Greater Cypress Park NC - Public Safety meeting

Tuesday - 02/26/08 -
7:00 pm

Dear Clifford:

Welcome to the office of Education and Youth Rep @ large for the ASNC; if there is ever anything I can do to help .. up-to-and-including just going away .. please call or email me !

Attached is a Flyer from the Greater Cypress Park NC about a special community meeting they are having Tuesday evening - focused and wrapped around last Thursday's gang shootings in Glassell Park and Cypress Park. The very futures of our children are at stake in our communities and our neighbor communities .. and I hope you will join with me in supporting true dialog within and between our communities.
.

This is an issue that must override community boundaries and the petty political differences within and between our neighborhoods; together we must either stand together in united opposition to this sort of terrorism or we give up on the future.

Onward and best wishes -

- smf
Scott Folsom

SMFolsom@aol.com
323 / 459-2711

Here's what I wrote in 4LAKids Sunday, a newsletter/blog that circulates to educators and parents throughout LAUSD:

ALSO THURSDAY and closer to home all hell broke lose in my neighborhood. Around noon right near a local elementary school a carload of adult gang members shot and killed another adult gang member who was standing holding the hand of his two year old.

Read that back to yourself:

The Times continues in their description saying that witnesses saw what happened and returned fire.

A car chase with police ensued. More shots were fired. A gang member from the shooters' car brandished an AK-47 and was shot dead by police; three other guys ran and got away – this all adjacent to a second elementary school and middle school. All three schools locked down while the manhunt continued – eventually the second and third – but not the fourth shooters were apprehended.

All this gunplay happened near schools with kids in them; three schools were locked down.

Glassell and Cypress Parks – where all this took place – are pleasant working and middle class neighborhoods, with homes and yards and hard working folks raising families - struggling to make ends meet. Kids going to school, API growing, multiplication tables learned, homework forgotten, living the American Dream - the flagpole with the Old Glory and the MIA/POW flag in the pocket park.

When The Times printed the map in the paper of these goings-on I could find where I live on it; my family travels those streets every day, to work, shopping, to school. The victims this time may be gang members – but the real victims are my neighbors – and your neighbors - the good people who live with this sort of violence everyday.

The name for what gangs do in LA is "Terrorism" by any definition; StreetGangs.com reports 5,728 gang related homicides in LA in the 21 years between 1985 - 2006.

When I was growing up we 'ducked and covered' in school to save ourselves from nuclear annihilation. The children in those three schools Thursday – "low to the floor, keep away from the windows" – and the two year old – came closer to annihilation from stray 9 millimeter and 7.62 rounds than we ever did.

If this is the new Americana, the Norman Rockwell Four Freedoms include the right to be safe; I think that's nonnegotiable. Kids need to be safe at school and at home and going to-and-from school.

That's not asking too much.

LA Times article: MAYHEM CRIPPLES BIG AREA: Thousands stranded, schools locked down as notorious group battles the LAPD after a drive-by killing.