Drive-by Shootings Research Articles

Drivebys Systematically Underperform

Drivebys Systematically Underperform

Beauty and the Beast: Gendered and Raced Discourse in the News

This article explores the implications of the extent to which the mythic intrudes on the everyday in newspaper reporting, taking as a case study the drive-by shooting of two young, black women in Birmingham in 2003. An analysis of news headlines and texts demonstrates the use of mythical language and imagery in this case (as in other high-profile cases) as compared with the usual reporting of homicides in the press. Notions of innocence and guilt are explored through the construction of gendered and raced bodies in the case study. The article finds that this media discourse relies for its impact on the simultaneous and mutually dependent construction of fabular gendered and raced ideas; of exceptional innocence and purity (unusually) attached to black femininity (beauty) and of exceptional and volatile violence (usually) attached to black masculinity (the beast). Moreover, the discourse is constructed such that guilt for the gun crime extends beyond the individual perpetrators to the black community as a whole. While media coverage reflects a realistic fear of gun crime, the article concludes that media discourse in this case directs fear towards the black community/male as the dangerous 'other', and that this is crucially underpinned by polarized gendered discourse.

Autobiography of My Dead Brother (review)

Reviewed by: Autobiography of My Dead Brother Deborah Stevenson Myers, Walter Dean Autobiography of My Dead Brother; illus. by Christopher Myers. HarperTempest, 2005 [224p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-058292-8$16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-058291-X$15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-12 Jesse and Rise have been close, more like brothers than friends, since Jesse was one and Rise was almost three. Now Jesse's fifteen, a talented young artist who's always [End Page 28] sketching or working on his comic strip, and he's noticing some changes in his friend: "Now I was getting the feeling that when Rise was saying one thing, there was something else going on behind the words." Especially after a drive-by shooting takes the life of one friend of theirs and another goes to jail, Rise is adopting a persona of cool toughness; he's beginning to consider selling drugs and trying to turn their generations-old Harlem social club, the Counts, into something a lot less tame. Ultimately Jesse realizes that the Rise who was his blood brother has become someone else, a Rise whom Jesse can no longer trust or follow. Jesse's plainspoken but emotional narration credibly captures the viewpoint of a young man whose life is changing, and he's not yet sure in which direction. Myers makes his protagonist particularly articulate about the pressures to appear strong and defiant, whether it's toward the police ("Everybody knew we had to have cops around so the thugees wouldn't rule, but we had to be all like 'don't be in my face with it' at the same time") or in one's own eyes ("I just decided I can't be limping all my life," says Jesse's mild-mannered friend C.J.). Rise's eventual death by shooting is sad but largely inevitable, and while the book doesn't offer any false guarantees of safety for Jesse, there's at least hope for him in his questioning of the dangerous power his friend sought. Christopher Myers' renditions of Jesse's black-and-white sketches have the talented literalness plausible in a gifted teen artist, and his graphic-novel-type insets and comic-strip panels add further accessibility to this absorbing read. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Fears of Children in the United States: An Examination of the American Fear Survey Schedule With 20 New Contemporary Fear Items

Twenty contemporary fears (e.g., terrorist attacks, drive-by shootings, having to fight in a war) were added to E. Gullone and N. J. King’s (1992) Australian Fear Survey Schedule for Children-I I for use in the United States. The revised survey, the American Fear Survey Schedule for Children (J J. Burnham, 1995), was investigated The component structure was examined; findings on fears are reported for Grades 2-12.

Drive-by Shootings in Kyotoville: The Global Warming Debate Heats up

Drive-by Shootings in Kyotoville: The Global Warming Debate Heats up

Representing, Politics, and the Politics of Representation in Gang Studies

In Isaac Julien's 1994 documentary film The Darker Side of Black, rapper cum actor and director Ice Cube justifies preponderance of images of guns in gangsta rap. He reminds viewers that African Americans are made in U.S.A.; that is, they are products of a violent nation that commits atrocities on a global scale. Comparing U.S. bombings of Iraq to a drive-by shooting and United States' 1989 invasion of Panama to a carjacking, pioneering gangsta rapper remarks, We do carjackings, but that's very small when compared to country-jackings, when America goes into Panama and takes out its leader and puts in its own leader.1 Just as United States is now described as a global gangster, male gangster remains an American icon. In American popular culture, male gangsters whether they come from Hell's Kitchen or Compton frequently represent pluck, honor, and selfreinvention. They often symbolize laissez-faire capitalism, vigilante justice, and masculine bravado. At times, they are also looked to as embodiment of American dream and Americanness in and of For example, The Godfather, one of most popular and critically acclaimed gangster narratives of all time, has been described as the classic epic of an American crime family that is really story of America itself. In tradition of Horatio Alger, The Godfathers Vito Corleone overcomes adversity and is rewarded with wealth and power. Because Corleone family adheres to its own code of ethics, rather than to society's laws, Corleones

