Bubbaworld

The 2007 homicide death toll for Tulsa is 64. Not a new record, but not far from it either as the record for homicides in Tulsa is 69, set in 2003 during a major “gang war”.

Tulsa’s oldest homicide victim of 2007 was 68 and the youngest was not born yet.

Here’s the breakdown of homicides by age groupings:

0 – 1 = 5 homicides
1 – 9 = 1 homicide
10 – 19 = 11 homicides
20 – 29 = 22 homicides
30 – 39 = 12 homicides
40 – 49 = 5 homicides
50 – 59 = 6 homicides
60 – 69 = 2

Of these homicide victims 45 were male, 19 were female and the median age of homicide victims in Tulsa during 2007 was 26.

What is most alarming about Tulsa’s 2007 homicide death toll, which is 8 more than the 56 homicides in 2006, is the number of homicides of persons 18-years-old or younger.

Two babies and their mothers were killed in domestic violence attacks.

One expectant mother and her fetus were killed.

And a total of four infants less than one year old were 2007 homicide victims.

One two-year-old was a homicide victim, as were one twelve-year-old, one thirteen-year-old, two fifteen-year-olds, two sixteen-year-olds, one seventeen-year-old and one eighteen-year-old.

These child deaths, 13 plus one fetus, account for over twenty percent of Tulsa’s 2007 homicide death toll and are an absolute disgrace especially when one realizes that only two, at most three, of the teen deaths are associated with criminal gangs, gang warfare and so forth.

So, to what should we attribute Tulsa’s 2007 homicide death toll on children?

Anyone have a clue?

Aside from victims of domestic violence, it appears more than anything else that those young homicide victims were “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, typically out late at night, on the streets after curfew and coming in contact with their killers when these kids should have been home safely asleep in their own bed.

If 2008 is to see a reduced trend in homicides of young people in Tulsa it is going to require the watchful attention of parents, grandparents, police and the community as a whole. Parents and grandparents need to know where there kids are late at night. Police need to practice a zero-tolerance curfew policy and aggressively enforce it. And folks, like you and me, need to be vigilant for kids out after curfew and call either their families if the child is known to us or the police if we do not know them.

“The world” has vastly changed since many of us were kids and today’s world is simply too dangerous to permit kids to be out running the streets late at night, for whether they are looking for trouble or not, odds are high it will find them and often with tragic and fatal results as 2007 in Tulsa has shown…