If you want to have any understanding about the true nature of the violent crime problem in Boston, read this piece by the Boston Globe. (or just watch The Wire, but we’re tired of recommending that show to you people)

Here’s the money quote:

"Crime in many neighborhoods runs in families, where elders bequeath gang membership, drug abuse, joblessness, and brutality to their offspring like a toxic inheritance. In Grove Hall, police have said that 2.4 percent of the area's 19,000 residents cause most of the serious crime. Many of those people, police say, are related."

Read the full article. And don't miss the graphs the Globe put together:

• Family profile

• Impact on the Grove Hall n'hood

• Public resources dedicated to the family

The root cause of crime is, apparently, criminals. Specifically, a small group of hard core, recidivist criminals raised in an atmosphere of violence and neglect who are operating within a community that is otherwise largely law abiding and eager to do the right thing.

And it’s not because of any wholesale neglect on the part of the city or state:

“A Globe analysis shows that in the final year of Liquarry's life, government agencies spent at least $314,000 on his family, about half for social services and government benefits, in an extraordinary effort to save the family, especially the children.

Besides the salaries for the battery of social workers who regularly called on the house, the public spending includes a subsidized housing allowance, food stamps, court-appointed public defenders, and the $56 paternity test that a judge ordered one of the fathers of Liquarry's mother's other children to undergo for an out-of-wedlock child with another woman.

The other half of the total went to the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning family members. Taxpayers spent an estimated $30,000 on a double-homicide trial for the father of two of Liquarry's half siblings in October -- he was acquitted -- as well as dozens, maybe hundreds of hours worth of police work on cases that involved family members. When the Boston Herald admonished the family last month for costing the public $10,000 in needless investigative work because Liquarry's mother, Lakeisha Gadson, falsely reported that her son had been shot by home invaders, police and social service officials knew the bigger story. The family had been tearing through $10,000 in public resources every couple of weeks for a long time.”

(Before you praise the Globe for it's investigative reporting on this piece, a close reading will suggest that most of the legwork was done by the Boston Police as far back as 2004)

As a founding member of the Ten once said to a Boston Police officer working out of C-11 nearly 12 years ago: “It all starts in the home” to which the officer responded “Amen, brother. Amen.”