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‘This so-called war’: In Florida’s deepening teen gun violence crisis, the kids who are forgotten are those who need help most

South Florida Sun Sentinel - 2/10/2024

When Ammond Ivy, 17, shot his stolen gun in Riviera Beach last March, he said it was because he was afraid.

Walking over the train tracks with some of his friends, he thought he saw someone in the bushes, shining beams at him, someone he didn’t like. And Ivy had come close to dying before when he was with friends, when someone who didn’t like one of his friends decided to shoot at all of them.

“I thought I was gonna get shot at, so I just started shooting,” he told the South Florida Sun Sentinel Thursday night in the kitchen of a community building in Riviera Beach, where he was attending a meeting with Inner City Innovators, an organization dedicated to turning around lives like his. When a police officer caught him later, gun on his hip, he ran. Then he was arrested and charged.

Gun violence spiked across Florida and the U.S during the pandemic. But while other age groups have plateaued, shootings among teens are continuing to rise, a trend for which experts do not yet have a cause, but see as a public health crisis unfolding along racial lines.

In neighborhoods where shootings are a daily occurrence, teenagers fear dying because of a disagreement or for hanging out with the wrong person. They get guns to protect themselves, they use them, and violence begets more violence.

But a solution to the crisis can’t center only on gun control, experts say. In states like Florida, where legislators are now trying to lower the gun-buying age to 18, some see the proliferation of guns in minority communities as a foregone conclusion.

Experts and advocates believe the most important work now comes from people within the community who know the most vulnerable and their families, and who treat gun violence like the trauma that it is.

“When a kid first comes into our program, he doesn’t know how to describe what he’s feeling, he doesn’t know how to describe his state of being,” said Ricky Aiken, who started Inner City Innovators after growing up surrounded by gun violence himself. “But when he hears it described by his peers, or young people like him, he obtains language to describe what he feels inside. And most of the gun violence in our community can be pinpointed to the fact that our young people don’t know how to process the trauma that they’ve endured thus far, so when something happens, they snap. Every situation is a life-or-death situation for them.”

2023 sets another record in teen shootings

The total number of fatal shootings involving teenagers rose sharply in Florida and across the U.S. in 2020, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, dipping in 2021 before rising again in 2022 and reaching a new high in 2023. Much of the violence is clustered in densely populated areas like South Florida.

Experts point to the pandemic as a catalyst for the surge, but they haven’t reached a conclusion as to why the number of gun homicides continues to rise among teens but has leveled out in other age groups.

“I think we’re going to look back at 2021, 2022 as the peak of this most recent wave,” said Jonathan Jay, an urban health professor at Boston University who focuses on youth gun violence. “But among teenagers, there’s some indication that rates have continued to grow, that they did not plateau in 2022 for teenagers.”

While Florida and Texas lead the country in the sheer number of these shootings, the state sits in the middle of the most populous states when adjusted for population, just below Illinois and significantly higher than California and New York.

A crisis along racial lines

The first time Javen Bennett lost someone he knew to gun violence, he was about 12 years old. He thought of his mother.

It was 2016, and Bennett had just played football with a group of people the night before in his neighborhood on Tamarind Avenue in West Palm Beach. The next morning, one of those people been shot.

Bennett began to wonder what would happen to him and his brother if his mother, who worked late every night, didn’t come through the door one day.

Every year after that, it seemed, someone else he knew would die.

“I just hadn’t been thinking about death a lot,” the 20-year-old said Thursday night. “And it’s crazy because after that, death is following death, like literally every year, somebody that we knew passed away. I think it was probably only like a two-year gap where nobody didn’t die. Someone did get locked up.”

The difference between Black and white teenagers is stark. In Florida, Black children between 12 and 17 died by gun at almost four times the rate of their white and Latino peers: over 16 in every 100,000 Black teens died compared with about five in every 100,000 white or Latino teens, according to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Those numbers include homicides, suicides, and accidents.

In one recent study, Jay and a team of researchers looked at the gun victimization rates among teens in U.S cities during the pandemic. In some cities, the Black-white disparity was 100 to 1, he said, while Latino to white was 26 to 1.

“It’s just incredibly extreme,” he said. “White children do get shot, and it’s tragic, but it’s very rare compared to Black and brown children. And yet that’s still not treated as the crisis that it needs to be.”

Much of that violence is concentrated in certain neighborhoods or even parts of neighborhoods, Jay said, and is fueled by economic status, housing discrimination, and a lack of resources like quality schools or even neighborhood parks.

