Armed and Unprotected: When a City Fails, Its Children Start Carrying

By Kenn Dowell

“Safety in Black Cleveland has been privatized. Not by ordinance. By abandonment.”

I asked him twice because I didn’t want to believe the answer.

Chairman Fahim runs New Era Cleveland. Ten years on the southeast side. A community center at 117th and Buckeye. Seventeen members doing intervention work most institutions won’t touch. Mothers call him at two in the morning to come take a gun out of their own house. He is not talking from a studio. He lives in it.

So I asked him straight. Has Cleveland become so unsafe that a young man with no gang ties, no street beef, no enemies still needs to arm himself just to make it home? He said yes. I gave him room to walk it back. I asked again.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

Let Me Be Clear About Where I Stand

I want no confusion about this part. We did not agree. We did not find common ground. And I’m not going to soften my position to be polite.

A child carrying a gun is not protected. He is one bad second away from a casket or a cell. There is no version of that story that ends in safety.

And I’ll say this with respect, because the work New Era does is real: when a man leading a community organization says young kids ought to be carrying, I can’t ride with that. Not from that chair. The work is right. The answer is wrong. Both things are true.

But here’s the thing. I can reject his answer and still hear what’s underneath it. Because the question his answer forces on all of us is the one nobody wants to sit with.

Why Do Our Kids Believe This?

That’s the real story. Not whether Fahim is right. Why a twelve-year-old already believes he is.

He told me about a boy new to the neighborhood. Knows nobody. In nothing. And that child runs survival math on a walk to buy a drink, because somebody might decide not knowing him is a reason to end him.

Fear is part of it. But it’s not all of it. Four things put that gun in a child’s hand.

Access. These guns are everywhere. A kid can get one easier than he can get a summer job in this city.

Culture. The music, the videos, the image — carrying got sold to these kids as street life. And I won’t act brand new. My era had drug selling and gangbanging stitched into it too. Some of that never changed. It just got a better marketing department.

Weakness dressed up as toughness. Fahim came up in the nineties. I came up in the eighties. We fought. Somebody won, somebody lost, everybody went home. You could show up at school the next day after losing, because losing with heart still earned respect. These kids skipped the fight and went straight to the funeral. The fists got replaced by the trigger. That’s a generation that never built the muscle to take an L.

Social media pours gas on all of it. A kid gets clowned online by strangers who will never know his name, and he’s ready to take a life over what they might think. That’s how a joke becomes a homicide.

Fahim broke up two boys at his own program because one stared too long. The boy staring had cognitive delays. He couldn’t help it. That is how thin the line has gotten.

Abe’bre’anna Jackson. Fourteen. Straight-A student, home in her own bed. A house shot full of bullets took that baby’s life where she slept. Columbia Avenue. Glenville. The same streets that raised me.

Four failures. All of them ours to fix.

The City Owns This

Now watch the numbers. Cleveland spends more than $400 million a year on public safety. Over half the General Fund.

The Neighborhood Safety Fund got seeded with $10 million, and the first round put just $1 million on the street, split 29 ways, with grants as small as $7,500. During budget hearings, council learned the city funded a total of six violence prevention workers.

Four hundred million for safety. Six people doing prevention.

I know the city is trying to staff up. I know the police force has been shrinking for years, and they’re offering $5,000 signing bonuses just to get recruits in the door. That’s a real problem and I won’t pretend it isn’t.

But short-staffed is not the same as off the hook. Protecting citizens is the first job of government. Not the third. Not after the lakefront. When a fourteen-year-old dies in her own bed and a community organization of seventeen volunteers is carrying the intervention load, the city has not done its job. Period. Recruit harder. Fund the prevention workers. Show up before the funeral.

And This Is Exactly Why the Cameras Matter

Now let me connect this to something I wrote about a few weeks back, because some of you will think I’m about to contradict myself. I’m not.

After Abe’bre’anna was killed, Councilman Kevin Conwell walked her street door to door begging people to talk to police. Some were hostile. Nobody talked. When a community is too afraid to be a witness, footage is sometimes the only witness left.

So hear me plainly. In a community this violent — where even the man doing the intervention work believes children should be armed — somebody has to be able to see what happened on that street. That is the case for the cameras. Not a blank check. A tool.

My position hasn’t moved an inch: the cameras can stay, the blank check has to go. Rules written down. Limits with teeth. Reporting to council in public.

You cannot tell me we should accept armed twelve-year-olds and rejected cameras in the same neighborhood. That math doesn’t work. If the block is dangerous enough to justify a child carrying, it is dangerous enough to justify accountability that can see.

Where This Lands

Two wrongs are on the table in Cleveland right now. Arming our children. And abandoning them. I reject both.

Fahim is building his answer with seventeen people and a community center, and I honor that work even where we split. But the answer to a failed city is not a fourteen-year-old with a pistol.

The answer is a city that does its first job — with prevention workers who are funded, police who show up, and cameras that answer to the public they watch.

Tell us straight in the comments: do you side with Kenn or with Fahim? Should young people in a violent neighborhood carry, or is that the surrender we can’t accept?