Bushwick Teens Talk About NYPD |

Alisha Lopez, a student at the High School of Enterprise, Business and Technology, has been part of our ongoing roundtable discussion sessions about gun violence. She has been taking notes as a journalist and helping to prepare blog entries about these discussions for our website. Here she re-caps a recent conversation we had about community-police relations, and whether or not guns serve a purpose in society.

At my high school, there was a discussion about gun violence. Several students got to speak about their personal experiences with it. Although gun violence is taking place in our community some of my peers believe that cops are the ones who use gun violence the most. A lot of the boys have been stopped and searched by undercover police because they "fit a description". My peers said they "always get searched", and that they are "asked random questions" and then released because they are innocent. They are stopped for no reason.

Most of my peers which were boys felt uncomfortable with the cops, but the girls seem to believe they felt completely safe. One student said that he believes that his peers "fill out a stereotype" and the girls agreed that you have to be nice to the police if you want them to be nice to you. The whole class agreed that it goes both ways, and that we make assumptions about police and the police make assumptions about us.

The students believe that there is a purpose for having guns but some of them think they should be regulated. One of my classmates thinks that guns are "important for safety, but shouldn't be used to kill." The teacher asked "Can you separate guns from gun violence?"

One of my peers talked about the cycle of violence and how it needs to stop: "If you kill someone's family, one person from that family may kill yours, we need to stop it all, gun violence needs to be stopped."

Our main question is why do we "need" guns? Students of Grand Street Campus had a lot to say.

Submitted by stephanie on January 6, 2011 - 5:02pm
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