A.G. Gancarski
“That baby is a symbol,” said Bishop John Guns.
It has been a violent January in Jacksonville. Thirteen slayings in January so far. The latest: a 22-month-old boy.
Reaction to that killing (a drive-by shooting near the Sports Complex) brought most of Jacksonville’s City Council, the Mayor, the Sheriff, and Guns and many other ministers together Saturday.
City leaders have pledged action. They offered $500,000 from the Jacksonville Journey budget to pay overtime for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. At a Saturday news conference at A. Philip Randolph Park, Mayor Lenny Curry pledged another $1 million from the current city budget.
Sheriff Mike Williams, who held the news conference (seen by this writer via streaming video), said the spike in violent crime is related to the drug trade.
“The Jacksonville Journey was frankly ignored [in the past],” Curry said in response to a reporter’s question.
Now? “The Journey is back.”
Williams cautioned that the Journey is a “long-term investment.”
Guns noted that the response is collective effort of community, law enforcement, and political actors “because we simply care about lives.”
Williams said the relationship-building between the community and law enforcement requires “getting people to buy into” it.
With the Curry administration launching a series of Community Conversations on the Jacksonville Journey starting Feb. 11, it’s clear that in contrast to the fractious issue of Human Rights Ordinance expansion a broad-based consensus supports fighting the drug trade the resulting violence.
Such consensus will be necessary in the short term because the rate of the killing isn’t slowing down.