These Faces

These Faces Robert Vivian (bio) The faces inside the back room of the old Catholic church just south of Boston are like cratered candles molded by grief: the flames sputter, nod, go out, come back again, manage to flicker on somehow in the long journey of bereavement that for many of them has only just started. You're afraid the slightest hush of air might blow them out. These faces all seem to say with one telltale expression that there's no hiding from the loss, a loss large enough to swallow each one of them without a sound. Some are veterans, old pros, their children dead for seven years or more; others are brand new to the keening, salt-water waves of grief, their children dead less than a month. The deaths come in every form: suicide, car accident, overdose, drunk driving, disease and mishap, drive-by shootings, or falling from buildings. But all of them hang their heads in the same, recognizable way, just a slight degree off center, looking down into a place where most people will never go. I'm here at the request of a friend who lost his wife and first son a few months ago, but it's clear to me I'm way out of my league, a wide-eyed interloper who has no business sitting in on their stories. And yet here I am. The group is called Compassionate Friends for parents who have lost their sons and daughters. The chairs are set off against the walls around a large table with literature of every kind on losing a child; the windows look like they haven't been washed for months, maybe even years. The room is dark with its mahogany furniture and just as sturdy, the glass bookcases looking back at us in the dull reflection of gossamer panes. One by one they go around the room and introduce themselves, telling the rest of us when their child died and how, in brief, matter-of-fact explanations shorn of any commentary and at the same uncanny volume, the words coming out of their mouths with a slow, deliberate sadness they've [End Page 1] been treading since their child's death, like cosmic weather reports from the center of tragedy. They're mostly working-class folks, with Boston accents shaving off the r's, one with eagle tattoos on his forearms and another with an oversized pocket protector, their hands useless and folded in front of them, as if they will never be able to touch anyone again without trembling misgiving. The mother whose twenty-two-year-old son died in a car accident three weeks ago can't keep from crying, but her tears are unlike any I have ever seen: they seem to well up from deep inside her like some eternal spring that's been waiting to flow all of these years. She can't get through her introduction, so her vacant and arrow-faced husband speaks for both of them in a monotone voice as if he's reporting from the moon: "Our boy Richie was killed three weeks ago by a drunk driver. He was twenty-two." And as they introduce themselves one by one, it's like they hand each other an invisible baton as old as the world. I want to tell them how beautiful they are, how inexplicably round I find them and their countenances, the way some of their loping shoelaces communicate their grief in a way words never could. I want to touch the electric chord of their sadness one jolting truth at a time—not to fool myself into believing that I know what they are going through, but because there's nothing else, no other action or gesture in the whole universe, that anyone can do. I want to let them know somehow what witnessing their grief means to me, how this same roundness I sense in the room is like so many invisible hoops coming together just above their heads to partake of the infinite pity, the one that goes on forever into the heart of love's mystery. I want to remember these faces and honor...

Playing with fire?

The latest computer games involve pretty gruesome scenes — severed limbs and drive-by shootings are standard fare. But opinion is divided on whether such games spark real-life violence. Tony Reichhardt investigates.

A Quality Life in the Shadow of Terrorism

After the demise of the Soviet Union, many individuals felt a sigh of relief as fear was leaving them. Yet, over the years, counselors have seen a new fear—terrorism—demonstrated in drive-by shootings, hate crimes, and now, weapons of mass destruction. In helping clients deal with this all-too-real phenomenon, a reframing process is in order, one that views our lives not in permanence, but as constant change. Much needless suffering is due to clinging to permanent belief systems, which, in reality, are impermanent. Many clients I have worked with have found effective ways not only to deal with, but to flourish in whatever life brings, via a self-Being relationship.

Using Discourse Processing Methods To Study Moral Thinking

A 16-year-old gunslinger named "Doug," who performed nine drive-by shootings in his hometown of Omaha in 1 year, considers the films South Central and Boyz'n the Hood to be affirmations of his aspirations and lifestyle (Hull, 1993). In contrast, most viewers of these films absorbed explicit lessons about which behaviors and life choices to avoid. What are the factors that lead to these radically different understandings of the same video text? Why are the "take-home" moral lessons so distinct? Combining methods and theory from two research areas—discourse comprehension and moral judgment—a research program is summarized that examines moral thinking using methods such as narrative recall, multiple-choice moral theme extraction, thinking aloud while reading, and probing for inferences while reading on computer. These studies offer a new approach to uncovering how people process moral events in discourse such as written and visual texts, persuasive messages, and real-life events.

