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| Needed: Honest, courageous, and productive conversations at the roundtable on Tuesday.... |
Sheriff Chip Simmons has empaneled a group of community leaders to hold a round table discussion this Tuesday regarding a deadly double-shooting in District 1 two weeks back. I applaud his leadership in taking this bull by the horns. The conversation will be about the levels of violence in the community as well--not just this particular shooting. I am honored to have been invited to participate, and I look forward to Tuesday.
In the lead up to the event, I have given three media interviews on this topic, after having been asked my opinion on what, if anything, should be done to focus on the violence in our community that leads to these tragic events like the murder that happened in Bellview. Two of the pieces have subsequently been published and I believe the third will be published this week in the lead up to the roundtable.
The violence, the gun crimes, and the gangs+drugs issues we see growing in our community are symptoms of a bigger problem that few are willing to discuss: The loss of the family unit in growing pockets of our community. This dissolution of the in-tact family unit leaves many young men with no strong role model and disciplinarian in the house to deal with issues that invariably arise in child rearing through formative years.
The single biggest predictor of whether or not a young man in America will become entangled in the criminal justice system is whether or not a father was/is in the home where such a young man is/was raised. But to some, such discussions are verboten for political correctness' sake.
Imagine, as my friend Tom Danheisser posited in his hard-hitting, prescient op-ed on this topic last year, if we were trying to cure lung cancer but we could not talk about cigarette smoking? He knows what I know and he has seen it in his courtroom as has my brother in his courtroom: Fatherless families produce children who are at a much higher risk of committing crimes, being prosecuted, and ultimately ending up in prison. (And lending creedence to the media's reticence to discuss root causes of the crimes, drugs, and gangs issues in Pensacola/Escambia County that produce the carnage we see locally--I'm told the Dannheisser op-ed was also sent to the PNJ last year in May of 2021--but their editorial team refused to print it. Too much truth I suppose.....)
So this conversation Tuesday has to have a few guideposts if it is to be successful:
1. We must realize the long term solution will take decades.
2. We must realize the problem is not the police.
3. We must have the courage to speak truth and use irreputable facts and figures to buffet our positions.
4. We must realize no matter what we do we cannot and will not be able to save every young person from descending into a life of crime.
From my perspective, in order to actually accomplish a worthwhile outcome and trajectory toward
