On Tuesday, December 19th, 2014, my group and myself went to interview journalist Daryl Kahn. Daryl works for an online newspaper named the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, and teaches at the CUNY School of Journalism. He recently wrote an article about a gang raid in Upper Manhattan. One thing we spoke to him about was how he got into his line of work. He told us his first murder case was when he was 16 at a school dance. Someone had given birth and left the child to die. Daryl has since worked for the New York Times, and has covered many articles relating to children in gangs. We next asked Daryl what he thought the NYPD should have done instead of arresting every last person involved in the gangs that were in the midst of a war in Upper Manhattan. We all thought that although arresting 10 year olds and leaving a mark on their identity was not the right thing to do, one can’t just let a gang war go on the middle of a major city. One thing that I found interesting, apart from the info on the gang raid, was the way that he had his classes go out into the world in groups, like we were, and look up stuff and talk to people about old court cases. He said that some students were, amazingly enough, reluctant to go. We couldn’t understand this. We found that we could get so much info from going out and talking to experts, or just going to see something for ourselves. Why would collage students not want to do that? We were baffled. Overall, a very successful fieldwork. We learned a bunch from Daryl Kahn.
