‘What are we willing to do?’: Gee connects the Belltown shootings to a deeper problem rooted in poverty

15 arrests, zero violent crimes: Gee on what the numbers don’t tell you

Gee said he called a cousin while driving and began venting about what he was seeing. The cousin pushed back, saying people in poverty need to work harder and stop looking for the easy way out.

Gee said the response stunned him because of his cousin’s own record.

“I said, ‘How many times have you been arrested?’ He said, ‘Like 14, 15 times,'” Gee said. “In this business, you say somebody’s been arrested 14, 15 times, oh, you need to be thrown in jail for life, because you’re just a chronic offender. So I asked a simple question: If you had the financial means, how many times would you have not been arrested?”

The cousin’s answer, Gee said, was most of them. No insurance, driving on a suspended license, warrants tied to unpaid child support. No drugs, no theft, no violent crimes.

“If you can sit here and tell me that finances would have helped you out, why can you not see and understand how finances would help someone else out?” Gee said.

Fill-in host Angela Poe Russell said it hit close to home for her, too.

“One of my relatives who ended up in jail, the thing that got him in jail was not paying the fee to get off probation,” Angela said. “Had he paid that fee, there wouldn’t have been a problem. It goes back to the money conversation.”

Producer draws a line between poverty and the Belltown shootings

Producer Andrew Lanier said the connection between poverty and violence is not that poverty causes someone to shoot, but that it strips away reasons not to.

“If I was age 18, living in poverty, my parents didn’t care a hoot about me, I had no future, no opportunities, I grew up in a community with violence, I’m going to own a gun,” Andrew said. “And if somebody makes me mad, I don’t have anything holding me back.”

Gee said he keeps hearing proposals for more officers and new strategies, but none of it prevents what happened in Belltown.

“What are we as a society willing to do to really drive down crime?” Gee said. “I don’t think comprehensive gun violence strategies and more police officers, those things don’t prevent three separate shootings that left three people dead.”

He pointed to what he called a double standard in how America treats financial hardship. Banks were bailed out after the 2008 recession. Farmers receive federal subsidies. But student loan relief, he said, is treated as unacceptable.

“Banks get bailed out, farmers get help, but the folks that have student loan debt, that’s the no-no,” Gee said. “If you do believe that way, you keep asking the same question: why? Poverty does not justify crime. Let me say that again. Poverty does not justify crime. But I don’t see the concentration on trying to limit and prevent poverty.”