Yesterday evening, 11 locally elected representatives and
one local pastor as well as the Pensacola Police Chief met at the Brownsville
Community Center for the second Sheriff’s Roundtable on Gun Violence. The event had about 50 citizens
from the area in attendance, as well as multiple media outlets and various
office staffers.
About a dozen speakers addressed the panel. Various ideas/topics were broached. The overall theme from the citizens was that
areas of poverty produce the violence—so anything that the local governments
can provide to such areas will help stem the tide of the gun violence we have
seen. Jobs, infrastructure, more
programs for youth, and more police patrols were some suggested solutions. In a nutshell—more services and money
invested is what most of the speakers wanted to see.
After public forum concluded--each of the panelists spoke
and described recent actions their respective organizations have taken to
assist with this problem. The group
ended the discussion after about an hour and forty minutes, settling in on the
idea that the entire panel would descend on one neighborhood and bring all the
available services from each represented entity to this one area in a “blitz” of
the neighborhood --for lack of a better term.
I fully support this, although we will see if such an initiative carries
over and has staying power long term to help curb gun violence. It will take events like this combined with
much more, to turn the tide.
For my part, I offered specific, tangible ideas I would
fund, and ideas for which I would advocate, built from the comments I made at
the initial meeting where I described the current violence (as well as other
social ills we see) as a symptom of a much larger issue—the complete breakdown
of the American Family, acute in areas where we see extreme levels of violence
and crime. No families, no fathers, no
religion, cultural acceptance of dysfunctional conduct, and NO guidance for too
many youths growing up in the cesspool of a cultural meltdown with such
children being “raised” by the entertainment industry’s products promoting the glorification
of violence and antisocial behavior.
I believe the issue is massive and will take a holistic, wide ranging set of short-term, medium term, and long range approaches to turn. It will take decades. It takes families, and it takes fathers.
In Pensacola, as in other cities, we see a significant
amount of gun violence that manifests from areas of generational social dysfunction and poverty.
Sheriff Chip Simmons has sponsored community
roundtables to allow us (local leaders) to brainstorm practical solutions. At the first such roundtable meeting heldlate last year—a large and diverse group of community leaders, pastors, law
enforcement personnel, school district leaders, and other elected officials got
together to discuss the problem with an eye toward solutions.
And the sheriff was direct in asking for ideas and tangible
solutions that could be implemented by each participant within his/her
individual sphere of influence.
Yesterday as we met again, we interacted with one another
and the members of the community that came to the event to have their voices
heard. I left my suggestions, below,
with the Sheriff,----- and I described a few to the panel.
No easy, fast solutions exist short of martial law in some
crime-ridden areas and the construction of more jail space—but if we have the courage to identify the real root causes
and begin to work on these big issues that drive the dysfunction—we will see
improvement over time.
But it takes decades to fix what has taken decades to unravel and devolve. My proposed, initial list of suggestions below:
