New Haven Independent

Posted by: Norton Street | October 14, 2009 12:41 PM

The motor bike incident happened based on stupid decisions a few young people in the neighborhood. Quinnell recklessly road an illegal bike and unfortunately lost his life just for trying to have fun. His friends reacted wrongfully and passionately against the van driver who was not at fault. I tend to agree somewhat with Ms. Watley and I wish she had expanded on her view because her short response did not do her opinion justice. I honestly cannot say what I would have done if I had been in the position of Quinnell's friends. My childhood friend is lying on the ground motionless bleeding profusely when just 10 seconds ago we were all laughing and having a good time; I see a van driver and my other friends are running over to him, maybe to yell at him, I run after them, they start kicking him, maybe I do to. Even one kick from a dozen people will nearly kill someone, its not like each kick spent 5 minutes on the man. And when everything cools down, would I want to tell on myself and my friends and send them to jail rather than help the van driver, someone I do not know? Probably not. And if I was a person in the community I might not want to say anything even though there is a massive sense of guilt because there is a real possibility of retribution for "snitching", or maybe I know the kids and not the van driver and want to protect them over helping the unknown person. The situation is not a bunch of kids waiting until after the incident to find out the identity of the man and track him down to get him, the incident is a split second reaction to a friend being mortally wounded after seeing him hit a van. I find it very difficult to figure out what I would have done in the situation because this situation is not predictable or thoughtout, it is a reaction and no one I know can predict split second reactions.

As for the parking issue, the city is not aggressive enough. People should not be parking downtown, the less the parking the better. We have a massive public transit system that is greatly underused by the middle class. Its hilarious that people feel parking tickets or paying for parking puts a strain on people during economic times, when really its the car itself which costs thousands of dollars a year to own that is hurting people's wallets. When people stop treating cars like legs they will have much more money be way healthier and will begin to realize who horribly our environment is designed and built and we can move towards reestablishing urbanism in ways that give purpose to and motivate the middle class again, which in turn will pretty much solve every problem of the city.

Maybe there can be a partially elected and partially picked school board?

Posted by: Norton Street | October 14, 2009 1:11 PM

Also wanted to comment on Mr. Watley's ridiculous comment about being "boxed in" on the street. It isn't the street that boxes one in, its the car. It is literally a box. The streets don't box anybody in when you're on foot, so while two way street are preferable in general, our streets should not be designed around cars only.

Posted by: James | October 14, 2009 1:20 PM

And once again, I will be forced to vote for a man I despise as a corrupt egomaniac. OK, I won't actually vaote for him, but I won't vote for any of the alternative candidates, either.

Watley's parroting of the Newhallville witnesses simply belies her tremendous ignorance and inability to function in an environment based on sanity and fact. Not that she ever had a chance in hell, but any possibility of her being a serious...anything went out the door with her even beginning to cast doubt on the completely unacceptable nature of the actions of those hoodlums that beat that van driver or the witnesses who preferred to retreat into conspiracy theories of cover-ups and police misconduct rather than looking inward and doing the right thing.

Sumner's response deserves little consideration. Bringing up a murder that happened 10 years ago and implying that that has any bearing on the relatively constant presence of street violence is irrelevant. Again, the man who I wanted to like for looking really nice in a suit went and opened his mouth and destroyed my dreams of a legitimate contender.

And Ralph. What can I say. Hi, Ralph! Good answer. See you again in two years. I imagine that Ralph must enjoy his candidacy, because I doubt even he harbors any delusions of actually winning. You can't run the same failed campaign, year in, year out, and expect a different outcome. If your serious, step up your game. Repetition, in this case, Ralph, does not make perfect. You won't get a consolation prize for being the guy who feebly stood against the Mayor half a dozen times.

Of course all three were right about an elected Board of Ed. And it makes no difference, because until he is ousted entirely, Johnnyboy will not cede a single ounce of influence. He needs to keep his ego fed, and the more people he can control, directly or indirectly, the happier he is. As a result, we have people who have become comfortable and secure in their positions, fat, lazy, unimaginative, and incompetent.

So come election day, I'll put my vote in for anybody but Mayor McDildohead. But my long term goal is to simply sell my home and leave this bad memory far behind.