Fears of Hispanic and Anglo Children: Real-World Fears in the 1990s

Fears are a common and normal problem of childhood. An abundant literature exists concerning thefears of middle-classAnglo children. Only afew studies have investigated fears in children of low socioeconomic status (SES) and of non-Anglo ethnic background. In this study, elementary-school-age children of Hispanic/Mexican American and Anglo ethnicity and low to middle-to-upper SES were surveyed as to their fears. The children completed the Childrens Fear Survey Schedule, which was revised to include contemporary fear items. Girls reported a higher level offearfulness and more frequentfears than boys did. Low SES children, in contrast to high SES children, reported more intense and morefrequentfears. Hispanics did not differfromAnglos. The mostfrequentlyfeared items related to danger, death, and physical injury. The majority of the children rated real-life contemporary fears of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, and gunshots as very fearful. These findings are discussed with reference to developmental issues and to potential emotional difficulties.

Declining Homicide in New York City: A Tale of Two Trends

The mass media pay plenty of attention to crime and violence in the United States, but very few of the big stories on the American crime beat can be classified as good news. The driveby shootings and carjackings that illuminate nightly news broadcasts are the opposite of good tidings. Most efforts at prevention and law enforcement seem more like reactive attempts to contain ever expanding problems rather than discernable public triumphs. In recent American history, crime rates seem to increase on the front page and moderate in obscurity. The recent decline in homicides in New York City is an exception to the usual pattern, the most celebrated example of crime-news-as-good-news in decades. No doubt part of the public attention can be explained because the story took place in the media capital of the United States. But more than location made the New York story newsworthy. The drop in homicides was both large and abrupt-the homicide rate in the nation's largest city fell 52% in five years. Further, changes in police manpower and strategy are widely believed to have contributed to the decline. If this drop can be plausibly tied to enforcement

Firearm injury among urban youth during the last decade: An escalation in violence

Purpose: To better characterize firearm violence in urban youth, the authors investigated the circumstances and out-come of shootings among youths under 17 years of age. Methods: A retrospective case review was undertaken of all patients under 17 years of age treated for a gunshot wound at two adjoining level I Trauma Centers (adult and pediatric) administering to a predominantly lower socioeconomic population from January 1986 to December 1995. Demographics, injury severity, circumstances, and outcome of injury were analyzed. Results: 323 youths were wounded by firearms. The mean age was 12.8 years, and 82.3% were boys. There was a 110% increase in frequency of wounding noted during the second half of study (219 v 104), predominatly in the adolescent subset (160% increase for age greater than 12 years v 30% increase for age 12 years and under). The mean injury severity score and trauma score were 9.3 and 14.4, respectively. Violent circumstances (assault, crossfire, drive-by shooting, suicide) accounted for 60.4% of injuries and more than doubled over the study period (26.7% of total in the first 2 years [n = 4], 68.8% in the last 2 years [n = 55]). Unintentional injuries (self nonsuicide, family, friend) accounted for 26.3% of the injuries and declined in relative frequency over the study period (46.7% of total in the first 2 years [n = 7], 20.0% in the last 2 years [n = 16]). Black boys had the highest wounding incidence ( 9.2 1,000 population), were most commonly injured by assault (29.0%), and had a higher mean number of wounds (1.8). White boys had a lower wounding incidence ( 3.1 1,000 population), were more often injured unintentionally by a friend (41.2%), and had a lower mean number of wounds (1.3), none as a result of violence. Girls had a wounding incidence of less than 2 1,000 and were most commonly injured in crossfire (40.7%). Ten percent of shootings were fatal. The assailant was known to the victim in 52.8% of children less than 6 years of age, but only 24.7% of children over 12 years of age. Conclusions: The incidence of gunshot wounds in the youth of this urban population has increased substantially over the past decade. Adolescent black boys were the most frequent victims of these shootings. There has been a disproportionate growth in violent circumstances surrounding the shootings.

Drive-by shootings by violent street gangs in Los Angeles: a five-year review from 1989 to 1993.

