Shannon NickinsonWe’re going to need a bigger bridge.
To make a meaningful dent in crime prevention, the gap between law enforcement and those they are sworn to protect needs to be narrowed.
The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office in Northwest Florida is trying to do its part, and for that it deserves due credit.
It hosted a two-day crime prevention summit aimed at highlighting strategies to improve trust between law enforcement and the community.
Doing that, in essence, boils down to communication, as Pensacola Police Chief Chip Simmons told those gathered at the Pensacola Crowne Plaza Hotel last week.
“Every connection, every little thing we do makes our community a little bit better,” Simmons said. Those who were there must be willing to be the pebbles in the pond, the ones who create the ripples that ultimately make the difference.
Some progress has been made in Pensacola, as State Attorney Bill Eddins noted.
For the first half of 2014 crime is down in Escambia County (11 percent) and in the city limits (16 percent). Neighborhood Watch programs have blossomed in the last five years — from 13 to 127, Eddins said.
Cooperative efforts like the Gun Crimes Task Force and undercover, multiagency stings help. Drug court, pretrial intervention, domestic violence court, a new mental health court, civil citations for juveniles and other diversionary and rehabilitative programs are a part of the progress, Eddins said.
But the “headline crime,” as Eddins called it, remains.
“The ‘headline crime’ has not gone down even though crime overall has gone down,” he said.
And that’s what most folks respond to — the stuff that makes the big type. That’s what makes the rounds on social media, never mind the decrease in residential burglaries, vehicle thefts or property crime.
The things that resonate are the things like the death of Kenteyonna Anderson, a 14-year-old cheerleader at Pensacola High School. She went to visit family on Sept. 19 and ended up lying on Maxwell Street “because someone fired a gun in the air just to know what it was like,” said Malcolm Thomas, Escambia schools superintendent.
“That was a pivotal point for me,” Thomas said. Kenteyonna was heading home. She studied, she planned to go to college, he said.
How far she would have gone in life is lost to her loved ones and to Pensacola.
All that remains is a hole that can’t be filled.
There were other people in the audience with similar holes in their hearts. Women like Cindy Martin, whose son, Matthew Cox, was shot to death in July of 2012.
Fewer break-ins and car thefts don’t feel like a reduction in crime for these families.
Bridging that gap requires more.
It requires hearing Shawn Jackson of The Jaxsun Group from Atlanta make a stark point that Lil Wayne is more readily identifiable than Colin Powell among those under 18 years of age. That Nicki Minaj means more to young people than Condoleezza Rice.
“Who has influence on your child?” Jackson asked rhetorically. “Who are their minds open for?”
It requires hearing Pensacola City Councilman Brian Spencer cite Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” in finding the presence of just 5 percent of professionals in the population of a neighborhood tamps down teen pregnancy, school dropout and crime rates.
And it requires hearing Sheriff David Morgan say the greatest threat to our community is from within if we don’t enforce standards of what’s acceptable.
Morgan asked those at the session to pray for their community, if they were the “praying sort.”
“The evil one’s greatest tool is divisiveness,” he said. “I don’t need to be in your face. I just need to sow a seed of doubt.”
And that, Morgan said, is why channels of communication between law enforcement and the community are crucial, even if they start with a small audience of the faithful in a hotel meeting room.
Prayer never hurts, but for Pensacola to progress, we need just as many hands prepared for the work of reaching across the divides of class and geography as we need hands clasped in supplication.
We need mentors. We need parents who are engaged in the life of their children — in school and out. We need people to share information that can help the police.
We may well need the power of prayer, but we already have the power to speak up and do our part of the work that will make a difference.
Instead of building more walls to divide us, let’s build bigger and better bridges to bring us closer together.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of www.progresspromise.com, a news and analysis website in Pensacola. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
