I just got back from covering the fatal shooting of a nine-year-old girl in York. It was a drive-by, apparently.
She was from Lancaster, and visiting her aunt. Whoever did it shot her once in the back. Police are still investigating. But my guess is it's going to turn out she was caught in the crossfire of a drug dispute.
When I got out to the block where it happened, all that was left of her were some grieving family members and some dried blood stains on the sidewalk.
So what does this have to do with politics? Everything.
See, I cover politics four days out of the week. On Sunday nights, I cover the cops shift.
It was a quirk of scheduling. They needed somebody to hold down the fort Sunday night.
Most times, I don't have a problem with it. But the minute my editor came over and told me a nine-year-old girl was fatally shot, my stomach clenched up like a spastic fist.
I can't tell you how many times I've covered similar situations in more than two decades as a reporter. I do what's required of me, but I've never reached a point where it doesn't get to me. I wonder if anybody really has.
It looked like a pretty tough neighborhood. A couple of neighbors told me that shootings are a fairly common occurrence around there.
I talked at length to one guy who's living on the block where the shooting occurred with his wife and his seven-year-old daughter. He told me about nights shut in their home, hearing gunshots from outside somewhere.
But what's he going to do? Force his seven-year-old girl to live as a shut-in? He's got to let her play outside and see friends, even though he worries every second she's doing it.
I asked him if there was anything somebody should be doing. The city government? The state government?
He gave that some thought. More police in the neighborhood would help. But he acknowledged that his isn't the only block in the city with problems. You can't put a cop on every corner of the city.
I talked to another guy, who identified himself as a friend of the victim's family. He was saying that the kids in that neighborhood have nothing to do and noplace to go. They live in the streets and learn the worng things, make the wrong choices.
He asked why things are so nice out in the suburbs, but the people in his neighborhood have to deal with all that.
There's no simple answer to that question.
Should the federal or the state government simply give the city of York a lot of money to hire enough police to keep a constant watch in all the troubled neighborhoods? Should they do that in every troubled neighborhood in every city?
Where would they find the money to do so? Slash funding for libraries or medical research or farmlands preservation?
Simply tax everybody who can afford to pay more? From a political standpoint, would such a thing be remotely possible?
So many questions, and I don't pretend to have the answers.
Here's my point. As I said, the police shift I work on Sunday night is a quirk of scheduling, not an ostensible part of my political beat. But maybe I need it to give me some perspective.
When you cover politics, it's easy to get lost in the gamesmanship of it all. He hired that guy as a campaign strategist which was a sharp move because if he can get that caucus on his side he could maybe get that initiative passed which would really shore up his votes among the ... blah blah blah, etc.etc.
Sometimes you get caught up so much in the abstractions, you forget that government policies and actions have real consequences.
And once in a while, those consequences take the form of a young girl's blood drying on the sidewalk.
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