Brutal Boston Killings Reflect Culture

Four people including a two-year-old child were shot to death in the Mattapan neighborhood in Boston. A fifth man is in critical condition and is not expected to survive. The gunmen are still at large and police are having difficulty getting any cooperation from residents. Mattapan is a primarily minority neighborhood overrun with gangs, drugs and violence. This horrific crime says a lot about the state of many of our inner city neighborhoods. Criminals are so in control that gang-bangers walk the streets wearing "Don't Snitch" T-shirts. The few instances where someone actually came with information on a crime resulted in that person being gunned down by gangs. The reaction is always the same. Everyone turns out for a few highly publicized rallies and vigils against violence and then the TV cameras go home and the thugs come out of the shadows and resume their activities. For the most part residents in other parts of the city unaffected by these incidents say all the right things but in the end don't really care as long as "they" don't start coming into their neighborhood. I'd be curious what you would do to address this problem. Do we send in an occupying force of National Guardsmen as a Washington D.C. mayor suggested a few years ago? Or do we continue deferring to the leadership in the black community to discipline and police themselves? Let me know.