To determine trends in the numbers of drive-by shootings, individuals shot at, innocent bystanders shot at, and homicides by drive-by shootings in the city of Los Angeles from 1989 to 1993. A retrospective analysis of police records was performed for all gang-related drive-by shootings that occurred in the city of Los Angeles between 1989 and 1993. From 1989 to 1993, there were 6,327 drive-by shootings, 9,053 people shot at, and 590 homicides. There was an increase in drive-by shootings, people shot at, and homicides between 1989 and 1991, followed by a decrease between 1991 and 1993. The case fatality ratio of individuals killed to individuals shot at increased from 1989 to 1993 (p = 0.0011). Forty-seven percent of the people shot at, and 23% of the homicide victims, were innocent bystanders. Drive-by shootings are a major public health problem in Los Angeles. While the rate of drive-by shootings decreased in 1992 and 1993, the proportion of fatal cases increased. To prevent drive-by shootings, the root causes of violent street gang formation must be addressed.

Kids, Guns, and Homicide: Policy Notes on an Age-Specific Epidemic

Concern about the violent young offender is a cyclical phenomenon in the United States, usually lagging a few years behind general public alarm about rising crime rates. The sharp increase in violent crime in the United States between 1965 and 1974 occurred without any particular focus on adolescent offenders. After 1975 and until the beginning of the 1980s, however, youth crime and the young offender became the featured problem in public and legislative debates.1 The moral panic about drugs and drug control that was launched in the mid-1980s, like the reaction to the crime problem in the late 1960s, did not center on young offenders for a number of years. Since about 1993, however, the young offender and particularly the violent young drug offender has been a special target of public anxiety and governmental activity. One aspect of the attention young offenders are getting in the 1990s is brand new, rather than merely a cyclical recurrence. For the first time in modern history, middle-adolescent offenders are being identified as a high-risk and highusage group for firearms. The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention now issues reports on reducing youth gun violence.2 Drive-by shootings, fear of guns, the demand for metal detectors in schools, proposals for special legislation, these are the youth violence soundbites of the 1990s. The most poignant reminder of the change in public focus was the passage of a federal law that established the creation of as a policy ambition of the national government.3 The sad part of this stated ambition is that gun-free schools were regarded as an accomplished fact for all of previously recorded American history. This essay is a brief examination of three dimensions of the juvenile firearms use epidemic of the period since 1985. Part II of the essay will examine the factual foundation for concerns about rising youth gun use. It will compare

Creating Safe and Caring School Communities: Comer School Development Program Schools

Norris M. Haynes, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University* This article asserts that schoolwide interventions have the greatest potential for buffering students from violence outside of schools and for preventing violence within schools. It examines critical aspects of one such intervention, the Comer School Development Program (SDP), and explores the ways in which this program directly and indirectly impacts both the level of violence in the school and children's, parents', teachers', and school administrators' responses to it. By embracing children within a web of prosocial relationships and activities, the SDP is shown as creating a safe haven that supports their healthy development, fosters optimal learning, and discourages interpersonal violence. INTRODUCTION The devastating effects of violence on children's development and psychosocial adjustment are widely evident in the increasing number of children being treated for violence-related trauma or themselves being accused of perpetrating acts of violence on others (BoneyMcCoy & Finkelhor, 1995; Garbarino, Dubrow, Kostelny, & Pardo, 1992). Virtually constant exposure to real violence in their homes and communities and simulated violence in the media have rendered many of our nation's youth violence-impacted and violence-prone. Gun-toting individuals, drive-by shootings, and drug-related homicides previously confined to lurid dramatizations in the media are now everyday occurrences and pervasive influences on many children's development (Children's Defense Fund, 1994). Indeed, Kotlowitz's (1991) ruminations on the pervasive violence he found in the lives of two small boys growing up in an impoverished urban neighborhood prompted him to assert that such children are being robbed of their childhood. He and others have maintained that the increase in violence may be related to the failure of our nation's social institutions, including its families and schools, to adequately address the psycho-emotional and educational needs of children in holistic and collaborative ways (Bey & Turner, 1996). Forced to grow up at an unnaturally accelerated rate in order to physically and psychologically fend off assaults on their inner and outer selves, these young people cannot succeed on their own. Nor can we as a nation succeed in protecting them and restoring balance and integrity to their childhood unless we form communities of support around them to buffer them against the scourge of community and domestic violence. Insufficient attention has been paid by educational researchers to the quality of the human interactions that occur between children and adults at school. These interactions contribute substantially to the overall social climate of the school, which encompasses the attitudes, values, and behavior of students, school personnel, parents, and community members toward each other and toward the activities and programs occurring at the school. A healthy school climate supports children's healthy development and facilitates their acquisition of the effective social and intellectual skills they need to survive and thrive. An unhealthy one leads to conflict between children, parents, and school personnel and makes children's social and intellectual development difficult, if at all possible. In 1993, researchers at the Comer School Development Program (SDP) of the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, conducted a national survey of parent, staff, and student perceptions of school climate (Haynes, Emmons, & Comer, 1994). The sample was randomly selected from a national cross-section of 150 elementary, middle, and high schools. Of the 11,963 middle school students who completed this survey, 22% indicated that some of their schoolmates carry guns or knives to school. Forty-three percent responded that the children at their school fight a lot, and 42% noted that many children at their schools are suspended due to violent behavior. …

