DC radio personality creates anti-carjacking PSA with go-go star's help
WASHINGTON - "Would you date a carjacker?," 19-year-old Demarco Taylor-Wade asks in a recorded video.
"Are you serious?" a young woman shrieks in response.
The point of the clip is to reach young viewers and deter them from carjacking. The video’s creator also wants to drive home the point: You’re not going to find girls in jail either.
The visual is part of a new series of anti-carjacking public service announcements (PSAs) that attempt to target at-risk youth in a different kind of way.
"They’re not afraid of going to jail. They’re not afraid of dying so, we can’t use messages that say, ‘Hey look man, you’re going to die if you do this.’ So I’ve come up with a creative way to be able to attack the lifestyle," said EZ Street, an area radio personality and founder of the non-profit Academy DC, which operates a safe passage program in the District.
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EZ Street and other community leaders he is working with, including Backyard Band’s Anwan Glover, are hoping to address the continuing issue of carjackings and auto thefts in the D.C. region.
The issue has been so prominent, D.C. Police recently created a Carjacking Dashboard.
On Thursday, the Dashboard said the District has seen at least 182 carjackings so far this year. Around 75% of those carjacking incidents included firearms and juveniles aged 14, 15, and 16-years-old were found to have committed the most carjackings this year.
"This generation of young people is not like the past generation, they’re different. So they’re requiring different messaging," EZ Street said.
One of the PSAs features Melinda Robertson, founder of Black Mothers 4 Justice, INC.
"I work with numerous women whose children have been incarcerated and this one woman in particular shared with me that her son was paying for protection. That she maxed her credit cards," Robertson said in the video.
"These are the things they don’t talk about because they tend to glorify going to jail, but they don’t really understand the impact that it has," she told FOX 5.
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Anwan Glover, known as "BIG G," told FOX 5, "Right now they don’t really have no money, they not eating. They don’t have no mentors, nobody telling them nothing. They’re looking at their internet. They’re getting these rapper's songs that are telling you to do this, do that – and that’s what they’re following by."
Taylor-Wade hopes the PSA helps give the victims of carjackers and their families hope by knowing that there are people trying to address the problem. He told FOX 5 what frustrates him the most about these particular criminals.
"People trying to portray an image for social media. [For] some reason, people think that social media is a platform that you can just do anything, even if it’s the worst thing in the world, you still get credit for it," the 19-year-old said. "But that’s actually a problem, people do give the credit. You get millions of likes for doing bad things. People want to see that, they want to instigate things. They do that on purpose because they want to see somebody fail … it really shouldn’t be like that at all."
EZ Street said he’s planning to put out mostly radio ads and Instagram-sponsored ads that will be geotagged to target social media users in specific high-crime areas in both D.C. and Maryland.
When asked if he thought teens would really watch the videos, EZ Street said, "They don’t have a choice!"