Parenting & Family Quote by Matt Gonzalez

Gonzalez’s line is doing something politicians often avoid: it relocates blame from the individual act to the civic ecosystem that makes the act more likely. The phrase “I think” softens the opening, a small rhetorical cushion before the harder turn: “we as a society have failed them.” That pivot is the real payload. It’s not an excuse for violence so much as an indictment of neglect, delivered in the collective first-person plural that drags the listener into complicity.

Notice the careful causal chain. “Youth violence” becomes “kids who don’t have opportunities,” and opportunity is framed as a public good, not a private hustle. “Engaged in a certain degree of lawlessness” is almost lawyerly in its restraint: it avoids demonizing, but also avoids romanticizing. The subtext is pragmatic rather than sentimental: if you want less violence, you don’t just want more policing; you want functioning schools, stable housing, mental health care, after-school jobs, safe transit, the kind of everyday infrastructure that makes “lawlessness” less rational.

Context matters because this is the language of a progressive municipal politics that sees crime as a systems problem. It gestures toward the debates that sharpened in the 1990s and 2000s around “root causes” versus “tough on crime,” and it anticipates today’s argument over prevention spending, inequality, and whether public safety is built mainly through enforcement or through opportunity.

The intent, ultimately, is to reframe “youth violence” from moral panic to policy failure, converting fear into an agenda - and making “we” the subject that must change.