A Housing Manger finds a gun he knows bas been used in several shootings. He calls the police, but when they don't come, what happens when the owner does?
Carole King sang: “You can’t talk to a Man with a Shotgun in his hand,” and we hope not to test that theory.
A manager of a low-income housing project, one plagued by shootings, violence, and drugs dealing, had a particular problem, a young man name Gillie, who had been arrested the previous year after shooting a man; and robbing an ice cream truck at gun point while children waited for their Popsicles, had returned to the site.
He’d acquired a colt 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol, which he carried with him, and showed to young, single women, offering them protection if he could share their bed, and retribution if they refused.
The manager told the police of Gillie’s reemergence and his threatening of the tenants, but this was a low-income site, and the police preferred to let the crime flourish there, making it less likely it would spread over to their own street.
So Gillie continued, finger on the trigger, looking for a place to stay. He was told he could live in a basement, not the ideal arrangement, no one to share his bed, but it was a place to sleep. A tenant who had the gun held on her, reported to the manager where he was staying.
He scheduled an apartment inspection and, upon entering, checked the basement, and saw a bed, and explored further, finding a bureau, and a slightly ajar bottom drawer, and saw the 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol and boxes of Winchester bullets.
He called the police and talked to the shift supervisor, telling him he found a loaded semi-automatic handgun in a basement and gave the address. We’ll send someone, he was told.
The housing manager called his female assistant to wait on the steps of the apartment to flag down the police, and then he sat on the cellar steps and waited, five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and then heard footsteps above, and relieved that the police finally arrived, he looked up, to see two Hispanic youths, hoods up, faces covered, coming down the steps.
They walked right over to the gun, and the bullets, and removed them. They, began going up the steps, then stopped, and the manager saw the barrel pointed at him, as he was told to keep his mouth shut or he would get his.
Carole King was right: There was nothing to say to the man with a shotgun in his hand.
The shift supervisor? He had listed the offense as found property and didn’t dispatch anyone. The assistant who was called to stand on the steps and waive down the police? Two days later someone put a bullet hole through her home’s window, a common warning not to snitch. She’s been reassigned. And the Housing Manager? Hasn’t been back since. Something about a being unable to process a traumatic event.
Gillie? The two young men who took the gun? To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen: “They’re still there, everyone else is all gone…gone…gone.”
And the shift supervisor? Nothing happened to him. The place the incident happened? Low income. The people living there? Low priority. Their lives? Expendable.
When this Democracy was founded only those who owned land could vote. Anyone without white skin had no say. We like to tell ourselves things have changed, but if that gun had been found in a residential neighborhood, there would have been a hundred police there. In low income, no one.
It’s like that everywhere, at least everywhere we call the land of the free.
