A.G. Gancarski
Solving the Unfunded Liability may be Lenny Curry’s spend of political capital. But if all goes right, and that is a big if, the Jax Journey renewal will be his legacy. And the city’s.
In a media availability before Thursday’s Community Conversation on the Youth Violence prevention aspect of the Jax Journey, Lenny Curry spoke with considerable detail about his approach to the problems of the city that the Journey addressed once, years ago, and must address again.
Speaking on his walk through the Moncrief Road area on Thursday, Curry described the folks he met as a “resilient people,” despite living in an area with “crumbling infrastructure” and “street lights shot out,” and despite having heard “gunshots in the last month.”
These conditions, Curry said, “should not be tolerated.”
“By my presence, [by using the] resources of the city, we can begin to do things one [step] at a time.”
“The long-term answer,” Curry said, is “being serious about the Jacksonville Journey,” as happened a decade ago, when a concerted focus on prevention and intervention brought the numbers down over a 4 to 5 year period.
Solving the unfunded liability, Curry said, is key to the funding piece; Curry likened the city’s financial situation to a “frog in boiling water,” and if it’s ignored, “a decade from now, it will be really bad.”
Also key: stepping up code enforcement, and increasing police presence in neighborhoods that need it.
“When you have people who,” Curry said, “shoot up cars, shoot up homes,” government has to take meaningful corrective action toward enforcement.
Some of those solutions might sound quotidian.
Code enforcement, undermanned in Jacksonville, requires being “very strategic” with the resources on hand, using “data to make sure we’re targeting the right area.”
This data-driven approach (one which won him his mayoral campaign) extends to Journey initiatives, which have “limited and finite resources,” and must be “targeted to youth most likely to end up in a bad place.”
“I don’t know what that funding looks like right now,” Curry said, regarding the future of Journey initiatives.
“People want a police presence,” Curry said. “They want to feel safe in their neighborhoods.”
Policing, prevention and intervention, and reentry programs for reformed felons: all keys to the strategy.
“It can’t just be a spray ‘em approach,” Curry said; it has to be targeted, addressing kids most likely to end up in juvenile detention, most likely to fall prey to the cultures that beget cycles of violent crime and incarcerations.
Remedying the issue is going to take many parts. The administration, Curry said, has had internal discussions.
“How do we engage the citizenry? How do we get churches involved?
Churches, Curry suggested, could have “mission trips right here at home,” offering meaningful solutions for the problems in these neighborhoods that time has forgot.
Another solution: the Neighborhoods Department.
The transition team talked about it this summer, and Curry said it’s “really close” and to “stay tuned in the weeks ahead.”
The Neighborhoods Department, Curry said, is a “very important piece of a very big puzzle.”
To remedy these issues, “community buy in” is necessary, to create expectations that will drive elected officials to respond if those expectations aren’t met.
Curry believes he can get this done.
“When I want to achieve something,” Curry said, “I’m committed to it. I have assembled one of the best teams in government,” and “they know how to execute.”
Leading off his comments at the front of the conversation, Curry asked the question: “why do this?”
“This is a citywide issue,” Curry said, especially given “over a dozen murders in January,” and given that the burial of 22-month-old Aiden McClendon was “one of the most difficult moments of [Curry’s] personal life.”
Seeing the casket, contemplating the loss of potential, of what could have been, was heartbreaking for the mayor.
During the press event, Curry said the casket was a “symbol to people,” a clarion call for a “city waking up to this,” as happened in 2006 when the shooting of Dreshawna Davis galvanized the city into action.
“This is just one more step,” Curry said, “toward One City, One Jacksonville.”
As the media left the conference room, Curry said, bluntly: “we are working our asses off” to implement Journey solutions, to address these problems.
The panel featured Sheriff Mike Williams, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti (Duval County Public Schools), State Attorney Angela Corey, and Correctional Officer Deon Johnson. W.C. Gentry, chairman of the Jax Journey Board, moderated.
The crowd was respectful; a far cry from the contentious moments of the HRO community conversations.
And each of the participants spoke to an approach that built on what other leaders, both on the panel and in the city, were committed to.
Vitti spoke of how males can “go in the wrong direction.” He, who lost his father when he was young, relied on coaches as surrogate father figures.