Posted by: James | October 14, 2009 1:43 PM

Really, Norton, you don't know what you would do? Then you don't belong outside of your house. You've articulated many intelligent, well reasoned opinions in these threads, but that's ignorant and deplorable. You know what you would do? You would check your emotions. No matter what you were thinking at the time, what you were feeling, you would check your emotions and restrain yourself from attacking another person. Because that's what we in civilized society do. We restrain our emotions. And if you didn't, well, society would understand. That's why we have second degree murder. A crime committed in the heat of passion is still a crime. What excuse do you make for these kids for failing to do so?

Let's say that my wife and I are driving down the street. She rear ends another vehicle and when the dust settles, I find that she's been killed. I'm utterly grief-stricken and destroyed (just writing that sentence made me feel a little ill). I then proceed to get out of the car and beat the driver of the car we just hit. Would you be rationalizing my actions? I certainly hope not. And I will restate what I said earlier. If you honestly don't know how you would react to a traumatic event then you should lock yourself in your house and never come out again. If you cannot be relatively assured that you can control your emotions, if you cannot say with some certainty that you would contain your primal rage and need to attack the first person you see the first time your emotions got the better of you, you don't belong on the street, in an office, at the grocery store, or anywhere else. You, like the kids who beat that driver, would belong in a cell.

Posted by: Andrew Garrow | October 14, 2009 3:18 PM

Norton St. why can't you just lighten up. Perhaps move to Fire island, or the island of Lamu in costal Kenya - they only have two vehicles on an island of 20,000.

Posted by: Almost Ex-resident | October 14, 2009 3:58 PM

Right behind you, James...

Posted by: nfjanette | October 14, 2009 4:01 PM

A legally registered weapon available to the van driver might have produced an entirely different outcome to that situation for the violent criminals that attacked that innocent man. Then again, who would expect those animals to have attacked him when it was his van that was struck by the motor bike and he was without fault?

Posted by: Our Town | October 14, 2009 5:27 PM

The report does not mention anything about the crowd...how many people showed up for this, how did they react?

And, Norton Street's take was a surprise. Reason should prevail.

Posted by: Norton Street | October 14, 2009 5:44 PM

James,
This is a very complex issue which has not been given justice by either of us in our posts. 5 years ago I probably would have joined my friends in attacking the van driver, as would many 15 year olds in America. Today, I'm not sure what I'd do; I've never witnessed first hand a friend bleed to death on the street. In 5 years, I would probably have reacted by going over to my friend to check to see if he was alright and waiting with him until help came. I can remember several years ago when a friend of mine was stabbed by a mugger and my initial reaction was anger and a desire to find the attacker, and not to give him a pat on the back. It wasn't for several hours that I cared about my friend recovering more than I cared about justice being served to the attacker. I imagine there was a similar reaction in the motor bike incident in Newhallville, except the "attacker" was present and easily accessible. Now the perceived guilt of the driven from the kids was incorrect and their actions are terrible and I hope they are found and do serve time. But it is easy to sit on the outside and say just someone point out the kids, but who on the inside would give up a friend to help a stranger? Self preservation means preserving one's physical self as well as mental self, and the mental self is made up of that individuals surroundings and human relationships, so to give up a friend would be sacrificing a piece of yourself, something extremely difficult to do even though it is the correct thing to do.
The kids of this city (and almost all other cities in this country) have grown up in rotting neighborhoods that lack most of the services, recreational opportunities, jobs, investors, and all other things that make human habitation enjoyable, meaningful and pleasant and that were present in this city not that long ago. My childhood, for example, is defined by a dependence on my brothers to escort me everywhere. My mom worked all day and my dad worked all day and all night so I did not rely on them for car rides to parks, sporting events, recreation places, etc. If a place I wanted to go wasn't on a bus route, wasn't within walking distance, or occurred at a time when at least one of my brothers was busy, then I stayed at home. This builds up over time and becomes unbelievably frustrating. And before I get into an entire life story I will stop and just say that there are reasons why several generations of inner city youth have emotional problems, anger issues and a desensitization to violence and it has to do with who is at home, who is in the neighborhood, and who is at school looking after the child; it also has to do with what is the home, what is the neighborhood, and what is the school. Often children have uncaring mothers, no father, crazy neighbors, and teachers that just want to get through the day; they also live in decaying homes, in smoldering old neighborhoods that are full of holes in the urban fabric, full of junkies who come in from outside, full of cars that are commuting or speeding or driving recklessly that make streets unsafe to use and these kids attend warehouses like the old Jackie Robinson, East Rock Magnet, or in my case West Hills middle school that are/were massively depressing buildings to be in only to go to equally depressing homes and neighborhoods. These types of stresses of not being able to enjoy one's own community builds up to something really awful. The problem isn't in the neighborhoods themselves, they have great potential, but this country's citizens refuse to invest in them in any meaningful way and instead aspire to or live a middle class life of isolation and meaninglessness at the direct social, economic and physical expense of old urban centers like New Haven.

