A high school football game should be one of the easiest promises a community keeps to its children: Show up, cheer for your classmates and get home safely. When gunfire breaks that promise, the responsibility for restoring it belongs to adults well beyond the principal’s office.
Two teenagers were injured in the Oct. 2 shooting outside Eden Prairie High School’s homecoming game. The stadium was evacuated. A night organized around students became another occasion for police investigators, frightened families and school officials explaining what would change before the next kickoff.
The changes included metal detectors, student identification checks, tighter bag restrictions and additional security. Those are understandable precautions. School administrators have an immediate obligation to protect the people coming through their gates.
But every added restriction should come with a question for the larger community: What are we doing about the violence that made it necessary?
I have been writing about sports since 1971. High school athletics have occupied much of that work because they give a community something worth paying attention to together. The players are somebody’s children. So are the musicians, cheerleaders and students in the bleachers. Their accomplishments deserve an audience.
There is value in that gathering beyond anything recorded in a box score. Teenagers get a place to belong. Parents meet other parents. Younger children see something they want to become part of. A school becomes more than a building people drive past.
That is what gun violence threatens to take away, one anxious family decision at a time.
Authorities were preparing Monday to outline a partnership involving 46 local, state and federal law enforcement agencies following recent shootings across the Twin Cities. Regional cooperation makes sense. Investigators tracking a threat or an escalating dispute need information to move as quickly as the people involved.
Still, the number of agencies participating is an organizational detail. The public deserves to know what their cooperation will accomplish.
Who is responsible for identifying the next retaliatory threat? How will information reach the officers and school officials who need it? What resources are being added? When will residents receive an accounting of the work?
Those questions should survive the news conference.
As a former city council member, I believe public officials owe residents a clear assignment of responsibility. A partnership can strengthen accountability, but only if somebody can explain who owns each part of the job. Otherwise, families are left with an impressive list of agencies and no clear answer about whom to ask for results.
Schools cannot carry this alone. An athletic director can arrange security at an entrance. A superintendent can revise admission rules. Neither can investigate a regional pattern of retaliation, prosecute a shooting or provide every intervention a young person might need before a dispute becomes lethal.
Police, prosecutors, courts, youth workers and families have different responsibilities. We should expect each to perform them. Serious violence demands serious consequences, established through evidence and due process. Preventing the next shooting also requires people who can recognize a developing conflict and help interrupt it.
One shooting does not establish a regional crime trend, and fear should never become permission to assign collective guilt. Responsibility belongs to the people whose actions the evidence establishes. Keeping that distinction clear makes enforcement more credible.
My daughter and grandchildren live in Bloomington. That gives these questions a personal weight, but families should not need a nearby shooting to earn our attention. Children throughout the Twin Cities deserve the same expectation of safety, regardless of their address.
No public official can honestly promise that violence will never happen. Officials can promise clear responsibilities, sustained work and an honest accounting of results. We should insist on all three.
The measure of success is a family comfortable taking its place in the bleachers and a student whose biggest concern is whether the home team can hold a fourth-quarter lead. Giving children that ordinary evening is serious public business.