Donald Derrick

I keep getting asked why I'm so angry about repeat-offender crime. This photo is why. I grew up in a country where childhood felt free. Not perfect, free. We hopped on our bikes after breakfast and didn’t come home until the streetlights flicked on. No phones. No “Find My iPhone.” Just a bunch of kids pedaling through the neighborhood, cutting through yards, racing down hills, stopping at a friend’s house because you saw their bike thrown in the grass out front and knew they were home. We went to public pools with a diving board and a high dive. We played soccer in the front yard with whoever happened to be outside. Kids you knew from school, kids you only knew because you saw them every summer riding past your house. Parents talked on the porch, or they didn’t... ...because it was normal to assume your kids would ALWAYS come home in one piece That’s the America I knew. My kids are not growing up in that America. I don’t get to just be “the parent yelling, ‘Be home by dinner!’ I have to be the parent running risk calculations in my head because ALL OF US PARENTS know all the public spaces are no longer safe. There’s no headline for “Another neighborhood kept their kids indoors today.” But that loss is real. It’s a slow, quiet theft of my kids childhood. A childhood I once had, that was beautiful... that they will never know or experience. So when I talk about repeat offenders... when I post the screenshots of their 50+ arrests EVERY DAY... It’s because I want my kids, and your kids, to have what we had. I want the BIGGEST concern at a park to be a skinned knee, not a stabbing. Streets where the sound of bicycles and laughter is louder than sirens or the screams of a drug addict. This is why I won’t shut up about it. I’m not asking for a perfect world. I'm just asking for the radical idea that childhood should be safe enough to look like this picture again.