Word: crimeeds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Time was when East St. Louis enjoyed a modicum of blue-collar prosperity. In the '40s and early '50s it ranked second only to Chicago as a national rail and stockyard center. But almost all its industry has left, driven out by high crime rates and property taxes. Thousands of jobs have gone with the factories, leaving the city a pocket of nearly hopeless poverty in the generally economically well-off St. Louis metropolitan area, and quite possibly the worst-off urban center in America...
Beating. Rape. Murder. Screams in the night. Bricks in the face. Sirens drowning out the crying. These are the images of violent crime -- the crime generally associated with the most depraved individuals. No one is shocked any longer to hear of atrocities committed by mobsters, drug pushers or psychopaths. But the boy next door? That harmless-looking kid in biology class? The captain of the football team...
...sure, teenagers have never been angels. Adolescence is often a troubled time of rebellion and rage. From West Side Story to Rebel Without a Cause, the violence of youth has been chronicled on stage and screen. But juvenile crime appears to be more widespread and vicious than ever before. "Burglars used to rob a house and then run away. Now they urinate or defecate in the home or burn it up before leaving," says Shawn Johnston, a forensic psychologist in Sacramento. "Thieves mugged a person and ran off. Now they beat their victims." Or rape or murder them...
...teen crime wave flows across all races, classes and life-styles. The youths who went on the Central Park rampage were blacks and Hispanics from Harlem, but they were not desperately poor. Three of the five suspects charged in the Glen Ridge sexual assault were idolized football stars, and two of them were co-captains of their high school team. Eight other Glen Ridge High School students, including the son of a local police lieutenant, allegedly stood by and watched the assault. In Denver a 16-year-old boy charged with first-degree murder in a stabbing death...
...exploits and shrug off victims' pain. A Chicago case in which four teenagers raped and killed a medical student was solved because of good police work and what Pat O'Brien, Cook County deputy state's attorney, describes as "the defendants' inability to keep their mouths shut" about the crime. "It was a badge," he explains. "It was something they talked about as if it gave them status within that group of guys." Youngsters offhandedly refer to innocent passersby caught in the line of gunfire between two gangs as "mushrooms." "That is callous," observes Edward Loughran, commissioner of the Massachusetts...