This story began on August 25th. My apologies for not getting to it sooner, as the news has been overwhelming since the school year began.
16-year-old Dannady Greene was standing at her school bus stop in Louisville when a car pulled up. Witnesses say she refused to fight with a girl who got out of that car, so the boy in the car chambered a round and told her to fight or get shot. Dannady ran, but the boy shot her anyway. She died days later at the hospital, and last week two teenagers were finally arrested and charged with her murder.
The pair of suspects were said to be ages 16 and 17 at the time of the shooting. They have both been charged with murder and being a minor in possession of a handgun. The boy was also given the additional charge of tampering with physical evidence. Prosecutors are looking to try them as adults.
This is the second time this school year I’ve had to write about a kid getting killed at a school bus stop. The first was 17-year-old Jomiltron Fair in Gaffney, South Carolina, shot dead in front of 15 of his classmates by a trio of teenagers who apparently had some kind of beef with him.
While doing my research for this post, something stuck out to me as an ancillary topic. The LMPD and local media seem to be bending over backwards to make the arrest sound like a triumph of modern policing.
Neither of them can stop talking about how a Flock camera cracked the case, tracking the suspects’ car all the way into southern Indiana before officers tracked them down.
Congratulations, I guess. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally, and a camera network that blankets an entire metro area is going to catch something eventually just by sheer volume of surveillance.
What none of these triumphant press releases mention is how those same cameras get used the rest of the time, tracking people who haven’t shot anybody, feeding data to agencies with a documented history of misusing exactly this kind of tool.
A system that occasionally helps solve a murder isn’t automatically a system worth having, and I’d argue Louisville would be better off without a camera network that watches everybody all the time on the off chance it eventually helps catch the one person who deserved watching. But I digress.
Getting back to the shooting, City Councilwoman Tammy Hawkins essentially told parents that Louisville is too dangerous, the police can’t help, and they’re on their own, like it’s Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises after Bane takes over the city.
“Louisville is not safe,” Hawkins said. Hawkins warned parents that the responsibility of protecting children ultimately falls on them, declaring that the city is currently operating in “survival mode.”
“Whatever that looks like for them,” Hawkins said of how parents should protect their kids. “We are in a survival mode as a city, right? LMPD cannot be everywhere. LMPD cannot be on these bus stops every day.”
When asked whether that meant parents should carry firearms to protect their children if legally able to do so, Hawkins reiterated, “Whatever they need to do to protect their kids.”
I genuinely don’t know what she pictures happening next. A shootout started by a parent who’s never fired a gun trying to outdraw a teenager who’s already proven he’ll pull the trigger over a refused fistfight? What kind of message does that send?
And again, nobody wants to address the real problem that led to Dannady Greene’s death. Where did the gun come from, and why does a 16-year-old boy have access to one at all?
Nobody’s talking about closing loopholes that allow guns to move between people who have no business owning them and kids who definitely don’t.
Instead we get a victory lap for a misused camera network and a councilwoman telling parents to strap up, as if the answer to more guns near bus stops is more guns near bus stops. Like I keep saying, that’s like trying to cure cancer with more cancer.
Louisville can arrest every kid who pulls a trigger, but it’s not going to stop being a city where teenagers can get their hands on guns until somebody with actual power decides that’s the problem worth solving.
(Sources)
Leave a Reply