Programs like 5000 Role Models, connected into the school sites, can especially be helpful in terms of providing meaningful formative influences for Hispanic and African-American males.
“In some of these neighborhoods,” Williams said, “it’s really about the environment in the neighborhoods.”
“Engaging kids” during downtime, Williams said, can keep them from “being on that street corner and meeting a drug dealer.”
“All of these things working together is the direction we want to go,” Williams said.
Vitti noted the lack of “economic opportunity for these young people,” such as in the neighborhood Mayor Curry was in today, as a factor. And indeed, there are larger issues of social dysfunction in play: joblessness, hopelessness, and a leaching out of the spirit of aspiration.
Jobs and hope are not instant Cream of Wheat. The work is slow and deliberate, said Corrections Officer Deon Johnson, who is close with the Rev. Mark Griffin.
“These young men, they have hearts, they have minds, and they really want to see us walking the streets in the neighborhood with the sheriff.”
That line of communication, of community building will take a concerted effort.
“Where that criminal element is in the city, there are churches on every corner,” Johnson said, and mortuary services “on Moncrief every fifth block,” a “booming business because our boys are killing each other.”
Much of what was said lacked emotional appeal. Programs like Alternatives to Out of School Suspension aren’t exciting writes for media. Nor is Vitti’s claim that Jacksonville has “one of the most progressive codes of conduct in the country” or the increased allocation for school counselors. Or the increased use of “restorative justice” practices.
But these are steps. Necessary amelioration for family structures, neighborhood structures, social structures that tend toward a functional anarchy, especially after dark, in neighborhoods.
About “65 percent of my incarcerated juveniles are in for murder,” said Johnson, with three or four new ones in the last week.
“They’re kids,” Johnson continued. “What would drive these young men to commit these crimes… some of them so senseless that you can’t put your hand on it.”
“In the streets at 2 or 3 in the morning … my first thought is: where’s the parent?”
“Most of my juveniles … the reason they don’t get in trouble is they don’t go to school… they aren’t involved in sports.”
Strapping young men: at home, “still in the bed,” said Johnson. They learn that from their parents, “still in the bed.”
“There are kids walking down Tyler Street, first and second graders, walking to school by themselves. That’s a problem,” Johnson, who was raised by his mother and didn’t meet his dad until he was 14, continued.
The parents drop the ball; the drug dealers step in, from a lack of “parental accountability.”
The speakers from the community would break your heart. A mother of a 19-year-old kid, hooked on opiates, who just got a 10-year stretch in prison.
She tried to get help for him at 15. “I tried to get help, I couldn’t get no help.”
A substitute teacher in DCPS, a group that saw its last pay raise in 2001, lamenting the lack of “respect” for subs.
“We need to have some kind of campaign,” said the sub, “to teach children respect for themselves and others.”
“It is scary to see these children in third and fourth grade.”
Vitti pledged to push the School Board for a pay raise for subs, giving them relationships with schools, so they can “build a rapport” and “the students will gradually learn to respect you.”
“A lot of what you’re seeing in the schools is a manifestation of what’s happening at home,” Vitti said.
At the local community centers, said one speaker, there are “kids coming out of the projects who want to learn,” the “bottom 5 percent.”
He is PTA President at one of Jacksonville’s failing elementary schools of the NW Quadrant.
“We’ve got 850 kids in our school, and 20 percent of them are a disciplinary problem. How can we get more adults to show up at these programs?”
Not so fun fact: the school went a few years without a PTA. At all.
30 years out from the height of the crack epidemic. 20 years out from the beginning of the Clinton era mass incarceration policies. What the Jax Journey reboot makes clear: the 20th century solutions didn’t work. Except, perhaps, for the prison industry and its stockholders.
Curry, and his fellow city leaders, will need to develop 21st century solutions.
They will need resources.
They will need community buy in.
And they will need perseverance. And a lot of luck.
“As a community, it’s time to say enough’s enough, and let’s find real solutions,” Sheriff Williams said near the end of the program.
At least half a dozen City Council members were on hand, including President-in-waiting Lori Boyer.
It will be up to her and the mayor to make the aspirational rhetoric of the last few months operational reality, with meaningful budget allocations in hopes of solving a problem that is intractable.
