Aug 02 2008
Does the Media Care about Protecting People?
Two years ago, a young man was walking in my neighborhood at 9 p.m. on a summer night, returning home after the local sunset concerts and was stabbed.
Police think robbery was the motive. He was stabbed four blocks from my home on a major thoroughfare and his murder remains unsolved.
Yesterday, about a mile from my house, a group of people were enjoying the summer afternoon in their yard when an unknown man walked into the yard and robbed them at gunpoint. When one of the victims refused to cooperate, the thug shot him.
The victim is recuperating at a local hospital, but the thug is still at large.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time this summer that my community has been shaken by armed robbery. The last time I heard about it was earlier this spring when some friends who share an apartment with two other people heard a commotion and came out of their room to find their roommates in the living room calling the police about the men who had just robbed them.
One of the roommates went out to smoke and when he came back into the apartment, the robbers, one of whom had a gun, forced their way in. They took the money out of the victims’ wallets and their cell phones and then fled on foot.
When it was reported to the police, the local police reported it was the second such robbery in that apartment complex in a week.
Neither of the armed robberies in the apartment complex made the news. The one yesterday did because someone was shot.
And the headlines make me nervous.
The year Ryan Livingston was stabbed, the young man from the beginning of this blog, there was a rash of armed robberies in my neighborhood, but it wasn’t until Ryan died that the local media cared. Now, I wonder how many other armed robberies have happened this summer without being reported.
The man who robbed my friends’ roommates threatened to shoot one of them when he assumed that the gun wasn’t real. He backed down when the threat came.
I wonder if the man who was shot yesterday would have acted differently if he had known about the other robberies or if he too thought the gun was a fake?
More importantly, I wonder why the media hasn’t reported these incidents so that people could be safe?
