The Beginning

I work for a local school distict in Texas and was recently asked to attend a mandatory "Gang Awareness Course" before the start of the school year.  Two very experienced police officers spoke for 2 hours and flooded my naieve little brain with lots of information.  I was anxious to find some of the pictures and videos they used in their presentation on http://www.youtube.com/ when I got home.  I thought that information that I was recieving would be useful information to any parent who has a child in Jr. High or High School.

When I got home, I visited YouTube and typed in one of the gang organizations that was mentioned in the presentation.  What I was expecting to find was educational clips, maybe some clips from movies, ect.  But to my surprise, that's not at all what I found.  What I discovered was a vast amount of gang members promoting their local "organization", people showing off their 'stacking' skills (gang signs), no-name freestyle rappers bragging about their crimes and the list goes on.  I was not happy that these people have been given a stage to stand tall and promote this violent activity. 

So I posted a question in an open forum of the google.com support group.  The question I posted is as follows:

I recently attended a Gang Awareness Course for my local school district.  It was suggested to me that I go to youtube to see more gang signs and graffiti.  When I typed in a specific gang name I was overwhelmed at the amount of gang activity on Youtube.  I know youtube does an outstanding job of keeping sexual content and copyrighted videos away from their site.  I am wondering if it were possible to educate the makers of Youtube of the gang signs and memoribilia (sp?) to avoid allowing these influences on a site that children can so easily access?

 

Now, what I was expecting to hear was something to the effect of "You know, you're right and this is outrageous, we should fix this immediately.  Thank you for bringing this to our attention."  HAHAHAHA....YEA RIGHT!  Wow!  After almost 6 hours of going back & forth on our oppinions of the subject she (the Top Contributor from Google) finally said "FREEDOM OF SPEECH".  I knew it was coming.  She was out of arguments so she slapped me with that.

 

I contacted one of the local news stations and left a detailed message.  I am waiting on a return phone call.

 

So, after some more research and taking wise counsil, I posted another question:

 

I recently posted a question asking why aren't gang members being held at high standards on YouTube like that of people who copyright videos and who post sexally explicit videos.  After hours of debating with a Top Contributor, she finally said that they have the right of free speech.  I was a little appauled by this so I would like some more feedback.  Is she right or is there a way that we can stop the online promotion of gang affiliations and violence on YouTube?

 

It didn't take me long to get an address and some useful information of who I can contact to help fix the situation.  I have written my letter and my next step is to send it off.  I have also found an organization on facebook that hopefully will be able to direct my paths. 

 

This isn't easy, and I probaly won't make a difference, but I certainly am gonna give it a shot!