Henry Cisneros Quotes

I want the violence among young people in this country to stop - particularly gang violence.

The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing, and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it - they all look like Chief Keef. When it comes to the point that, you know, that kids who are doing the killings, and they're kids 13 to 19 years old, and you can replicate that in New Orleans, you can replicate that in Oakland. All the kids look the same.

I am rather in favour of dealing with teenage hooliganism.

Our young people live in a world in which there's violence wherever you turn.

If I wasn't playing basketball, I would be in the streets.

America may be the only society on earth to have experienced what has been called an 'epidemic of children killing children,' which is ravaging some of its communities today.

You wonder why we're having shootings and killings here in 2017? Because we've asked for it. We've taken prayer out of school.

The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.

As we saw in the Queen's Speech, anti-social behaviour - a phenomenon that I believe to be a genuine worry that is also being fed by a lot of scare stories - is the political theme of the moment.

You know in my own area of Waltham Forest, we've had many murders as a result of the gang violence and often innocent bystanders get caught up in it.

Three thousand jurisdictions across the U.S. are estimated to have had gang activity in 2001. In 2002, 32% of cities with a population of 25 to 50 thousand reported a gang-related homicide.

Everybody does good things, but I'm talking about making major changes in the educational system that would impact an entire race. I'm talking about stopping these young gang members from killing one another. I'm talking about keeping prisons from overflowing.

The fact is that in too many communities in cities in Britain gangs now have become completely rooted into these communities and they destroy them around them.

Many areas of Los Angeles have gang problems.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

What we have to do is stop children from killing children.

I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.

Knife crime devastates communities.

Growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, there's not a whole lot to do. What I did was I just went to the basketball court at the Boys & Girls Club and literally stayed there all day until my mom got off of work.

Whether it is kids carrying knives because they are in gangs or kids carrying knives because they are afraid of gangs, it is the gang culture that underpins the problem.

New Orleans is a great place, a place of celebration. But on the other hand, there's a reality to it, there's violence, there's misguided youth.

We Die Young is about gang violence. That was something that was happening in Seattle, something that kinda opened our eyes. It just seemed like things were getting out of hand. Incidents where kids were getting shot, and getting their tennis shoes ripped off their dead bodies. It just seems like these kids are dying at younger and younger ages and getting involved in gang activity.

I go to the favelas in Brazil. It's the same in the South Side of Chicago. It's the same, or just more violent. We're trying to get them to stop selling dope. You see kids with AK-47s, and nine-year-olds with nine millimeters. You know, they don't play. They make us look like nuns.

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.