that young woman?

Or do we want to figure out the right age to get to these kids? And without people on the right or the left having their heads exploding, let’s talk about a government system that deals with true family planning, that deals with some kind of stigma attached to multiple illegitimate pregnancies, and doesn’t reward it with more cash, better living space, more frills, more material things.

Raashad was a very, very beautiful child. But it was clear that the mom was completely in over her head in caring for the kid. Until you do something about that, forget your rallies and your vigils and your little teddy bears where the kid got shot.

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