Zitat des Tages von Greg Boyle:
The power of community policing is in the relationship. This can happen only if an officer sticks around for a while.
God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole Him.
You don't really get Jesus saying very often there'll be pie in the sky when you die. He's really talking about now and today, and it's supposed to be like that. You're supposed to delight in what's right in front of you.
Reactive and proactive policing are both necessary. Still, we need to lower expectations that such efforts can ever be responsive to crime.
People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.
Jesus did not only serve the needs of the people, but truly hoped that the people and Jesus would be one.
We can't get at crime unless we know what language it speaks. Otherwise, we are just suppressing the cough, not curing the disease.
Me wanting a gang member to have a different life would never be the same as that gang member wanting to have one.
My job isn't to fix or rescue or to save. It's to accompany, see people, listen to them.
I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.
The church needs a pope who can call us to conversion and lead us to take seriously what Jesus did.
Delegations from all over the world visit Homeboy Industries and scratch their heads as we tell them of our difficulty in placing our people in jobs after their time with us. Americans' seeming refusal to believe in a person's ability to redeem himself strikes these folks as foreign indeed.
My church is in the detention facilities where I preside and celebrate the Eucharist. To me that's the church. That's the people of God.
As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.
No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang; he's always fleeing something. He's not being pulled; he's being pushed by the circumstances in which he finds himself.
You prevent kids from joining gangs by offering after-school programs, sports, mentoring, and positive engagement with adults. You intervene with gang members by offering alternatives and employment to help redirect their lives. You deal with areas of high gang crime activity with real community policing. We know what works.
I wouldn't trade my life for anybody's.
The highest hallmark of a civilized society is not the rapidity by which it exacts vengeance, but its ability to hold victim and victimizer in its compassionate heart.
I feel called to be faithful.
What is ultimately compelling for our children in helping them conjure images of a future for themselves is our willingness to walk with them as they do it.
I want to be prophetic and take stands and stand with those on the margins, and I want to laugh as much as I can.
God is compassion.
If the Los Angeles Police Department had enough officers, it could focus on one part of the community and stay there long enough to know and respect the people the officers are called on to protect and serve.
Young people can change and grow. Every parent knows that.
All politics are local, and so in church.
What do we know to be true about gang violence? We know we will fail if we fixate on the symptoms and not address what undergirds it.
Gangs are born of a lethal absence of hope, and hope has an address: 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles, CA 90012.
I didn't take my vows to the LAPD.
The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.
We are less than honest and commit a grave error if we insist that what happened to Rodney G. King was isolated and an exceptional case. The poor know better.
We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.
The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God's fingertips.
Our best selves tell us that 'there but for the grace of God... ' and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God's grief and heart for us all.
Children find themselves adrift not because the informational signposts are illegible, but because there is no one around to guide and accompany them.
I think not everything that works helps, and not everything that helps works.
We don't need a specialized gang unit. We need patrol officers who specialize in knowing their community.