The Epidemic of Gang-Related Homicides in Los Angeles County From 1979 Through 1994

To determine trends in gang homicides and the population at greatest risk for homicide by reviewing all gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County, California, from January 1979 to December 1994. Homicide files of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department from 1979 to 1994 involving violent street gang activity were reviewed. Gang files were reviewed for demographic data, weapons used, homicides by drive-by shootings, and times and geographic areas of occurrence. Los Angeles County from January 1, 1979, to December 31, 1994. Age, race, and sex of gang-related homicide victims; frequency of weapon use; and the change in gang-related homicide rates during the study period. A total of 7288 gang-related homicides occurred in Los Angeles County from 1979 through 1994; 5541 of these homicides occurred in Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jurisdictions. During the study period, the proportion of all homicides that were gang related increased from 18.1% to 43.0% (P < .001). Of the 5541 gang-related homicide victims, 4580 (85.6%) were aged 15 to 34 years, 93.3% were African American or Hispanic, 5157 (93.2%) were male, 3559 (64.2%) were gang members, and 1408 (25.4%) occurred during drive-by shootings. Firearms were used in an increasing proportion of homicides, from 71.4% in 1979 to 94.5% in 1994. Homicides by semiautomatic handguns dramatically increased during the study period. Gang-related homicide rates for African-American males aged 15 to 19 years increased from 60.50 per 100,000 population per year in 1979 to 1981 to 192.41 per 100,000 population per year in 1989 to 1991. Gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County have reached epidemic proportions and are a major public health problem. To prevent gang violence, the root causes of violent street gang formation must be alleviated, the cycle of violent street gang involvement must be broken, and access to firearms must be limited.

Youth Violence and the Language Arts: A Topic for the Classroom

Alienated from faltering families, schools, and neighborhoods, young people in all parts of our country are becoming increasingly violent, turning to gangs, deadly weapons, the drug economy, and still more heinous forms of criminal behavior. All of us read about it in the news; for many of us it is an immediate issue in our classrooms. We learn of drive-by shootings, of weapons found in school, and of assault and even murders committed by children barely in their teens. While gangs and drugs are not new, in the 1990s perhaps it doesn’t even shock us anymore to learn that more teenagers are killed by firearms than by all natural causes combined; that three times as many African American adolescent boys die in homicides than automobile accidents; that more and more children in rural as well as urban areas report carrying handguns. As crime has become a major political issue, a national outcry has arisen for increased policing, more prisons, mandatory sentencing, and treating juvenile offenders as adults. But these “easy” answers are shortsighted and ineffective, as law enforcement officials themselves point out. While the number of Americans in prison doubled between 1980 and 1990, giving our country far and away the world’s highest incarceration rate (for black men in America it is five times higher than in South Africa under apartheid), violence, especially among the young, has only increased. What is truly disturbing, even ironic, about the lives of these young people is that their antisocial behavior represents a desperate—if misdirected— attempt to secure their most basic human needs, to establish for themselves even an illusion of safety, respect, and belonging. To understand this fundamental irony of the 1990s youth violence crisis, it is necessary to enter into the experience and perspective of many of our children, to understand the way that intersecting lines of poverty, racism, and shattered family life condition their lives. That investigation can and should be part of language arts teaching, to be conducted with all of our students and in many of our classes. I am convinced that by reading relevant literature, especially contemporary biography and autobiography, by examining film, essay, and even music lyrics, and, perhaps, above all, by listening closely to our own students’ words in discussion and writing all of us can come to better understand and better address the violence in our lives and in our country. To begin I will describe some of what my students and I learned this last year in a lower-division college survey course in African American literature that focused on an exploration of America’s crisis of youth violence. Having been a high school teacher far longer than a college professor, in teaching this class (of half African American and half white students from Detroit and small towns in Michigan, ranging in age from freshmen to seniors), I emphasized actively involving all my students. High school teachers I have been collaborating with in our area are also integrating the same materials and themes into their teaching, and the second part of this article describes their efforts.

