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3 juveniles arrested for armed robbery spree

May 16, 2015

hand cuffs 1Santa Maria police arrested three juveniles for committing a string of armed robberies in San Luis Obispo, Arroyo Grande and Santa Maria on Thursday. [KSBY]

Early Thursday morning, police said victims of multiple armed robberies provided similar descriptions of the suspects. Also, in each robbery,  the thieves’ were armed with what appeared to be a shotgun or rifle.

Police arrested two juvenile suspects Thursday morning and booked them into Santa Maria Juvenile Hall.

Later in the day, officers arrested a third juvenile in connection with the robberies and booked the suspect into juvenile hall. The names of the suspects are not being released because of their ages.

 


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Santa Maria is ghetto as hell! But we need to respect the culture of the city OK? Send those kids to jail!!


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Would your analysis also apply to our country’s 10 most dangerous cities?

Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Stockton, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo and Cleveland are all crime-ridden areas that were once decent, middle-class cities.


Race isn’t a common denominator since Santa Maria suffers from pre-dominantly -Hispanic- crime whereas every single one of the 10 most dangerous U.S. cities has a huge rate of -African-American/black- crime.


Could it be that kids-turned-criminals are “thrown into the system” in these areas because they do not have fathers? That there’s no “sense of community and individual identity” because the vast majority of families are broken, with a single mom or grandmother raising multiple kids from multiple absent fathers… Gangs appeal to kids because they are a surrogate family with a strong patriarchal hierarchy, structure, incentives and rewards for approved behavior. (Of course it’s twisted and illegal–vandalism, stabbings, drive-by shootings, robberies, etc.– but for a fatherless 12 year old boy, it all looks attractive.)


Just a thought. Not trying to be snarky about your assertions but it seems that the blame doesn’t lie mostly with “big box stores and cheap housing tracts” but with the government welfare state that creates dependent generations year after year. Single mom + three kids + multiple baby daddies + huge out-of-wedlock birthrate = disaster, whether it’s Hispanics, blacks, whites, whoever…


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I would say that my analysis does apply to many of our cities, in fact much of the country, because crony capitalism and excessive involvement by the government in the economy has helped to erode the middle class that gives a community wealth, self determination, and opportunity. When I say middle class, btw, I’m not referring to working class with good jobs, I’m referring to the REAL middle class of business owners, traders, and highly educated professionals.


I would say that it doesn’t help that their fathers weren’t there, but to some degree I think that is also a function of this trend. Community is very much built around economic activity. Loss of community can mean loss of loyalty and accountability. As far as race, the drug war without a doubt had a very destructive effect…. homes that weren’t already broken might be broken by fathers winding up in prison for victimless crimes. Constantly struggling with the penal system also creates a lot of stress and despair. So that just compounded the problem.

And of course this created a self fulfilling prophecy as far as crime in these communities.


I grew up in SLO, and I can promise you that lots of the kids where I lived (in a nice area) got into the same kind of things that kids in Santa Maria did. But the kids in my neighborhood didn’t get subjected to the legal system, most of the time anyway. I lived in Santa Maria for a while I was *shocked* to see how many kids were on probation, most of them for the same kinds of minor crimes or drug crimes.


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There’s a lot of truth to the “culture of poverty” argument, but culture grows from access to socioeconomic opportunities to better your situation in life. Culture “improves” when times are good and opportunity increases, and it “declines” when times get bad. To act as though middle and upper class societies are innately morally superior to lower class societies (as though they find it easier to recognize some truths that the lower class can’t) is an oversimplification that pundits and politicians try to sell constituencies as a means of preserving the status quo/existing socioeconomic power structure. So yes, culture is problematic, but its more of an exacerbating symptom of poverty rather than a root cause.


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Quite honestly, anyone interested in sociology or politics needs to descend on Santa Maria and use it as a case study. Determining exactly “what went wrong” would be extremely useful for future planning. Putting aside everyone’s knee jerk assumptions about race and welfare and whatever other nonsense, my guess is this: The local leaders did not care whatsoever about keeping their capitalism local. They whored out their land to big box stores, and cheap housing tracts, and then the bankers descended to make the creative loans. The result was no strong sense of community and individual identity, no profit remaining within the community to build a strong middle class, all the existing middle class couldn’t compete and the entire city became low-middle working class. Their children were subject to enforcement of drug laws and racist profiling police which ensured they would get thrown into the system on some basis for years for doing things that kids in my white neighborhood got away with. This destroyed their motivation and their chances to get a good education.


All else, the crime, gang activity, the welfare cases, all of it, is a symptom of this process, not the cause.


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I think I’ve heard this song before. Sorry, but managed empathy, entitlement, and fatherless homes are the problem. Oh and be sure to keep beating the mean police drum. Here’s a clue; law is force, and that’s why they put the word force in enforcement. I was raised in a lower middle class white culture, and at no time did the police give us a pass. But anyway, congratulations for covering all the same old bases: Big box (capitalism), white neighborhood (racism), and blah, and blah. Particularly intrigued by your putting aside racism and welfare, then launching right into racism. The beat goes on———–and on—————————–and on.


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