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Chester: Jobs Won’t Solve Crime
posted (July 7, 2016)
So, what we saw yesterday was a series of lawless gang retaliations for recent murders. Commander Williams says that part of the reason for the flare up is because he hasn't been having his meditation sessions with gangsters for a few weeks and that accounts for the upsurge. You'll hear more about that shortly, but first to ACP Williams's grim take on the ruthless law of the streets - which dictates that there will be shootings and death no matter what police do, or what jobs are given:...

ACP Chester Williams - OC. Eastern Division South
"We will never be able to stop all the shootings, no matter what we do. If we have a police at every street corner, it still won't stop all the murders and I have always said, it is the hard truth. The current generation that is out there giving trouble, they have sentence themselves to death. They are like purging themselves and I think that as a society we have done them an injustice, we have lost them. It's just a matter of time and one of the only way we could stop this is to see how we can begin to work on the other generation coming up, so that they do not fall the way how the current generation has gone. We are trying to do that and even though we believe that we have lost this generation that is giving trouble, we are still working to see how best we could save some of them, because we still believe that some of them can be saved. I can tell you that through our interventions and mediations, we have seen that some of them have been in deed change, because some of them do listen. But there will always be those ones who does not want to change and will just want to be out there lurking and looking for people to shoot. People talk about jobs, getting them jobs. Brother, if we give those people jobs in the current conditions that they are in right now, do you know what they will do with the money that will get from the job? They will buy more guns and ammunition and they'll have a bigger war. We cannot put them in any jobs until we could learn to help them overcome their anger and hate. That is 1st and foremost. If they are out there angry and they are hating against each other's, they will continue to kill out each other, whether you put them in a job or not, it will not help them."

Jules Vasquez
"Isn't it sir, a cycle in which you are powerless to change?"

ACP Chester Williams - OC. Eastern Division South
"I will not say that the police is powerless. The society is powerless and the reason that the society is powerless is because some people just want to sit and talk and don't want to do anything. They want to sit and criticize, instead of trying to get up and do something. The issue of crime will never be able to be address by the police alone. At the end of the day the effort of myself and my officers and the intervention team has been doing is not sufficient. We need to go beyond that and I really and truly want to push this conflict resolution anger management workshop in the different gang areas, because we have to teach them that there are other means by which they can resolve their conflicts without the use of a gun. Because currently the way it is right now as they have a little hard talk or a little mad steering, the 1st thing they think about is a gun and go and shoot. So, we have to help them overcome that."

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