While some of Bennett’s acquaintances were dying, others were going to prison. Another friend of his is currently serving a 12-year sentence for shooting and killing his girlfriend’s father during an altercation.

“I’d rather him be locked up than out here, because in there, he’s safer,” Bennett said. “Even though prison isn’t safe, you’re safer; you’ve got a chance to actually live and see 30, or 25, you know, rather than being out here, where the chances are lower.”

But asked if he thought it was unfair that he has to live that way and others don’t, he said, “It’s on us.”

“It’s hard because people have lost people to this so-called war, and beef, and things like that,” Bennett said. “But I’d be wrong if I said it’s unfair, because it’s on us. We’re the ones causing the war.”

Young adults often use “beef” to refer to the disputes that lead to shootings.

‘Petty disputes’

The conventional narrative tends to treat gun violence in minority neighborhoods as gang- or drug-related. But oftentimes shootings have to do with silly arguments or perceived disrespect, or “dissing” another person, experts and advocates say, while bystanders are caught in the crossfire.

Like Bennett, Ivy said his life reached a turning point after which everything seemed to get worse, the day he almost died. He was in a car with someone that someone else didn’t like, so the other person started shooting.

“I’ll just say wrong time, wrong place, wrong place, wrong time,” Ivy said. “… Me being with somebody else put my life in danger. I know that I don’t have an issue with anybody, but they just started shooting the car down. And ever since that happened, things started taking a big left turn.”

A team of researchers at Florida State University recently completed a study of community violence in Leon County, where they found that one-third of homicides and non-fatal shootings “involved arguments, most commonly regarding petty disputes or perceptions of disrespect.”

Those petty disagreements, researchers continued, included “taking too long at the cash register; cutting in line; moving plants without permission; refusing to leave a room or property when asked; looking at the suspect(s); honking excessively; stealing a parking space; and criticizing the suspect(s)’ clothing.”

“Some of the conventional wisdom about gangs and guns and drugs, it didn’t fit,” said Thomas Blomberg, the dean of FSU’s criminology school, who led the study. “We looked at specifically homicides, and one of the most common causes, what might surprise you, was the perception of disrespect or what’s called ‘dissing,’ as opposed to fighting over drugs, which is portrayed in the media a lot.”

At first, after Ivy was shot at, he felt relief. 

“You’ll go home and be like, I made it out of that,” he said. “But you’ll think back on it and be scared and you’ve got to look over your shoulder. You’ve got to walk with a hoodie, cover your face, so nobody can see you.”

Every day Bennett is not with his brother, he prays he makes it home alive. The threat of being killed is ever-present, he said, regardless of who you are or if you’re involved with the wrong people.

“Bullets don’t have no name,” he said, “so how I look at it is, if you’re outside in the streets, just going on a regular day, you’re not into nothing, you just happen to get hit and killed, I just look at it as God said it was their time. Because there’s no other way we could look at it.”

‘After you jump’

The decision to shoot at someone is almost like suicide, some teens have told David “Dee” Rae, a mentor and life coach at Inner City Innovators who works with Aiken.

“After you jump, the people that live are like, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to jump,'” he said. “A lot of the kids, they say after they shoot, they didn’t mean it, or they wish they could take it back, you know? And a lot of the attitude is f*** it. I did it. I’ve just got to survive now. But in reality, they’re scared. They’re like, ‘Oh my God,’ I just did that.”

Those most likely to shoot have little to lose, Blomberg said, often from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

“They’re being marginalized and they’re not important,” he explained. “One of the ways that can manifest itself in behavior is aggression.”

Teens “excluded from systems,” such as those who have been suspended or expelled from school, are also at a higher risk of being shot themselves, according to Jay.

“You think kids walking home from school, it’s a normal thing to see yellow police tape or people being carted off or hearing screams of a mother who just lost her child. We want to let people know, especially we want to let children know, this is not normal, this is not acceptable, and we have a role to play in stopping this.” — Ricky Aiken, who started Inner City Innovators

“When you grow up in a community like ours, you assume everything you see is normal, right?” Aiken said. “You don’t really question your reality, you do what it takes to survive that reality. And a lot of the things that it takes to survive a traumatic childhood are things that keep you locked out of mainstream American society.”

After Ivy shot his gun that day in March, a police officer caught and arrested him. He was charged with possession of a stolen firearm, one of three guns his friend had stolen in a car break-in. He went to a juvenile detention center and then struggle to meet probation. Officers later found that the gun was stolen as part of another investigation, and he got arrested again in October.