Posted by: faCchec | October 14, 2009 8:33 PM

First let us examine how the Mayor is responding to these questions and then put the FACs to his response to the test.

1.

"The mayor spoke of how Quinnell Payne needed help, and how the city tried to help him. The young man grew up without his father at home; the father has been in and out of jail.

"Four different government agencies had contact with Quinnell Payne and tried to help him, DeStefano noted: City Hall’s summer youth jobs program, the Street Outreach Workers unit, the state Department of Children and Families, and the school truancy team".

Three of the four governmental agencies were city agencies operating on taxpayer monies. The mayor openly admits that all three failed in attempts to help Quinnell Payne, yet the mayor has made no corrections to the agencies format or manner of response.

Instead the Mayor flips the responsibility to:

"Government, churches, and other community groups should work harder to work with young people to offer them alternatives to the street".

Yet no community House Mr. Mayor!

2.
Aggressive taxes:

"DeStefano argued that those policies have enabled him to keep taxes lower; everyone should pay their taxes, he said, so that those who do pay don’t end up footing the bill for scofflaws".

Please Mr. Mayor, parking tickets are not taxes, they are fines, which you proposed, and the puppet BOA approved, three increases in the last three years. That is anti- business and anti- resident, including Yale parkers.

3.
Elected v appointed BOE:

"DeStefano countered that his appointees to the board act independently. He argued that elected school board inject too much political infighting in other cities. And he argued that accountability is built into the system — through biannual mayoral elections".

I agree in part, an elected board is accountable to the Mayor and the Mayor is accountable to the voters every two years.

In view of the Fac that this news blog has reported the Mayors poor attendance record and that of other board members attendance at BOE meetings, it would then fall on the Mayor to discipline the absentee members...yes? but no, that did not happen... did it...?

In order to change the current appointed board, the Mayor, or any member of the BOA could simply petition for charter change, any time within a ten year period.. but that does not happen... does it??...

Since there has been no meaningful changes during the past 16 years under the Mayors watch...
the poor math, reading, and writing scores, by our 9-12th grade high school students,who, according to your reports, have graduated and gone on to college.

.......Well then......

"instituting dramatic school reform".

I would say is long over due.

4.
The Newhallville gang beating:

A case of poor police response.. !!...

The police call log showed that many calls were made for hours regarding the dirt bikers..the police made a feeble response, saw nothing ..and left..more calls... no police response.. after more that five hours of dirt biking in a one block area, the accident, looking for someplace to happen..happened...!

Now, the questionaire panel and the Mayor would have us blame the neighborhood residents...

............PLEASE............

Posted by: streever | October 15, 2009 9:52 AM

I agree with this:
"The Newhallville gang beating:

A case of poor police response.. !!..."

Hours of calls to the police.

"No snitching"? is the problem according to the city? I'm sorry, I think the neighbors "snitched" for hours, and the police did not invest the time. Thankfully the NHPD has increased it's focus on this, so I think the lesson was learned. It's just important to clarify what that lesson was, because none of the panel members got to it.

Posted by: Fairhaven Dave | October 15, 2009 10:35 AM

This is NOT a complex issue...

The fact of the matter is, regardless of how the situation made the onlookers "feel" beating a person who has not threatened you in any way is assult.

If a child is not instilled with common sense, at least enough to avoid riding a stolen vehicle at high speed thru a red light into the side of a van, he will likely pay with his life.

Posted by: Bill | October 15, 2009 12:44 PM

If my friends and I steal a motorcycle and one of us "speeds" through a stop sign and strikes the rear of a vehicle, this gives the remainder of us the right to beat senseless the innocent occupant of the vehicle struck in the rear. What if it had been a car that was stolen, This whole article as well as the apologists it quotes is sick. there are actually people "who didn't take sides between the van driver and the kids" how wonderfully refreshing that is. I am sure the van drivers family takes alot of solace from these political morons.

