Introduction
Youths of today encounter enormous challenges on their way to adulthood. In order to assist youths, education should discuss the social challenges that youths face. Youth should learn to incorporate social spaces within their environment. Education must address issues that will assist youths to reflect and involve their social involvements, environment, and relate them to learning contents in order to see the relevancy in education.
The movie, Gran Torino reflects a city in the middle of reducing auto-industrial activities. Youths have come to the city suburbs, leaving their aging parents behind. Asia and Latin America immigrants have come to occupy the vacant neighbourhoods. They purchase vacant homes.
In the process, the new settlers face those who remained behind. Neighbourhoods have divisions leading to struggle for power and control among the Black gangs, Hmong and Mexicans. Old immigrants of various origins have established commercial entities such barbershops, constructions firms, among others.
Immigrants, Whites, Blacks and other races protect their territories using several ways, including gangs, gated estates and taxation barriers. There are inter and intra ethnic forces as ways of defining, excluding and subjugating territories. The movie reflects violence between Hmong and Mexican youths. This tension exists in the Hmong community and gang feuds on families as the movie highlights the relations between the local authorities and immigrant communities (Eliot, 2001).
Local police have involved community in an attempt to control the gangs. They detain unregistered immigrants. This has created a major rift between unregistered youths and the local police. Walt Kowalski acts according to the law, and then cheats the gangs into killing him where the gang faces the justice system. Therefore, this study shows the relations between social theories of youth crime and sharing responsibility of police and community as a tool of influencing gang activities.
Youth crime
Social strain theory of Robert Merton looks at crime problem in terms of anomie. Emile Durkheim studied society through its components so as to find out how the structures of a society relate to each other i.e. how the structures of the society work. A stable society operates smoothly, and social arrangements are functional.
There is cooperation, cohesion and consensus. Conversely, a society whose social structures threaten its social order has dysfunctional arrangements. This is what happens in the Gran Torino where a class-oriented society has conflicts. Merton looks at social structures in a society that gives out same goals to all its members but with no equal means to achieve these goals. Society experiences what culture advocates for and what structures allow.
Culture encourages success while structures prevent it. These result into a breakdown of norms because they no longer guide behaviour effectively. The term anomie describes a breakdown of normative systems of a society.
Merton argues that when a system of cultural values encourages certain common values of success in a given population while its social structures restricts or eliminates access to approved means of getting these values of success, then antisocial behaviour ensues on a considerable scale. Therefore, the social structure is the root of the crime. Sociologists sometimes call it structural explanation, while contemporary criminologists refer to it as strain theory (Adler and Laufer 2008).
Strain theory argues that people are law abiding but when under pressure will resort to crime. The disparity between goals and means creates that pressure. People strive for goals and aspirations that they believe in so as to achieve the desired end. A stable society must integrate goals and means for individuals to reach the goals that are important for them. Disparity creates frustration that leads to strain.
The theory looks at the criminogenic, or crime-producing nature of the interaction between socialisation processes and social structure. If a society tells people that hard work will pay off in terms of material success, but finds no means of achieving success, then frustrated people will turn to crime as an alternative of achieving their goals (Sarnecki, 2001).
Black gangs, Hmong, and Mexicans have no means of achieving material success. At the same time, there is ethnic tension among the multiracial living in Hmong community. There is also wide disparity of income among the joblessness gangs and established earlier immigrants. This has created tension and conflicts to struggle for power, and control of the community along racial lines.
Societies always experience periods of prosperity. This prosperity results into chaotic social order within a society. This normally occurs where ideals of a society do not work alongside its prosperity. For instance, the Black gangs could have originated in the movie, Gran Torino due to social exclusion and treatment as second-class citizens. Neither the law nor socioeconomic system provided gangs with equal opportunities.
Therefore, the Black gang originated out of the need to protect their territories and themselves. Social scientists attack the criminal justice system for violation of the concepts and principles of due process, under which a person cannot be denied of life, freedom or property without lawful procedures.
Likewise, people should have equal protection, under which no one can be denied the safeguards of the law. Under such social climate, labelling theorists began to explore how and why certain acts were criminal or deviant behaviour while others were not. Further, they also seek to know why and how society defined certain individuals as criminals or deviants.
According to labelling theorists, criminal is not inherent in people doing wrong acts. It is the criminal justice system and the community who confer criminal status upon people. For instance, Gran Torino, the local police detain youths who do not undergo registration and documentation processes.
This is equal to labelling these youths as criminals or deviants. Consequently, this has created a major division and conflict between unregistered youths and the local police. These theorists argue that tendencies of criminals themselves are not particularly significant. However, social reactions to them are significant. Deviancy and their controls focus on social definition under which reactions of others to an individual’s behaviour are the influencing factors on subsequent behaviour, and on individuals’ view of themselves (Burke, 2009).
