And crime no longer shocks

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

And on it goes. The news in brief. Three stories, six short paragraphs on page 18 last Friday, tell more about life in America today than all the front page headlines combined.

A 19-year-old Roxbury man was hospitalized in serious condition after an unknown gunman fired at least 11 shots at him, striking his chest, stomach, buttocks and both legs. The victim was taken to Boston City Hospital. The gunman fled in a black Camaro.

A 45-year-old Watertown man was robbed of his car and money at knifepoint in the Fenway neighborhood. The victim was in his car when two men approached, told him to get out of his car, robbed him, then drove away.

An armed and masked robber stole about 40 handguns and a number of AR-15 assault rifles from a West Bridgewater sporting goods store. The robber, about 6 feet tall, carried a sawed-off shotgun, wore a white hooded sweatshirt, black ski mask and sun glasses and drove away in a van stolen from Mansfield.

The fact that all these incidents are so routine that they're dumped on page 18 and reduced to a few short sentences shows exactly how ordinary they are. There's nothing shocking about any of them, which is, or certainly should be, the ultimate shock.

Experts would say we're desensitized. That seems to be the word of the '90s. This means that we're so used to mayhem that it no longer has an impact. We're like abused children; we think robberies and beating and rapes and murders are normal.

But this is pop psychology. It's far more complicated than this.

Let's look at the news reported the day before these incidents.

Page 24: Two Roxbury men charged in the murder of Paula Rosa, the grandmother who made the mistake of eating Thanksgiving turkey at a friend's apartment 17 months ago, (Remember, she was shot in the head by a bullet fired from outside.), were found not guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, assault, and weapons charges. Why? Because the state failed to prove that the men charged had caused her death.

They were involved in a drug deal, yes. Shots were fired, yes. But who fired them? Witnesses testified the defendants did, but the jury didn't believe the witnesses because they had reason to lie to protect themselves. The only indisputable facts are that four men were involved in the drug deal, one of them fired seven shots, and one those shots killed Paula Rosa.

All of them should have been charged with and convicted of murder; all of them were responsible for her death. But instead they all walked away.

Disgust is why we flip through the news, not desensitization.

Then there's this story, same day, again, the back of the paper. A 32-year-old Springfield man, Vincent Casavant, who, in 1981 was sentenced to 15 to 20 years in the beating death of a 78-year-old man, was arraigned Wednesday in the stabbing death of a young woman.

According to the numbers Casavant should still be in jail. Is he? No, he was released from prison last fall. So on it goes. Every day, more robberies, more stabbings, more murders.

We tune them out not just because it's the same story again and again, but because we feel powerless. Justice, the administering of deserved punishment or reward, is dead, killed by arbitration and plea-bargaining and delays and dissembling and deception. No one in America gets the punishment he deserves. So what can we do?

People who kill walk out of a courtroom door and get on with their lives. They go back on the street and pick up where they left off. They serve maybe a few years in jail and then are set free.

A week ago, the page one story was a list of 15 Boston teens murdered in the last 10 months. "Record bloodshed hits Hub schoolkids." This should have shocked. This should have caused a thundering reaction.

But it didn't. It surprised and it sickened, but only for a while. It's the way things are and the way things will continue to be, unless and until millions of ordinary people recognize that justice isn't prejudice and work to bring it back to life.