Posted by: Norton Street | October 15, 2009 1:29 PM

FACCHEC,
good post.
The mayor had kind of a weird answer to the motor bike incident. He said the city agencies contacted him but were obviously unable to get through to him in any substantial way. However, these same outreach programs work for many kids. The mayor brought up a great point that for some kids, like Quinnell, the city can't do everything and in these cases it is up to the community to do the work. Now this is a great place to expand upon, but unfortunately this is where the mayor stopped talking. Our communities are responsible to raising children, parents are responsible for providing the means for comfortable living. Many communities in this city are unfit to raise children, therefore putting an unfair burden on parents to do everything, and making it nearly impossible to raise a child especially if theres only one parent. The mayor of New Haven needs to find out how to get our communities to the point where children can be successfully raised in them. The only way to do this is to somehow bring hard working, motivated working and middle class people back into this city's neighborhoods.

Posted by: Norton Street | October 15, 2009 2:54 PM

What will follow is a description of the bare minimum thought process that needs to take place in order to have a worthwhile opinion on the motor bike incident:

What happened?
Kid rides stolen bike (never determined whether or not this particular kid stole the bike or was aware it was stolen) through stop sign into the side of a van whose driver was following the current laws.
Friends of kid beat up van driver.

Why did kids beat up van driver?
An instantaneous and rash reaction to seeing a seriously hurt friend bleeding to death in the street due to a collision with a motorist

Once the situation has become understandable through analysis then proceeds judgment.

Do these kids deserve punishment?
While their actions are understandable and relate-able, they are not excusable and warrant jail time. Personally I would say less than 10 years for each kid (3-7 maybe), but that would mostly depend on eye witness accounts. If it were just one kid that did that to the van driver, I'd say more like 20+ years.

Why have witnesses not come forward?
Either scared of community repercussions or protecting someone close to them

Why do some kids in our society react with violence so quickly?
many reasons mostly stemming from a degraded culture that is largely absent of coherent connections between people that allow for meaningful and purposeful life to occur
also the suburbanization of our country has separated our physical environment so drastically that it has greatly reduced the accessibility to role models in many communities due to the various negative impacts of suburban landuse, culture and thought processes that have flourished in this country in the last 60 year

anything less than this is symptomatic of a thoughtless individual who contributes very little to human society.
To come to the conclusion that a group of inner city youth who beat up someone automatically deserve a harsh sentence without properly considering the specific incident is uncharacteristic of intelligent thought. A monkey can tell when its banana is stolen, a human can figure out why and how so that similar incidents don't repeat. To brush off the kid's actions as unexplainable is ignoring our knowledge of human nature and our own capacities for overthetop reactions during traumatic experiences. Expaining why something happens and relating to it is not the same process as judging it, that occurs afterwards. It is easy to look at this situation from the outside and immidiately pass judgment, it is much more difficult (but more important) to immerse one's self into the situation and understand it first.

Posted by: Fairhaven Dave | October 16, 2009 1:34 AM

Norton Street! 'uncharacteristic of intelligent thought'? "Stupid" has 10 fewer syllables and is less condescending.

Obfuscate and link together as many lilting and patronizing phrases as can be Googled... REGARDLESS of the subjective rants... motivation rational or irrational does not excuse an unjust assault. The average person could likely relate to Jeffery Dahmer if they "immerse themselves" enough, but average joe has the common sense to know it is a waste of time.

A densely populated area will always have lowered morals as accountability for a persons actions become decreased. When you don't recognize nine out of ten people you encounter all day long you stop concerning yourself with how you behave. Combine that with drizzlers who think we should coddle and understand criminals and you end up with crime ridden areas where education and improving the human condition become secondary to survival. Stupidity expands exponentially from generation to generation especially with moral relativity being poured like thick syrup from fools.

