Cincinnati has fought a pitched battle over the past year to address gun violence in neighborhoods around the city.
City officials have waged that struggle in a number of ways, from 90-day plans to increased spending on police. Now, a coalition convened by Democrat City Council member Yvette Simpson is looking at trying new, longer-term approaches, including treating violent crime as a public health issue.
On the morning of Dec. 4, around 40 people from a variety of organizations met at the Anna Louise Inn in Mount Auburn for the third meeting of Simpson’s Violence Prevention Working Group.
The meeting attracted people from the Cincinnati Police Department, Cincinnati Public Schools, the Cincinnati Health Department, the University of Cincinnati, the Anna Louise Inn women’s shelter, United Way, City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld’s office and Vice Mayor David Mann. The goal: develop a long-term comprehensive strategy to fight violent crime in the city.
“We need to do this additional work so that we make sure in 10 years we don’t see the same thing happening, or in five years or in two years, and that’s the type of work we’re talking about,” Simpson said.
Overall, violent crime rates are down from previous years. 2015 has seen 2,246 overall violent crimes, well under the average of about 2,700 a year over the previous four years. But there’s a big exception: a significant spike in the number of shootings in the city.
Daniel Gerard, director of operations at the University of Cincinnati’s Institute of Crime Science and the former District 3 captain for CPD, says the spike in gun violence comes from the desire of those involved in street life not to be seen as weak or a victim.
“You’re seeing on the streets a decided increase in personal disputes among people that are being settled with guns,” Gerard says. “Things that traditionally would have been handled over a fistfight, an argument, something like that, are resorting to gun play.”
The impacts of those shootings are on display almost daily in neighborhoods around the city, many of them lacking opportunities for employment and education.
Just last week, one person was killed and three others wounded in a running gun battle in the city’s East Westwood neighborhood. The site of the shooting at the 2300 block of Baltimore Avenue also saw two other gun battles just days apart that injured five people earlier this year. Overall, tiny East Westwood has seen 13 shootings this year, and neighboring Westwood has seen another 44.
That area isn’t the only place struggling with such violence. The city has seen 459 shootings this year, according to CPD data, compared to an abnormally low 375 last year and an average of 400 over the previous four years. Sixty-three percent of shootings this year have come from 10 almost entirely low-income neighborhoods like the West End, which has seen 33 shootings this year, and Over-the-Rhine, which has seen 35.
Many of the victims of these shootings are African-American. CPD data shows that 93 percent of the victims of non-fatal shootings in the city this year were black.
Ozie Davis III, a lifelong resident of Avondale and the executive director of the Avondale Comprehensive Development Corporation, attended the working group and said he has three friends who grew up on the same block as he did who are not in jail.
“Where I live, significantly less is not enough,” he said of violence reduction efforts. Avondale has seen 50 shootings this year, the most of any Cincinnati neighborhood.
Simpson, who chairs the city’s Human Services, Youth and Arts Committee, says she set up the working group after looking through the city’s human services budget. She says she found the $1.5 million dedicated to fighting violent crime wasn’t following any kind of comprehensive strategy, but was instead being split across six priorities and sub-priorities. So she took the funding out and set up the working group to develop a long-term strategy. The group had its first meeting on Oct. 30.
The group is tasked with convening experts from a variety of backgrounds to put together a tailor-made plan for Cincinnati by looking at various long-term models used across major cities in the U.S.
“We’re taking a very strategic but organic approach to how we arrive at the best solution for Cincinnati,” Simpson says. “We could have taken something off the shelf from another city and said ‘let’s just do that here,’ but we know that that’s not going to work.”
Simpson’s idea is that the money she pulled from the budget is better spent on executing a carefully crafted plan to fight violence in the long run. She plans to unveil a set of recommendations in March and will request that the $1.5 million follow the group’s proposed strategy with a selected nonprofit appointed to lead the initiative.
Meanwhile, city officials continue to make more immediate attempts to address the issue.
“Our number-one priority is reducing the violence and shootings,” Mayor John Cranley said during a swearing-in ceremony Dec. 10 for newly permanent police chief Eliot Isaac.
Cranley announced that the city will hold a community policing roundtable next month in Bond Hill, followed by a series of community discussions on those issues that will take place in January and February in all of Cincinnati’s five police districts.
The city is also looking at spending some of its $19 million budget surplus to shore up police services. Among the proposals is spending $150,000 on more workers in the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence or CIRV, a nine-year-old collaborative effort that specifically targets those involved in street crime who are prone to committing violent crimes. The program has suffered budget setbacks in the last few years. City officials say they’d like to bring it back up to strength. Another $150,000 would go to a new police data scientist and new computer equipment to perform crime data analytics.
Simpson’s Violence Prevention Working Group is different from city officials’ other proposals in that it’s not CPD-led and its focus is on strategies that are more long-term than what the city currently has in place.
The group has discussed initiatives such as the Centers for Disease Control’s violence prevention model, which views the issue from a public health approach, and the CeaseFire model used in Chicago and Baltimore, which trains “insiders” to scope out where violence might erupt and intervene before it does.
The group also looked at targeting precise intersections and various “hot spots” like East Westwood’s Baltimore Avenue that have particularly high crime rates.
The preliminary proposed areas are all located in neighborhoods like Avondale, Walnut Hills and others where educational and employment opportunities are scarce and where poverty is high.
For Simpson, that’s part of the point. She says the initiative is in part about developing a model that will best tackle underlying conditions that cause violence specific to Cincinnati.
“How do we make it so that it’s not about a street or a street segment?,” Simpson asked at the meeting. “It’s that there are conditions good enough in our entire community that make it so more kids go to medical school than become shooters.” ©