e all know screen time is a scourge, but until recently, it wasn’t the first place police officers looked when investigating a shooting. With youth gun violence on the rise, however, Snapchat and similar platforms can tell the story of how and why a crime occurred. “Conflicts often manifest and are exacerbated on social media,” says Denver spoke with Dane Washington Sr., a former gang member who now heads the Park Hill Pirates youth football league and a youth mentorship nonprofit called Kids Above Everything, and Gene Fashaw, a seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher at High Point Academy in Aurora. Both men have tight, trusting relationships with their players, mentees, and students, who not only report frequently being around guns but have also been willing to tell their mentors what they’re seeing on social media. Washington and Fashaw want Denver parents to understand—and be on the lookout for—the following issues.
