Gaining the Courage to Stand Up to Violence

Tuesday night, I finished writing a piece about Christy Lynne Hamilton, the slain Los Angeles police officer, and headed home, tired and troubled.

My editor and I had worked hard on the column, going through all the editing tasks we do at the paper to make our writing clear and strong. Still, my fatigue didn’t explain the feeling of frustration that gripped me as I drove home.

My editor had wanted something from the column that I couldn’t give. He wondered if there weren’t some words of comfort, some answers, I could offer a city in which so many good people--young and old alike--are murdered.

No, I said. There’s nothing we can do. Christy Hamilton was a victim of random violence. It’s haphazard, deadly, liable to strike at any time, at a bus stop, at an ATM, as you walk along the street, as you sleep in your house. I know about random violence because my family was struck by it more than a decade ago and that event has affected our lives ever since.

*

Our youngest daughter was beaten with a hammer and left for dead when a burglar found her sleeping alone in our house one summer morning. Eventually, Jennifer recovered. She is now a nurse who has cared for many other victims of violent crime.

I’m not religious, but I think I believe in God. On my infrequent visits to a synagogue, I would ask God how this could have been permitted to occur. I never got an answer and eventually quit asking. I still don’t know.

If we had had better locks on our doors, the burglar might not have been able to break in. But that isn’t certain. I brooded over the locks for a long time, blaming myself, imagining I could impose enough control on life to guarantee my family’s safety. Finally, I realized the best locks can be broken and that the streets my daughter walked on were more dangerous than her own home.

Our friends were wonderful. But when we talked about the assault, I could see they were searching for some constructive lesson, a survival skill that could be gleaned from this experience.

The most common question was: “Did they catch the guy?” Eventually the police caught a man they believed did it. But it was hard to understand why people cared so much about a point that was almost irrelevant to us. I believe in swift and severe punishment, but it would not make my family feel any better or safer.

I finally figured it out. People felt that the capture of a criminal would make them feel safer. It would show society was in control. A thug would be removed from the street and a long prison sentence would send a message to others like him. Justice would be served.

This is a comforting thought. It’s what drives lawmakers to build more prisons and increase sentences. But given the reality of L.A., with all its guns and drugs, another law is much more relevant: being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

*

I got home Tuesday night and walked into our house, the same one my daughter was attacked in. The thought of moving hadn’t occurred to us. Our friends washed away the blood. It was our family home and nobody was going to force us out of it.

I told my wife about the dialogue I’d had at the office. We talked about whether there was anything more I could say about Officer Christy Hamilton’s death, in light of our own experience.

But as I thought about it, some lessons occurred to me. They’re nothing big, no 10-point program to guarantee safe streets, nothing to really stop the random violence that has gotten much worse since my daughter was attacked.

I had learned something about courage by watching my daughter recover, become a nurse and then work in a dangerous and bloody county hospital surgical emergency room. The lesson: We can’t run away from society’s dangers, nor can we permit them to run our lives.

Lesson 2: We, as individuals, have a responsibility to make our society as safe as possible.

Hamilton’s killer, 17-year-old Christopher Golly, was addicted to speed, methamphetamine, a drug that makes you act crazy. Yet a family friend said his father gave him a semiautomatic rifle so they could share a common interest. Hadn’t the father, who was killed by the son, ever heard of fishing, or sports or reading--or church? Giving that kid a gun was sending him down the path to murder and suicide.

And what about the kid’s friends? They knew he was headed down that path. They should have intervened.

My final thought is that we, as individuals, are all in this together. We’ve got to draw strength from each other.

I saw this a few weeks ago. Our next-door neighbors had been burglarized. Rather than sitting around bemoaning their fate, they had called the local police station and invited a cop out to help us organize a Neighborhood Watch group.

These groups are part of an overall Los Angeles Police Department strategy called community-based policing. Residents like us keep our eyes open and our houses secure. If we see someone poking around a neighbor’s house, we call the cops. The cops, for their part, know us and treat us as friends and collaborators, rather than patrolling the streets as if they were an occupying army.

This being L.A., it was the first time I had met some of my neighbors. We sat around and talked. A friendly cop filled us in on crime prevention moves. We put together a list of our names and phone numbers. It all made sense, certainly more sense than waiting for Sacramento or Washington to pass some complicated crime-fighting bill. It fit in with my belief in not running away, and in individual responsibility. Here, on this block, we neighbors would make our stand.

We’ve got our list now. We know some of our neighbors better. I know it’s a dangerous world. I don’t walk to the 7-Eleven late at night. But I’ve taken a small step to stop the threat of random violence from overcoming our lives.