Community calls on politicians and leaders to take action
FROM police officers to community leaders to elected officials, hundreds packed the pews of Hamilton United Methodist Church on Sunday, September 13 for a town meeting to discuss the recent surge in violence and the high number of killings in South Los Angeles.
“We’re going to take our communities back,” said City Councilman Curren Price. “We can’t police our way out of this, can we?”
The gathering was organized just days before by Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who had been looking for a way for South LA residents to discuss the issue.
Harris-Dawson said he wanted to give people a chance to talk about how it was affecting the community, to make sure their voices were heard by officials and police officers looking for proactive, realistic solutions.
“What’s very clear here is there’s much more to the story,” Harris-Dawson said, “whether it’s a gunshot survivor or a mother who lost her child or a police officer who thought he had it in check.
As of September, over 5,100 people had been killed in Los Angeles this year — up 4.4 percent from the same period in 2014, according to data from the Los Angeles Police Department.
August was a deadly month, with 39 people killed across the city, the most in a single month in the region since July 2009. Nearly half of those killings occurred in South LA, the Los Angeles Times reported.
LAPD officials and South LA leaders have been working diligently to ease the violence, which police attribute largely to gang activity. With the help of clergy and gang intervention workers, as well as more officers on patrol, the department has increased community outreach efforts to better protect its citizens.
LAPD Deputy Chief Bill Scott said that 80 percent of the homicides in South LA this year were related to gang violence. “But,” he said, “a lack of educational opportunities, jobs and other programs to help improve the community also play a role.”
Social media also was helping to fuel the aggression and ease gang tensions. For instance, Scott cited an August shooting in which a photo of two men lying bloody on the sidewalk circulated on Instagram and Twitter.
“Those types of posts are gonna cause problems,” Scott said. “We have to come up with some solid solutions.”
Leaders and residents in the audience called on the politicians in the crowd—including Reps. Karen Bass and Lucille Roybal-Allard and state Sen. Holly Mitchell—to bring more resources to their neighborhoods. They emphasized more in the budget for gang intervention programs, job opportunities, and after-school programs for young people.
“Intervention workers are crucial to reducing violence because they live and sleep in the neighborhoods most affected,” said Aqeela Sherrills, an activist working against gang violence.
“This has to be a long-term strategy,” he said. “We have to be looking at training the next generation of interventionists.”
Other residents looked to their own neighborhoods, saying it was up to the community to protect their children.
“We have to police our own selves,” one man said. “Go home at night and make sure your kids are home.”
Thomas Wilson spoke through a jaw that was wired shut, the result of gunfire outside of a carwash in Manchester Square. He was one of the two men in the photograph Scott had mentioned. The other, Delshon Eugene Hayes, was killed.
“Responding detectives thought I was dead and didn’t help me soon enough,” Wilson said. The delay allowed bystanders to snap photos of his body sprawled on the sidewalk.
“It’s our kids that are doing the killing,” said Tanya Summerise-Carter, whose two sons were killed in shootings 12 years apart. “And it’s our kids that are getting killed.”
