Deadly Lessons Understanding Lethal School Violence (2003) / Chapter Skim
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6. Shooting at Tilden High: Causes and Consequences
6. Shooting at Tilden High: Causes and Consequences
Pages 163-197
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From page 163... ...
This case study further shows how the trial of Joseph White became a political object lesson in the need for metal detectors in South Side secondary schools, a policy that evolved into a wide range of "zero tolerance" and disciplinary and exclusionary measures that diffused across the country, with Chicago Mayor Daley as their persuasive advocate. The Tilden High shooting was embedded in social conflicts that reveal it was neither random nor senseless in the way initial news coverage suggested, while the trial had much broader consequences than was indicated by the conviction for first degree homicide itself.
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From page 164... ...
Joseph White was identified in this story as the alleged shooter and as a 15-year-old freshman at Tilden now charged in adult court with first degree murder. He had fled the school pursued by other youths and a security guard and hid under a nearby back porch before being found and arrested.
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From page 165... ...
(For a summary of the media coverage regarding this case, see Box 6-1.) The family of Joseph White had retained Chicago attorney Robert Habib to represent their son, and he appeared in Cook County Circuit Court on Monday seeking to bar the news media from further reporting of the boy's name, because he was a juvenile.
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From page 166... ...
166 DEADLY LESSONS: UNDERSTANDING LETHAL SCHOOL VIOLENCE Habib later encountered the judge who had denied the suppression of Joseph White's name. The judge confided that, "You know, quite frankly, had there been no publicity on the case, I probably would have granted your motion.
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From page 167... ...
He is a victim of a tragic situation that cannot be altered." Karen White then echoed Mayor Daley's pleas for the regular use of metal detectors. An editorial in the Chicago Tribune also took up Daley's theme, observing that "had metal detectors been used routinely at Tilden, Delondyn Lawson's killer might have been deprived of his weapon or at least forced to use it elsewhere." Karen White's public comments began to suggest the way in which she was caught up in this story along with her son.
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From page 168... ...
However, the appearance of an article in a Tune 1993 issue of People magazine about Delondyn Lawson and his mother, Linda, focusing on the loss of her son, brought new attention to the shooting to a national audience (Tune 14, 1993~. Linda Lawson revealed that Delondyn had not wanted to go to school on that Thursday and that she had worried that he was becoming involved with gang members.
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From page 169... ...
When Joseph White's family moved in the spring of 1971 to their home at 324 West 51st Street, about a mile from Tilden High, the surrounding area was still overwhelmingly white and only 4 percent black. However, as indicated in Figure 6-1, by the time Joseph was approaching kindergarten in 1980, the area was less
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From page 170... ...
than two-thirds white, nearly one-quarter black, and about one-fifth other, mostly Mexican American. As Joseph approached high school in 1990, New City was less than one-third white, nearly half black, and about onequarter Mexican American.
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From page 171... ...
The Canaryville neighborhood made news when in the winter of 1982 the mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, ordered the dismantling of four heavy iron gates erected during the 1960s to separate white from black areas. Karen White was a supervisor in the accounts department of a large Chicago newspaper when Joseph entered high school.
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From page 172... ...
At the time of the shooting, at least six gangs had a significant presence in the black neighborhoods around Tilden: the Black Gangster Disciples, the Mickey Cobras, the Blackstones, the Vicelords, the Latin Kings, and the Satan Disciples. White students also belonged to neighborhood gangs.
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From page 173... ...
This experience, the school police officer surmised, nonetheless indicated to the black gangs that in the face of a serious deadly threat they could not rely on authorities but must instead rely on each other. This experience of a common enemy briefly fostered an atmosphere of relative harmony among gangs from the same Gang Nation, which for the purpose of this analysis most notably included the Mickey Cobras and the Blackstones.
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From page 174... ...
In the year of the Tilden shooting, the Chicago Police Board fired several police officers who had left two black youth in the Canaryville neighborhood, where they subsequently were assaulted by a gang of white youths (March 21, 1992~. A related incident was reported in the Canaryville neighborhood on a summer evening in 1985, when two young black adults detoured around road construction onto South Union Avenue (July 12, 1985~.
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From page 175... ...
One of the youths was struck in the face with a bat. "Lots of stuff like that happens all the time," a Canaryville resident told a newspaper reporter on the scene, "If you get a bunch of guys sitting on the corner and a colored guy rides by, they will chase him." Finally, it is important to bear in mind that the early 1990s was a period of economic recession and historically high rates of violent crime in America, which especially affected young black males, especially in areas like New City and schools like Tilden High.
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From page 176... ...
SOURCE: Chicago Homicide Dataset, a collaborative project of the Chicago Police Department, the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, and Loyola University, Chicago. Chicago street gang related homicides, black male victims, 1965
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From page 177... ...
SOURCE: Chicago Police Department, Youth Arrest Records, 2001. This is the world in which Joseph White and the three victims of his shooting moved.
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From page 178... ...
THE TRIAL The most telling evidence in the trial came from Joseph White himself, and the following discussion is based on his testimony, with some elaboration as indicated from interviews. Joseph had acknowledged that he was a member of the Mickey Cobras gang and began by recounting the gambling dispute that led to the shooting.
