Where were those 700 folks at the funeral of 14-year-old DeOnte Rawlings when his father cried for help? Seven individuals, who saw DeOnte’s life on downward trajectory, may have been able blunt his spiral. But people seemed deaf, dumb, blind and paralyzed until shots rang out.

Now, whole sections of the city want to turn against Metropolitan Police Officers James Haskel and Anthony Clay. The former is alleged to have shot DeOnte; Haskel says the youth was armed. No weapon has been found. A federal investigation is under way.

Truth told, juveniles in many urban centers are too busy shooting and/or killing each other; they don’t need anyone else’s help. It’s been this way since the late 1990s, when the federal Department of Justice found: “The victims of juvenile offenders were most likely to be about the same age as their offender.”

Between Sept. 1 and Sept. 22 of this year 265 juveniles in the District were arrested for various crimes, according to the MPD. If the feds’ assertions are correct, victims of those juveniles were likely one of their own.

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Mayor Adrian Fenty paid for DeOnte’s funeral. That gesture — a demonstration of sensitivity that often escaped former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, whose city seemed ripe with trigger-happy officers — may have sent the wrong message about the District’s tolerance for individuals allegedly engaged in criminal activity. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and D.C. Council Member Marion Barry blame D.C. Public Schools for failing to help DeOnte’s father; their response is the classic knee-jerk.

Certainly, anytime a child dies violently and under questionable circumstances, everyone should be concerned.

But, this hand wringing-hysteria-movie has played in the District before: Remember the murder of Princess Hansen in Sursum Corda and the shooting in a 9th Street nightclub of 17-year-old Taleshia Ford. Hours after DeOnte's funeral last weekend, three teens were shot — one fatally — at a bus stop in northwest.

Then, as now, the government is Beelzebub: Police officers should've been more careful in talking with Princess about a murder she may have witnessed.

The government shouldn’t have allowed alcohol to be served in the nightclub Taleshia patronized. If the government had enforced its own curfew laws, those three teens wouldn’t have been at some bus stop at 1 a.m.

Together these cases raise that all-important question: Where were the parents? A certain permissiveness prevailed — although parents claimed they knew better. There seemed to have been a disconnect between knowing and acting as the master authority in their child’s life.

Everyone knows government can never effectively do what adults, by bringing children into the world, are obligated to do as parents: keep their children out of harms way at all costs while shaping them into productive citizens. Still, it tries. And because government tries and predictably fails, it becomes the culprit.

Sometimes, I feel sorry for the government.

Jonetta Rose Barras is the political analyst for WAMU radio’s D.C. “Politics Hour with Kojo and Jonetta.”