On Tuesday, Deecember 19th, my group and I went to interview to journalist Daryl Kahn. Right now, Daryl works for an online newspaper called the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. He recently wrote an article about a gang raid in Upper Manhattan. Daryl teaches a class at the CUNY School of Journalism. We talked to him about how he got involved in journalism. He said his first murder case was when he was only 16 and at a school dance, someone gave birth and the mother left the child to die. Daryl has worked for the New York Times and has covered many articles relating to our issue. We asked Daryl what he thought the NYPD should have done instead of arresting every single person involved in the gangs. There were kids who were as young as 10 who were arrested. We all thought that although arresting 10 year olds and leaving a mark on their identity was not the right thing to do, you can’t just let a gang war go on the middle of the city.

Something that surprised me was not about the gang raid at all, but it was about his class. He said he assigned the class to go outside to the different boroughs and talk to people about old court cases. He said that some of the students were very reluctant to go, and we actually wanted to go outside and talk to other people. This surprised me because going out and talking to experts on the topic can give you a lot of information, so why would college students not want to do that? That is what we did, and we learned a lot from Daryl.