For brief, sorrowful time, Delaware held nation’s attention

It was a week like no other for Delaware. I cannot recall a single instance where Delaware claimed so much of the nation’s attention.

Such was the outpouring of affection and sorrow at the death of Beau Biden, former attorney general of Delaware, and, of course, son of Vice President Joe Biden.

Not only did President Obama attend, but also the Clintons, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, most of the cabinet members and Caroline Kennedy.

It usually takes a State of the Union address to get this many of our leaders together.

(What a day it must have been for Kennedy, a member of perhaps the only political family more star-crossed than the Bidens. If anyone could understand the depth of Joe Biden’s grief it was she.)

And it was, sadly, another case of Delaware gaining attention through an association with death.

For 30 years I lived in Dover, and it seemed whenever the city made the national news it was because of bodies being brought to the mortuary at Dover AFB.

The tragedies included everything from the Jonestown massacre in ’78, the plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others in ’96, and the many, many flag-draped coffins of American soldiers killed overseas over the years.

One of my grimmer memories is of the constant shuttling of helicopters back and forth from Washington, D.C., following 9/11.

But none of those events drew as much attention to Delaware as the funeral services for Beau Biden.

I never met Beau Biden, and so I have no personal reminiscences to add, but the many warm recollections of family and friends speak for themselves.

The family has launched the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children, which has already raised $125,000 to help protect kids from sexual predators.

Listening to a TED talk on NPR suggested another way to honor Beau Biden’s memory.

In a stunning case of unwanted attention, Newsweek in December ran a story titled “Murder Town USA (aka Wilmington, Delaware).”

Harsh but not unwarranted. According to the article, Wilmington had a violent crime rate of 1,625 per 100,000 people. The national average is 325.

Wilmington’s crime problems may seem far removed from ours in the Cape Region, but, unfortunately, they’re not.

Economically, we’re all in this together and Wilmington’s reputation as one of the most dangerous small cities in the country makes it harder to attract businesses anywhere in our tiny state.

Ominously, there has even been an uptick of shootings in Dover. Delaware is already limited, compared to our much larger sister states, in what it can do to entice companies to move here. A reputation for violence will make the task that much more difficult.

We have to act. The Newsweek article did mention that Beau Biden had created a Crime Strategies Unit. It was designed to shut down drug dens, clean up graffiti and bring houses up to code.

All good ideas, but the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, in his TED talk, discussed another, even more basic, path to reducing violence.

Brown was part of what is sometimes called the “Boston Miracle” of the 1990s. He and other faith and community leaders helped cut violent crime in their city by nearly 80 percent.

The first step, according to Brown, wasn’t hiring more police officers or cracking down on gang members or even preaching to them.

The first step, he said, was to listen, to reach out to gang members and learn from them about the problems in their community. He and others learned from the gang members themselves what help they needed. It worked.  The number of homicides dropped from 152 in 1990 to 31 in 1999.

Now, in truth, it was no “miracle” and it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of people and organizations working together.

And if the effort isn’t sustained the crime rate can rise again, as it did in Boston, though not to the levels of the early ‘90s.

But the approach has enjoyed some success in other cities, and launching similar efforts in Wilmington and Dover would be a fitting tribute to the memory of our late attorney general. It’s worth a try. If successful, Delaware would have a more uplifting reason to be in the national news.