Mayor Wu recently said that crime in Boston mostly occurs in five percent of selected street tracks in the city. She went on to say that the city would focus its crime strategy around the five percent with events being planned by faith-based organizations and nonprofits. This feel-good strategy does not do anything to change the needs of the people who commit the crimes.

The criminals are not going to church or the YMCA or Boys/Girls clubs. They’re hanging on the corners and in the parks and getting high and trying to figure out a way to get money because most do not have a trade or education to secure employment and have given up. They cannot afford the high rents, cannot live in public housing, and have become used to living on the fringes on couches and out of sight.

One out of four households in this country have no father in the home. In communities of color, that figure is dramatically higher. Most young men of color learn manhood in the streets and in our prisons. Our prisons teach them how to survive with no morals, just that the strong survive.

Mayor Wu must address this lack of fatherhood learning if she hopes to change behavior. Faith leaders and nonprofit leaders already know that the criminals are not coming to them for direction. They want them but have no attraction. Parole officers and other controlling authorities cannot force them to participate in most programs, so they wait until they violate some rule or other and then return them to prison or they pick up a new charge and return based on bad decisions, most often ones based on the need for food and shelter and drugs.

This is why a Learning Academy is needed. We have to teach, train, and mentor. In each of the selected areas where the five percent is located there are influencers who live there and who young people look to out of fear or respect. When they see these influencers changing behavior, they notice and sometimes emulate what they see. The former drug dealers and stickup men are the ones younger people try to be like. These are the people who change communities.

Benjamin Thompson
Codman Square