Saturday at the beach I heard a perhaps 7-year-old boy admonish his perhaps 5-year-old younger brother: “Don’t be a snitch.”
I’m not quite sure what big brother had done wrong and did not want to see reported to management.
But I am quite sure that the foolhardy gang-culture admonishment has gone out into the culture thanks to the movies.
It’s the kind of mock-macho ethos that always ends in tears for all concerned when the snitchable action rises to a certain level.
In the matter of the tragic death by errant bullet of Iran Moreno-Balvaneda, 13, while he sat inside his North Raymond Avenue home in Northwest Pasadena, we all know that someone knows who fired the gun.
There may in fact be quite a few people who know who fired it, aiming at someone other than Iran.
It wasn’t likely a random firing of a bullet. A gun that went off by accident.
It was likely another new cog in the wheel of gang violence that has gone around and around for at least three generations in Pasadena and Altadena, spreading in recent decades to Monrovia and Duarte.
It’s not going to bring Iran back. But it would be squarely in the interests of justice if those who do know who killed Iran come forward and let the rest of the San Gabriel Valley know, so that person could be arrested and tried for the crime.
And, yes, those who know include the shooter as well. So, man up — if the shooter snitches on himself, then there’s no call for gangland retribution.
As discussed in this space a few weeks ago, while it’s important to have some kind of law enforcement presence in a neighborhood being used as the battleground of a gang war, the police are not the solution here.
Personally, I was glad to see that in the days after Iran’s death the Pasadena Police Department note that it has confiscated over 250 illegal gang guns this year, and that it continues to try to put a governor on the local supply of gats.
But just as there can’t be a cop on every corner, we can’t confiscate our way out of the recent epidemic of shootings and killings in Northwest Pasadena.
It’s a cultural crisis. It’s on us. The ohana — the family — that lets the murder go on is a broken one.
We all of us have to take to heart what Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Laborers Network said of the police in front of a mourning crowd the other evening:
“It means that we don’t want to see SWAT teams coming into our neighborhoods, persecuting and going after young men, young women of color. We want you to do (your) job — definitely — we want that to happen. But we also want to see therapists, psychologists, social workers to come to our community. We want money invested in this community,” as our staff writer Brennon Dixson reported.
We need all that. And we need to have families that don’t tolerate gang members in their ranks. But people don’t really choose that short, unhappy gang-member life. If we are ever to put an end to the cycle of violence, we need to first put an end to the cycle of poverty that has been around Northwest Pasadena for precisely as many generations as its gang war has lasted.
Te vas, ángel mío.
Wednesday at random
I was away for the recent Head in the Clouds music festival held on the fairways of Brookside Golf Course in the Arroyo Seco, but some of my neighbors said the joyful noise was … loud. OK. But I’ve been talking to fiscal insiders about how one of the only possible long-term solutions to keeping the 99-year-old Rose Bowl alive and well is more, not fewer, medium-scale events surrounding the stadium. The fact is that people (unaccountably) like the new, the bright and the shiny. That’s why the Rolling Stones, who a couple of years ago chose the Rose Bowl as the coolest venue to play in Southern California, this time around went to the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. So will a lot of big acts. But Brookside is perfect for the cool, small-stage scene of a festival. And Brookside funds the stadium. Festivals, spread out over an afternoon and evening, don’t have nearly the before-and-after traffic impact of a sold-out Rose Bowl Game or mega-act. So, being for keeping the Rose Bowl out of mothballs, I’m for more festivals. But if the music is loud, at least let it be good.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.
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November 25, 2021 at 02:13AM
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