A sociologist, Howard Becker notes that we should not look at deviance as the qualities of the crimes individuals commit. It is the results of the application by society’s rules and sanctions to an offender. Deviant persons become people whom a label has worked successfully on to change their view of themselves. Therefore, deviancy behaviour becomes behaviour that people label on others.
In Hmong community, social interactions create deviance among the gangs of youths. Labelling theory states that people’s reactions and the following effects of such reactions create deviance. The Hmong community and the local police know the unregistered youths and consider them as deviant.
The local police work with the community in order to detain them. This is because the community and police label them deviants, gangs, jobless or thieves. The act of detention separates them from the mainstream social life. The process of detention makes these youths outsiders, and they begin to associate with other outsiders like themselves.
As majority continue to refer to these people as deviants and respond to them in that manner, deviants will react to the responses by continuing to involve in criminal behaviour society expect from them. This also makes deviants’ self-images to change. In this regard, it is the label that a society attaches to an individual that perpetuates criminal behaviour. Any reference to an individual as a criminal leads to criminal consequences as a result of their actions (Muncie, 2004). This is what happens in Gran Torino.
Since 1960s, there has been a growing concept of community and police relation programmes. The idea took social control theory through image management to implement community policing programmes. The concept involves improving the relationship between the police and community whereby police visit community centres such as schools, markets and local gatherings, and engage in dialogue with the community (Dominique and Ihekwoaba, 2009).
The proponents of community policing argue that the relation will destroy the existing social distance that the professional police crime policing had created between themselves and the ordinary citizens. The professional approach to fighting crime viewed the relations has a form of surrendering some powers and professional status to the community.
This is because professional police viewed assistance, support and guidance from the public as losing powers. This approach achieved low results. It served merely to increase the purpose of public relations with the aim of selling the police rather than change its operations.
The team policing focused on decentralising the police so that they could work as coordinated and self-sufficient neighbourhood units. This idea aimed at improving the community-police relations by assigning police officers to a given neighbourhood for a given period of time. This idea collapsed due to lack of planning and commitment (Waller, 2006).
In 1980s, there was the concept of community policing, and now it dominates almost every policing structure in the world. The Broken Windows theory of Wilson and Kelling looks at community policing through image management. The two argue that image management is not only an essential part of crime prevention, but is also necessary for the communities.
If a community presents an image that is in a state of disrepair, disorder, and is crime-infested, then soon it will be a crime zone. This is the scenario at the setting of Gran Torino, Gran Torino occurs in a city experiencing collapsing of auto-industry. Therefore, the image of the area is deteriorating, joblessness is setting in, and gangs are rising to protect themselves and earn a living through violence.
Walt uses the concept of community policing to mentor youths and remove the labelling of gangs. He guides a youth (Tao) with tools, and job search into a construction, thus eliminates joblessness, disentangles and assimilate Tao to mainstream society. Walt maintains community image through attending to unattended behaviour of youths.
The community and the police should steadily work together to address crime signals, such as untended property and untended behaviour that give a message that there are elements of disorder in the neighbourhood. Wilson and Kelling further argue that this method may not be that effective, but reduces the fear of crime among the community. Foot patrols by the police also improve their image, and the patrols indeed resulted into safer neighbourhoods.
The chief differences between modern, professional policing and community policing are that the philosophy of community policing encourages the scrutiny of the police by the public, promotes accountability of the police to the public, gives customized police service, and share responsibility of solving crime with the public.
Conclusion
The three theories of labelling, strain and social control explain the youth violence in Hmong community. Each theory attempts to explain causes and formation of such gangs. Factors such as poverty, race, power, control, association and community image contribute to gang violence in society.
Community should mentor or attend to a deviant behaviour just like Walt does. This approach helps the community and police to fight crime by engaging youths in productive activities. Youths cannot adequately cope with the pressure of the modern world. Therefore, they need assistances through the provision of life enhancing skills of self-reliance. Walt creates an opportunity to incorporate gangs into a society thereby breaking the cycle gang subculture. He also lures his killers into the justice system.
Scholars in the field of community policing believe that involving the community in policing ensure that the police effectively meet the needs of the community. The police departments have already admitted that they cannot solve the crimes on their own and need the help of the community.
This occurs if the community engages in the fighting crime. The concept makes citizens realise that the police are in the community in order to assist them, and withholding information or non-cooperation is self-defeating and illogical. The postmodern policing focuses on the image of crime rather than crime itself.
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