SPEECH FROM SAGINAW MAYOR BRANCH

CITY COUNCIL MEETING

June 11, 2012
(Copied with the Mayor's Permission) 

Last Thursday morning, 12-year-old Tamaris Steward Jr. was on a sleepover at his

grandfather’s house after his last day of the sixth grade. He was shot and killed when the house he

was in was sprayed with bullets. Two days earlier, four-year-old Miyona Alexander was injured

when she was caught in the crossfire of a gunfight.

 

I want to be very clear about the feelings I expressed to the Saginaw News last week, which

many people misunderstood.

 

This city is home to 51,000 people and 12,000 families. The overwhelming majority of those

people are good, decent people. Most of those families are caring, supportive environments that

turn good kids into good adults.

 

But there is a small percentage of people here who are not good, decent people. There is a

small percentage of families who do not provide caring, supportive environments … or even

anything you could call a “family.”

It’s like a small group of cells that goes wrong inside your body. It’s a cancer.

It’s a particularly aggressive and metastatic form of cancer. And when you have that kind of

cancer, it needs a combination of treatments.

 

Law enforcement is the surgical treatment. We find the tumor and we take it out. And a

punk with a gun, an attitude and no conscience is a tumor. We will find the guys who did this, and

they will be surgically removed from our community — albeit not in the way many would like them

to be. Mr. Ludos will give us an update on the status of the investigation and what we’re doing to

bolster our ability to do surgery.

But here’s the thing. We can take out this tumor. But there are hundreds of cancer cells

floating loose through this community … and hundreds of others that have the potential to be … if

only the wrong switch gets thrown inside them.

They are children who have been raised in homes with unprepared or apathetic parents, or

by parents who have never known anything other than a life of poverty, substance abuse and crime.

They are children who have been led to believe that academic achievement, manners and empathy

are a betrayal of a culture. They are children who have not been taught the difference between

right and wrong, good and bad, often because they’ve lacked the positive role models to teach it.

We could have 100 police officers, 200 police officers, a thousand police officers … and

they can’t keep that wrong switch from being thrown. They can only cut out a cancer once it’s fully

grown … and, usually, once it’s done its damage.

We’re doing everything we can to keep our law enforcement presence at the highest

possible level we can afford, to keep putting bad guys away and keep the overall downward trend in

violent crime we’ve had for five years. But we need the other treatments — the chemotherapy and

radiation therapy, the preventive care — that keeps those switches from being thrown, that keeps

those little cells from turning into cancer, that keeps children from growing into punks with guns,

attitudes and no conscience.

And that’s where we all need to channel our anger, our frustration and our energy. The city

does what it can, through the small human services allocations we make from the community

development block grant. As individuals, as families, as neighborhood associations, as congregations,

we can do so much more.

 

We need to support organizations like the Youth Protection Council, which helps at-risk

youth learn how to set life goals, manage anger and avoid substance abuse … which helps pregnant

teens learn how to become good parents. Or Women of Colors, which assigns mentors to young

girls to help them set life goals, aim higher, and avoid the traps of teen pregnancy and drop-out. Or

Big Brothers/Big Sisters, which helps expose single-parent children to positive, caring role models

they might not otherwise have. Or Operation Reach, which puts on after-school programming to

help keep young people off the path to unemployment, underachievement and crime.

There are dozens of organization in this community who are doing incredible work to help

stop this cancer from growing or spreading. But they can’t do enough of it, unless we help them.

Volunteer. Donate. We all need to do what we can to help these organizations reach more

kids. Yes, we need parents to step up and be parents. But we know that not everyone will — or

can. And that’s why we need to catch the children whose parents won’t step up before it’s too late.

We need to aim for a day when every child born in Saginaw gets the support, positive

reinforcement and love they need to keep from becoming cancerous … whether they get it from

their parents or not.

 

We also need to channel our anger, our frustration and our energy on the enablers. They

are the people who see, but won’t speak up. They are the people who know, but won’t come

forward. They are the people who suspect, but are in a state of denial. They are the people who

look the other way when they should be looking in the mirror. They are the people whose

misplaced loyalty to one person can destroy the lives of hundreds.

If I had the slightest suspicion that my nephew, my brother, even my son shot up a house

with an AK-47 and killed a 12-year-old, I would kick his ass and then drag what was left of it to the

police. Blood might be thicker than water. But my family’s blood isn’t any thicker, or any more

valuable, than Tamaris Steward’s. And when we lose a Tamaris Steward, we lose a family, we lose a

future, we lose everything.

 

I offer my deepest condolences to Tamaris’ family. I am committed to making sure the

person responsible is brought to something close to justice. And I am, as are my colleagues here,

committed to doing all we can to attack this cancer on every front. But we can’t do it without your

help.