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From page 179... ...
. couldn't." The ensuing shooting by Joseph White can possibly be explained by the male posturing that is prevalent in both youth and gang culture.
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From page 180... ...
Joseph White may be guilty of something, he had no right to bring this gun onto school property. That's a separate charge, though, unlawful use of a weapon on school property.
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From page 181... ...
The jury finally returned at about 10 o'clock Friday evening. They had deliberated at length and come back with the maximum possible verdict: Joseph White was convicted of first degree murder, two counts of
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From page 182... ...
THE SENTENCE Joseph White was sentenced in the early spring 1994, nearly a year and a half after the fall 1992 shooting at Tilden High. Karen White spoke to the court on behalf of her son.
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From page 183... ...
You need to tell us." MR. WRIGHT: My name is Kenneth Wright, and I am Joseph White's uncle.
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From page 184... ...
He explicitly dismissed the youth or other circumstances of Joseph White as mitigating factors. "It is time for everyone to understand," the judge concluded, "that those people who choose to take guns to settle disputes are accountable for what they do, be they 12 years old, or 15 years old, or 50 years old." Joseph was sentenced to 45 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections on the charge of first degree murder, with sentences on the other charges to be served concurrently.
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From page 185... ...
was given discretion over most matters of policy implementation including school security and discipline. The prevailing attitude among the LSCs was reflected in the comments of Sheila Castillo, executive director of the Chicago Association of Local School Councils, who told the Chicago Reporter, "Each [school]
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From page 186... ...
Mayor Daley and his subordinates adopted several strategies to neutralize the political opposition to metal detectors. First, the mayor, with the assistance of the school patrol units that he helped establish, amassed and disseminated the statistical information necessary to show that weapons and violent crime in schools were a serious problem.
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From page 187... ...
As of fall 1992 one month before the Tilden shooting 27 of the city's 75 public high schools and special schools had not yet taken up the city's offer to provide metal detectors (October 22, 1992~. Mayor Daley responded by publicly naming each of these schools at a news conference, thus implying that the school administrators and not the police department would henceforth be considered responsible for weapons-related injuries or deaths occurring inside their schools.
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From page 188... ...
A lone voice of dissent was Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, who believed that metal detectors would promote safer schools, but at a considerable cost. Metal detectors are "our most awful failure," Greene lamented after the Tilden shooting, "both as a symbol of today and a si~npost to our children's future." lo, Deputy Byrne credits the Tilden incident with laying to rest any lingering doubts about the use of metal detectors in the city's high schools.
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From page 189... ...
Paul Vallas, who was Mayor Daley's 1995 choice for superintendent of Chicago's public schools, took a leadership role in advocating tough new penalties and policies. In spring 1997, with the encouragement of Vallas, the City Council made student involvement in drug and other serious offenses committed off school grounds subject to expulsion (March 11, 1997~.
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From page 190... ...
In February 2000, in the wake of the accidental shooting of an 11year-old student at Duke Ellington Elementary School, Superintendent Vallas urged the daily use of metal detectors in elementary schools and ordered the purchase of 1,000 additional handheld metal detectors. By April 2000, not long after the discharge of a gun inside Parkside Elementary School, the proposed number of metal detectors had reached 4,000, to be combined with 178 additional off-duty police officers (allowing at least one off-duty Chicago officer in each elementary school)
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From page 191... ...
Steward explains that she kept the students in the classrooms all day in order to prevent any retaliation for the shooting. According to Deputy Chief Thomas Byrne of the school patrol units, keeping the students in the classroom was imperative, so all students could be screened by metal detectors on their way out of the school building to find Joseph White's gun.
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From page 192... ...
. and they knew I was serious." Some of Steward's efforts apparently caught the attention of others in the Chicago public school system.
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From page 193... ...
While the locker and metal detector searchers and other police activities did uncover a sizable number of knives and guns, and while surveys did indicate that students frequently brought weapons to school (Illinois Criminal justice Authority, 1991) there was little evidence that students, especially innocent bystanders, were frequently victimized by students with weapons in Chicago schools.
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From page 194... ...
Recall that the call for metal detectors was first made by lesse Jackson and only subsequently taken up by Mayor Daley. Furthermore, in choosing this policy response, the mayor also sidestepped what many might have expected from a nonminority politician and former criminal prosecutor: a call to try Joseph White and others in the adult courts.
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From page 195... ...
Deputy Byrne attributes this fact to the metal detectors as well as to the concerted effort on the part of the school patrol units, which began before the Tilden shootings, to make arrests for crime in or near schools. Byrne summarized his view of the issue by observing that "God only knows how many crimes we prevented through all the guns that we confiscated and arrests that we made." At least one other member of the school board we interviewed also attributes the absence of any school shootings to the metal detectors.
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From page 196... ...
The leaders in the trenches of Chicago public schools responded to the tragedy of Tilden High School with courage and innovation. Joseph White is still serving the first quarter of his 45 year sentence for the Tilden shooting, at Menard State Prison in Southern Illinois, 300 miles south of the school where it happened.
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From page 197... ...
New York: Monthly Review Press. Illinois Criminal Justice Authority 1991 Trends and Issues 91: Education and Criminal Justice in nlinois.
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