A.G. Gancarski
At Thursday’s Jax Journey meeting, Lenny Curry called for a resumption of Operation Safe Streets, a John Peyton-era initiative that focuses on murder reduction and gun abatement in hot spots of violent crime. New Board Chairman W.C. Gentry called for $500,000 to be moved to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for that budget.
The Jacksonville mayor has, on more than one occasion, addressed the murder rate in Jacksonville … a recurrent preoccupation of his, one that is rooted in socioeconomic gaps that predate even Jacksonville’s Consolidation itself.
As he moved from candidate to leader, his rhetoric and approach necessarily has changed.
During his campaign, he attributed the murder rate to Mayor Alvin Brown‘s lack of budget priorities.
In the background of the 2015 campaign was wanton, seemingly random violence.
The day of the final debate, less than a week before the election: Two girls were shot on a school bus.
Campaigning in Grand Park, a hardscrabble neighborhood with infrastructure old enough to qualify for Social Security, Curry talked of visiting the memorial of a kid who was shot a year before when he started his campaign.
He also talked about the 10-year-old kid that he met in Grand Park who saw his best friend shot in the chest.
Despite the campaign rhetoric, the murder rate in 2015 was the highest it’s been since 2009.
And the bodies still fall, in Jacksonville generally, and Grand Park specifically.
Hours before Thursday’s Jacksonville Journey meeting, a 22-year-old man was killed over there in a drive by.
He was in his church choir.
Also on Wednesday: a couple shot in a late model Nissan in the Robinson’s Addition neighborhood.
Their infant was unharmed, and has been turned over to DCF.
This bloodtide of violence is something Curry has pledged to stop. And the Jacksonville Journey is his mechanism to do it. So far, though, it hasn’t happened.
His commitment, however, is unshaken, as he said Thursday at the Jax Journey Oversight Meeting.
Curry, after thanking people for showing up, mentioned his work on the “pension solution,” before addressing “the continued violence and crime throughout this community.”
“This is our issue. This is our cause. With all the things going on in the city, this is the thing we have to focus on.”
“My heart is breaking every single day, and I am incredibly frustrated that I can’t just get up in the morning and fix this.”
Curry spotlighted Operation Safe Streets, the “enforcement arm,” and said he wanted to take some money from the Journey and give it to the Sheriff’s Office for “hot zones.”
“This is the most important thing we will do now and in the years ahead. This is about lives and people,” Curry said about the Journey.
The balance between prevention, intervention, and enforcement has been a focus of law enforcement and those on the policy side. With violence and murder on the uptick, addressing this issue is central locally.
New Board Chairman W.C. Gentry called for two meetings in the next month, to remedy funding challenges regarding some programs, with an eye toward getting programs going immediately to address “the tremendous uptick in violent crime.”
Also called for: neighborhood stabilization in areas like Eureka Gardens. And teen programming for older teenagers, to address their needs. Subcommittees will work on both these fronts.
There’s only so much that can be done, said Gentry, citing “limited funding for the remainder of the year.”
Curry’s Chief of Staff, Kerri Stewart, noted that next year’s budget needs to be planned also, and that the budget will at least stay the same next fiscal year.
The public launch of the Jacksonville Journey 2.0 will happen, in earnest, at a Community Conversation February 11 at the North Campus of Florida State College Jacksonville.
