Violence_in_American_Society

Jonathan Fajardo, who is believed to be a Latino gang member of the 204th Street gang, walked up and opened fire on a group of black people who were just hanging out in a driveway on December 15, 2006. As a consequence, a fourteen-year-old black girl by the name of Cheryl Green was killed, and three other people were injured. Furthermore, two weeks later, a potential witness by the name of Christopher Ash was found stabbed, more than sixty times, on a roadside. Prosecutors said that a group of gang members lured Christopher into a garage and killed him. The gang members assumed that Ash was giving information to the authorities about Cheryl Greens death. Jonathan Fajardo was eighteen years old at the time of committing the crime. Now he is a twenty-two-year old, facing the death penalty. Fajardo’s defense attorneys urged the jurors to give Fajardo the life sentence, in order for him to acknowledge the crimes. The attorneys provided two major arguments for Jonathan’s malice aforethought which included psychological and sociological factors. The psychological factor is that the perpetrator had a long-experienced depression and a misdiagnosed learning disability, which was labeled incorrectly as inactive. Thus, he is a product of neglect. His mother was busy working two jobs to make a living and his father was in custody. Besides, Jonathan Fajardo is erratic; his paranoid behavior is the result of a post-traumatic stress disorder, due to an experience of getting shot in a drive-by shooting. The sociological factor of Jonathan’s behavior is violence, because he was living in a poor neighborhood, where the 204th Street Gang is strongly established. Despite the justification of Fajardo’s reasons for committing the crime, he was convicted for the hate-crime killing of a fourteen-year-old black girl and a stabbing of a potential witness in the Harbor Gateway area. Fajardo is set to be sentenced on January 6, 2011. The article portrays that the cause of the violence is individual in nature. The reason is that the Latino gang member, Jonathan Fajardo, is a racist. The killing of Cheryl Green is considered to be a hate crime. The jury concluded that he should receive the death penalty for the first-degree murder convictions for the killings of Cheryl Green and Christopher Ash. Also, Fajardo was charged with special-circumstance allegations, including multiple murders, killing a witness, committing a hate crime based on race, and acting on the part of the 204th Street Gang. Prosecutors stated that the gang intimidated and attacked African Americans in the Harbor Gateway. Moreover, this type of violence is individual in nature, because it occurs between people that are not representing a social institution. This type of a crime is not structural violence. Structural violence is the way we organize the society, when it leads to violence. For instance, we could state that the reason why Fajardo is a gang member is because he is poor, and he happens to live in the community where he is surrounded by gangs. Fajardo is poor because in this society, “rich get richer and poor get poorer”. Budget cuts in schools are a practical example of structural violence. Due to structural violence, people tend to commit interpersonal violence. The explanation for the individual type of violence in the article about Fajardo is not sufficient enough. The article provides information about the murderer, and why the murderer committed such a crime, but the fundamental reason for the crime is not being addressed. The primary roots of the killing are being concentrated on psychological factors. The only reason given regarding the structural factor of the root in the killings was by Fajardo's defense attorney. He stated that the murderer did not choose to live in this neighborhood, where the 204th Street Gang is strongly established. Overall, the article addresses that the reason why Jonathan Fajardo murdered the innocent victims was because he is racist toward black people. People refuse to acknowledge the real reason why gangs exist. People do not open their eyes to see that we live in a world where wealth is distributed unequally and unfairly. So the reason why individual-factor-related crimes occur is because of poverty and interpersonal violence. Most of these problems arise out of structural violence. Therefore the core of the problem is very simple, but it is difficult to solve the problem. I believe that in order for people to live peacefully, a revolution is needed; a revolution which would change our country in a tremendous way. We need to change the capitalistic system, where wealth and power are unequally divided. Instead we need to establish a socialistic system, where the economic and political systems will give equal opportunities to all people, and where most businesses belong to the government. This way, everyone wins. Gangs would not exist anymore because people, who are filled with joy and not hatred, haven't got a need for them. And the joyful people of the new world would not harm anyone. But misery needs company.