By Thursday night, however, Ivy was free, besides the bulky ankle monitor sitting above his slides. He joined the group of teens eating pizza talking about exercise and mental health.

Sometimes kids come to rely on the justice system because of the structure it provides, said Rae. One time, when he was talking to Ivy about a school, Ivy told him, “I like that school because it reminds me of the tent.” The tent is slang for a juvenile detention center.

“He said he liked that school because it reminded him, essentially, of jail,” Rae said. “And what that indicates is he enjoys the structure.”

The pandemic catalyzed an existing mental health crisis among teenagers, in part by taking structure away. While much attention was paid to mental health in the context of suicide or school shootings, teens in gun violence-stricken communities lost critical years of school, activities and after-school programs that would have helped them learn to communicate better and resolve disputes without guns.

Some of those programs still haven’t returned as people moved more permanently towards social media and virtual spaces, putting teens at a greater risk of dying.

“These kids don’t know who they are, don’t know what they’re like,” said Joanette Brookes-George, a criminal justice professor at St. Thomas University and former Lauderhill teacher. “They don’t know their true selves. They’re out here unable to communicate, and because they’re all confused about who they are, they are easily aggravated. And because we have a high number of guns easy to reach, they find a gun and use it as their source of power.”

Solutions to violence at a turning point

Over the past 20 years, as guns have proliferated, so have solutions to gun violence: mentorship programs and summer activities, criminal justice reforms, or, alternatively, harsher policies like stop-and-frisk. Some work, some don’t, and some have mixed results.

Of course, experts say, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and stopping gun violence will require a multi-pronged approach. But community-based interventions like Inner City Innovators have been shown to work and are becoming increasingly popular, Jay said. Many of them rely on COVID funding, however, which has begun to run out. Local governments now have to decide if they want to keep doing them.

“We’re kind of at an inflection point around how much longer are we going to commit to this, to these intervention strategies,” Jay said.

Most of the funding for Inner City Innovators comes from out of state, Rae said, but they need more of it.

Aiken started the group in 2015 during a surge in gun violence in West Palm Beach, when it seemed like young men were shooting each other on almost a nightly basis. Originally, he and other concerned community members just started going to city commission meetings to try to explain why they thought it was happening.

But when a member of the group was gunned down himself because of someone he was walking with, it didn’t feel like change was happening fast enough.

“Bullets don’t have no name, so how I look at it is, if you’re outside in the streets, just going on a regular day, you’re not into nothing, you just happen to get hit and killed, I just look at it as God said it was their time. Because there’s no other way we could look at it.” — Javen Bennett, who grew up on Tamarind Avenue in West Palm Beach

So Aiken began going directly to young people after shootings and talking to them. He started renting a van and taking all the young people to Orlando just to get them away from the violence and the urge to retaliate.

The group started prioritizing three things: letting residents know that people are there and that gun violence isn’t normal, mentoring young men, and surrounding them with others on a similar path.

“You think kids walking home from school, it’s a normal thing to see yellow police tape or people being carted off or hearing screams of a mother who just lost her child,” Aiken said. “We want to let people know, especially we want to let children know, this is not normal, this is not acceptable, and we have a role to play in stopping this.”

Leaders in his organization, called “Hope Dealers,” learn cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to try to help kids rethink the urge to shoot a gun. They encourage kids to think about realistic goals but also avoid dissuading them if the idea of becoming a rapper is what motivates them to get off probation or finish school.

Blomberg also stressed the importance of education. Even kids who don’t start out on a good path in school can still turn it around, he said. In a study Blomberg conducted of incarcerated teens, he found that those who excelled in school while locked up and continued in school after release had sharply lower levels of recidivism compared to those who did not.

Brookes-George also thinks the solution lies in communication and self-love.

“We have to take time out for inner healing to address the traumas,” she said. “Be honest about the traumas, address them, give the kids opportunities to learn how to communicate effectively in school. If we don’t know how to communicate as adults, we can’t teach each other what we don’t know.”

Future plans

Growing up, Bennett dreamed of going to the NBA. Now, he works at a bedding manufacturer. He used to make YouTube videos and wants to get back into it.

Ivy has the rest of senior year ahead of him. Then, he said, he’s thinking about going into a trade, and eventually wants to own his own business.

Asked what he wanted people to know about gun violence, Ivy said he hoped they thought more about the reasons people do things.

“Before they go to pointing hands and go assuming and calling names, they need to know the backstory on why the thing happened,” he explained. “The question is why. That’s the question, why. You can answer that, everything will be okay.”

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