Posted by: Norton Street | October 16, 2009 9:48 AM

The same logic can be applied to a sparsely populated areas. When people have little to no accountability to other people they feel like they can do whatever they want.
People can point out problems all day in cities, in suburbs, in towns, in rural areas, there are problems everywhere. After enough observations are made, one can conclude that we generally have a degraded society in America. Often times people don't want to or care to assess why this is, because usually it involves looking in the mirror and seeing what it is we contribute to and take away from society.
New Haven's residential neighborhoods are not dense. This is a small New England city with traditionally designed streets and neighborhoods. The scale of New Haven is much closer to downtown Branford than it is to Manhattan. What makes New Haven seem dense is the contrast between the extremely low density suburbs that have popped up and the scale of traditional housing. New Haven's neighborhoods grew organically to fulfill people's needs, suburban housing was randomly scattered to fill developer's pockets.
To state that density has caused the moral, education and violent degradation of our society is completely wrong. This is easily observable right here because in New Haven during the 1950s and 60s the vast majority of the city's densest housing was demolished. These were some of the poorest, dirtiest yet most thriving communities in the city; the standard of living was low but the quality of life was high. So there is surely another reason for culture degradation since New Haven's current problems did not begin until after the densest housing was gone.
Anyone who had researched this topic quickly comes to the conclusion that middle class urban exodus coupled with the migration of poor, uneducated southern blacks, the immigration of Puerto Ricans and the decline of industrialism is the cause of today's problems. The mass urban exodus resulted in gutted, hollow cities where only people too poor to move out still resided (for the most part). Not only were city residents poor and uneducated, but all the manufacturing jobs were just recently moved out of the city or out of the country, leaving large groups of people unemployed. Small businesses either left fr the suburbs, were run out of business by a chain store or lacked enough business and closed because the clientele lived in the suburbs. In the last 10 years, distant corporations have come to the city to open up stores, but since they are not locally owned, there is no return investment in the community.

Posted by: Fairhaven Dave | October 16, 2009 10:39 AM

In sparsely populated areas where individuals can be identified and ostracized by the entire community persons are move likely to be accountable for their actions regardless of their personal circumstances. It's a large part of why the "middle class exodus" exists. Stay in New Haven and dodge criminals on your way to the grocery store or move to the country and dodge cows.

Posted by: Norton Street | October 16, 2009 12:16 PM

"In sparsely populated areas where individuals can be identified and ostracized by the entire community persons are move likely to be accountable for their actions regardless of their personal circumstances."
Possibly, or they are ostracized and become isolated and go insane. How many serial killers/mass murderers are from cities?
Also, your point is exactly wrong. Accountability does not have to do with density, it has to do with the stability of the economy and the culture. The economy is stabilized by easy accessibility to a wide range of diverse jobs and careers. Culture is stabilized by connections to people who are similar to you and who are different than you. New Haven lost many of its connections when huge numbers of people moved out of the city at mid 20th century; we also lost many connections when neighborhoods were physically separated from each other with highways, unsafe roads (like Whalley), and gaps in the urban fabric through mass demolition of buildings. Those 2 things (middle class population flees and physical destruction of neighborhoods) is what led to the cultural degradation in cities.

"Stay in New Haven and dodge criminals on your way to the grocery store or move to the country and dodge cows."
Most grocery stores around today are giant chains that funnel profits to a select group of people and little to no money is reinvested into the community where the store is located. In suburban strip malls, this practice is logical, since the stores are not located in communities but rather in giant horizontal boxes surrounded by asphalt, but in cities and towns were these stores are located there are people who depend on walkable streets and aesthetically pleasing environments. A place like Shaw's is a visually, audibly, and just a generally sensory abusive place for pedestrians. These same conditions in a suburban setting go unnoticed because people are shut out from the world in a car. So the suburban ideals have been brought into the urban setting, where everybody drives now, to avoid being in physically depressing public spaces. When people stopped walking everywhere, criminals were able to come out from the underbellies of society and do what they pleased. Recently people have begun walking and biking more, which has helped reduce crime levels (among other things) from 21,000 crimes a year in the early 90s to 9,000 a year today.
In present day Connecticut there is very little "country" left. An enormous amount of land has been hastily developed since the 1940s, leaving little of the rural lifestyle left. The suburbs are not rural, the suburbs are the inbred child of 'the country' and 'the town'. Suburban people dodge cars, actually, not cows. Vehicular accidents are amazingly more likely to occur in suburbia than in a town or a city, which is ironic because suburban streets were designed and organized for the specific purpose of circulating massive amounts of single passenger vehicles.

You need to do some research, I can't keep trying to make this complicated argument in various posts on a website. I can give you some references of books that you need to read, because you don't know what you're talking about.