Public Places of Childhood, 1915-30

When we think about children at play in the American city, we tend to arrive at two neatly complementary images, one of the present and one of the past. In the here-and-now, danger lurks in the doorway, playground, and schoolyard; unescorted children, we declare, must be kept from public places. But in the past, we sigh, city neighborhoods were well-used by children, even dominated by them; it was a time of corner stores, Saturday matinees, and sandlot games, a time when autonomous street play flourished. Neither idea-the one perhaps alarmist, the other perhaps romantic-should be dismissed too readily. Present reality virtually shouts that the American city is not hospitable to children. In an age of drive-by shootings, megastores, and razor wire, it is not inappropriate to feel that there is little in the cityscape that can still encourage and support children's street play. Conversely, our memory of a happier era is supported by some impressive recent scholarly studies that, even while addressing the tremendous hardships of urban life in the past, have illuminated the rich rewards of play in the alleys and on the fire escapes of yesterday's congested slums and near-slums'. The images and folklore contained in these works indicate that once there was a precious fit between the cityscape's vibrant accessibility and the child's inquiring and exploring nature. Even more, this recent literature suggests that the importance of children to social and urban history is at long last being addressed.

Trauma centers: Radiologists’ role

w hile in Denver on vacation this past summer , I took note of the newspaper coverage given to drive-by shootings and other acts o f apparently random violence; the local editorials discussed how to stop them. Even the Governor held a special session with experts to develop strategies to deal with the violence and its aftermath. One editorial especially caught nay eye: "Denver is lucky to have three trauma care inst i tut ions"-for it properly focused on the excellent care that level I trauma centers provide. It even gave some specific examples o f lives recently saved in these trauma centers. But how many did they say again? Three? Perhaps Denver has a corner on the market for level I trauma centers, and perhaps if you live in any of the 70 or so metropolitan centers in the United States, you, too, believe that your city has multiple level I tramna centers. (For awhile, I was under the mistaken impression that there were five such trauma centers in Columbus, Ohio, as well; in fact, there are t h r e e O h i o State University, Childrens, and Grant Hospitals have designation f r o m t h e American College o f Surgeons (ACS) as level I trauma centers.) The National Academy of Sciences/ National Research Council originally proposed that emergency facilities be categorized based on the institutional ability to deal with the broad spectrum of trauma; the article was entitled "Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease o f Modern Society" (1966). Since 1976, the A m e r i c a n College o f Surgeons has published, and repeatedly updated, a document from its Commit tee on Trauma proposing a national ne twork of trauma centers. This network would consist o f level I (regional resource centers), level II (comnmnity trauma centers), and level III (rural health centers). Yet, even in 1994, realization o f the network has not occurred. The number o f verified centers are: level I, <100; level II, 75-100; and level III, <20. Why? Well, for starters, the level I designation is difficult to obtain, because site visits, p roof o f specialists, many o f t hem not only on call but in-house at all times, and peripheral centers for burn treatment, head and spinal cord injury, and rehabilitation centers (to mention some of the many requirements) are expensive to maintain and require vast resources. Designation is supposed to be a cooperative venture among hospitals in the city, and the injured are to be transported to the appropriate center even though that means bypassing the closest hospital. Such cooperation is frequently difficult to obta in w h e n hospitals see themselves as competitors. The ACS believed that only a few level I centers would be needed; the majority o f centers were envisioned by the ACS as level II. But wi th even fewer level II centers, we must search for other reasons; some clearly are political. In addition, who, after all, likes to be labeled #2? In some regions, hospitals may follow state or county guidelines, where they exist, for trauma level des ignat ion. W h e r e these guidelines are not followed, the hospital may simply designate itself a level I trauma center! I suggest you investigate in your area which hospitals call themselves level I trauma centers, and which of those have met the rigorous criteria as applied by the ACS and your state o r county. The criteria for radiologists' availability in the ACS trauma centers are vague; yet, we can and ottght to play a major role. Our prompt diagnoses in the emergency setting--as radiologists all k n o w c a n n o t be m a t c h e d by untrained observers who only know radiology as a sideline. To be a major player, we must be on site w h e n most trauma cases arrive. Radiologists who abdicate their positions will surely lose them to those who hustle in the Emergency Department.