Celebrating Mother's Day in Gang War America

Ever have those moments when your mother is trying to tell you something, repeating and retelling and pushing again, and you're just like, Alright! For about ten years Ruth Gerstle, my mother, who died this past January, spent hours and hours of every visit telling me about Cincinnati gang violence, and what she was trying to do to stop it.

Since I'd often been coming back from a war zone overseas, I'd just shrug it off as nothing close to what I had been dealing with. "Okay, Mom! I heard you the first time. Now eat your lobster!" But this winter as I was cleaning out her apartment I stumbled upon something that completely transformed my understanding of who she was and what she was trying to do.

It was nothing cheesy like a picture of her and me together on a pony. Nor was it finding some lesson about how much she went through trying to raise children while going through a divorce. Instead, I found a meticulously-chronicled compendium of news and statistics about inner-city gang violence in Cincinnati. The murder rate for Cincinnati alone clocked in at between fifty and seventy homicides a year, and she wanted to do something about it.

Ruth lived alone in Cincinnati's troubled Bond Hill-Roselawn neighborhood and was severely disabled because of a motorcycle accident and chronic pain disorder. Like many others in her situation she felt powerless, anonymous, alone, and vulnerable. That left her and her neighbors at home most evenings watching Cincinnati local news on a loop — "Could your neighborhood be ravaged by drug gang gun battles? Tune in tonight at eleven!" — followed by mass murder marathons — Law and Order, CSI, NCIS, and so on.

When people started getting killed and raped in the neighborhood, Ruth tracked down the news, called the policeman assigned to homicide and vice in the district, and tried to figure out how she and other older, single women could defend themselves. And some of them volunteered to be informants and risk their lives to report what they saw, including how some gang members allegedly used their elderly parent's apartments to store drug stashes. It wasn't always actionable information; sometimes the cops were thoroughly annoyed by nagging grandmothers calling to report a neighbor who got on their nerves. But the intent was righteous, and the potential was enormous.

Over time, based on Ruth's many lectures over Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas shopping, and Memorial Day film going, and ultimately by reading her research which I found after she was gone, I learned that the most powerful force America has to fight crime and gang violence was not the police who must largely act as herders, looking in from the outside and reacting when crime pops up, much like a sociological game of Whack-a-Mole. (Although in Cincinnati in the 1990s, it was "Blow a mole's head off," and in the 2000s it became "Tase-first; forget the questions.")

The most powerful force against crime is community solidarity. Only when the mothers, fathers, and siblings of murder victims, often backed by the shut-in, disabled and elderly who have time to devote, rally collective heroism in their communities do the gangs who try to addict neighborhood youth to drugs or who overreact against their enemies lose the critical consent of neighbors which they need to operate.

Finally, after years of violence that statistically ranked higher than some of the world's now dormant but still notorious war zones, Cincinnati government is figuring this lesson out. Recently, The Crime Report did a story on this turning point that dovetails with the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence. Meanwhile, I forced myself to get over some mental blocks and finally put Ruth's work online with her story, "Cincinnati's Grandmothers Learn to Fight Crime."

For what it's worth, Ruth and I recommend that mother's day not only be a celebration of happy happy joy cheese, but also a day for solidarity among mother's who've lost children to gang violence. In fact, city governments should make it a habit of reminding themselves every day that building a safe community is about protecting children, transforming conflict so that it is not violent, and unifying communities across the tracks. It would also behoove them to recognize the powerful contributions of those mothers, widows, and grandmothers everybody thinks are impotent but who behind the scenes, with few knowing so, sometimes form the backbone of community solidarity.

Photo credit: David Paul Ohmer (Angel in contemplation, statue in Cincinnati's Spring Grove cemetery)