Children and adults gathered on the steps of St. Louis City Hall last Friday to remember Sandy Hook Elementary victims and to ask legislators to push for more rigorous gun-control laws.
The candlelight vigil was part of a national movement, yet it couldn’t have been more timely for St. Louis. On June 10, 17 people were injured in gun violence during seven different incidents all in one night. Four days later, four people were shot and killed in a murder-suicide at a Cherokee Street business.
“The amount of gun violence is a crisis,” said 21st Ward Alderman Antonio French, who spoke at the candlelight vigil. “It needs to be a treated as crisis. It’s an emergency situation.”
Every year, the majority of murder victims in the St. Louis region are young African-American men.
“Gun violence is a leading cause of death among some groups in our community,” French said.
James Clark, vice president of community outreach for the nonprofit Better Family Life, was not surprised to hear about 17 people being shot in one night.
“What disappoints me is our apathetic response as a community,” he said.
At Better Family Life, Clark leads a neighborhood alliance that puts resources into the hands of families living in two high-crime neighborhoods. Alliance members knock on doors and find families in need, especially those with children at risk of falling into crime. They, then, work with 65 service providers to bring these families resources, from prenatal care to aging services. In these areas, crime and homicides are down double digits, he said.
“The only way out of this is to be in our neighborhoods,” Clark said. “We have to deliver resources into the living rooms.”
The alliance’s work is crucial because many of these families live in isolation with little access to transportation, he said. Single-mother households are the majority in these neighborhoods, and many of these mothers have sons either in jail or who have been victimized by gun violence.
“And now they have 10-year-old sons who are already developing the same patterns,” he said. “Mentoring programs often don’t reach out and get boys who need it the most.”
To address gun violence, the region needs to make the paradigm shift in “direct resource delivery,” Clark said, and Better Family Life cannot do it alone. During its annual Family Week beginning July 31, Better Family Life will call out to churches to adopt the neighborhood-alliance model in their communities.
“We’ve tried everything else,” he said. “The COPS program, community policing, Operation Weed and Seed, hot-spot policing – all well-intended programs, but they fail to get to the core of the issue: a high unemployment rate.”
Pastor B.T. Rice of New Horizon Christian Church, retired St. Louis police chief Dan Isom and others recently launched the St. Louis Initiative to Reduce Violence, targeting Jennings and District 6 of the City of St. Louis, which includes the neighborhoods of Baden, Calvary-Bellefontaine Cemeteries, Mark Twain, Mark Twain I-70, North Point, North Riverfront, O’Fallon Park, Penrose, Penrose Park, Riverview, Walnut Park East, Walnut Park West and portions of O’Fallon.
The initiative aims to engage communities through different task forces including those focused on reducing violence, improving behavioral health, reaching out to children and young adults in schools and engaging the faith-based community.
Current St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said he would like to see more collaboration among these various community-based initiatives.
“Everybody has to start working together,” he said. “There needs to be a consistent, uniform plan to address the systemic issues. And that’s what’s missing.”
Crime down in 2013
The city saw a spike in violent crime last week, and people are concerned, Dotson said. However, he reassures the community that the police department’s hot-spot policing and other strategies are working.
Overall, crime in the city is down from last year at this time.
So far from January through May 2013, 38 people have been murdered in St. Louis City. Last year through May, there had been 45 murders. By the end of May 2011 there had been 51 murders.
The number of assaults with a gun are also down – 579 assaults in 2013 by the end of May, compared to 819 in 2012 and 706 in 2011.
“You can’t look at one week, or even one month,” Dotson said. “Crime is at the lowest level it’s been since 1970. Crime is in a downward trend.”
Dotson joins many police chiefs nationwide in calling for stronger gun-control legislation. Right now, 60 percent of gun-sale transactions require background checks, but 40 percent don’t, he said.
“We have to close those loopholes,” he said.
However, in Missouri, increasing background checks is vehemently opposed by the Republican leadership in the state legislature.
In May, the Missouri Legislature responded to President Obama’s proposal to close the loopholes on background checks by passing a bill that would not only declare all federal gun regulations unenforceable but also expand gun rights in Missouri. Gov. Jay Nixon has until mid-July to sign, veto or allow the measures to take effect without his signature.
“We are an urban environment in a rural state, and there are different cultures as it relates to guns,” French said. “Some people in the state have not been willing to be inconvenienced in order to save lives in the community.”
