Maryland: Isometric arrow formed by multiple merging colorful lines on white background. Coalition, partnership, merger, alliance, integration concept.

Opinion: Our Maryland Coalition Supports Evidence-based Programs For Black, Brown Communities

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Gun violence in Maryland disproportionately impacts young Black and brown men and, increasingly, women. It is important that gun violence prevention organizations look beyond traditional efforts to curb gun violence. In light of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many other individuals who have experienced police violence, advocates of violence prevention must address the growing concern of police violence and offer alternatives to community policing. 

Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence has led the charge on that front, joining with The Community Justice Action Fund to create The Maryland Violence Prevention Coalition (MVPC). 

MVPC is a statewide coalition of organizations with the joint mission of reducing violence and improving living conditions in underserved Maryland communities. Using a community-led approach, we seek to empower the voices often neglected and educate elected officials and the public about urgent community needs. The coalition was initially formed in 2018 to coordinate education and advocacy efforts to support state Delegate Brooke Lierman’s legislation to establish the Maryland Violence Intervention and Prevention Program (VIPP).

gun violence: Man and woman fasten seatbelts while sitting in car

Opinion: Gun Violence Can Be Reduced With Incremental Changes, As With Car Safety

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I remember when everyone knew a family that had been adversely affected by the loss or serious injury of a loved one in a motor vehicle accident. Initially, there was much hand-wringing and little action about automobile safety. After seat-belt laws were enacted, people railed against them as government interference, spreading fearful predictions that people would be trapped inside their cars. Then, something amazing happened: Seat belts worked. Fewer people died, and a disproportionate number of those who did die were not strapped in. 

Automobile manufacturers were not fans of improved safety measures for cars.

SAVE: 4 men, 1 woman, all smiling, pose in group, all wearing matching sweatshirts that say save east harlem

Opinion: For Community Policing to Work, We Need Investment, Stronger Partnerships

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Since COVID-19 hit, communities like New York City's East Harlem have been dealing with multiple diseases: a deadly virus, the ongoing effects of systemic racism and gun violence. 

Stand Against Violence East Harlem (SAVE), a Cure Violence program run by Getting Out and Staying Out (GOSO), has worked to address gun violence in its East Harlem neighborhood for many years. We have viewed gun violence as a public health issue, one that must be treated in order to change community norms. 

When you look beyond the headlines about gun violence in New York City and actually spend some time in neighborhoods like East Harlem, it is clear that what our community doesn’t need is increased policing and incarceration — what we need is more basic resources and opportunities. 

According to a recent study by the Center for Court Innovation — and as we see at GOSO — an overwhelming number of 16- to 24-year-olds who carry guns have been subject to trauma and violence themselves. This history, along with arrests for minor, nonviolent offenses, far too many of which lead to needless incarceration, can start a cycle that eventually escalates. This is why we must focus on treatment and investment, not just law enforcement. The Cure Violence model works to change attitudes and connect at-risk individuals to resources, with staff living in the communities where they work.

philanthropy: Two black men talking outside

Opinion: We Know What Truly Works for Gun Violence Prevention and Invest In It

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More than 115,000 Americans will be shot and 40,000 will die from gun violence this year alone — just like the year before and the year before that one. Gun violence in our country is considered one of the greatest public health crises of our lifetime, disproportionately impacting and traumatizing communities and people of color. 

Far too often we see the disproportionate rates at which marginalized people in our country are the targets of hate, violence and injustice. COVID-19 and the recent peaceful protests are bringing to light the inequities that exist in our broken systems — but it shouldn’t take a pandemic and a nine-minute video of a man being murdered by police for systemic change. The data on these inequities has existed for decades. 

As the only state-based donor collaborative investing in gun violence prevention in California, Hope and Heal Fund takes a public health, community-based approach through a racial equity framework to end gun violence. It harnesses the collective power of philanthropy, government, advocates, experts, researchers, community partners and individuals to invest in proven solutions and emerging strategies to intervene, interrupt and prevent trauma, injuries and deaths as a result of gun violence in the homes and communities in California. 

We don’t just look at the gun violence making national headlines, like mass shootings.

firearm injuries: Hands opening digital lock on safe

Opinion: Public Health Approach Can Help Prevent Firearm Injury, Death In Youth

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September usually marks the return to school, with teachers setting up classrooms and youth headed off on a new year of learning and growth. But 2020 has been anything but usual. In many parts of the country, learning has moved online as teachers set up virtual classrooms and youth engage from their bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms. 

Parents are faced with balancing work and oversight of home learning; for some, this means new child care demands, while teleworking parents struggle with divided attention. Outside the home, other stressors include coronavirus, the upcoming election, economic uncertainty and protests for racial justice; Americans are grieving, frustrated and frightened.    
For more information on Youth Gun Violence Prevention, go to JJIE Resource Hub | Youth Gun Violence Prevention
Add the 2020 surge in gun sales — with an estimated 40% being first-time owners — and there’s the perfect recipe for a spike in youth firearm injuries and deaths.

gun rests on platform outdoors

Opinion: Gun Industry Must Be Held Accountable for Gun Violence

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The national debate about gun violence in the United States generally falls into familiar patterns. We express shock and horror at acts of unspeakable violence, grieve for victims and their families and ask questions about the individual who pulled the trigger and what could have been done to intervene with them to prevent the tragedy. But there is one crucial actor who is largely absent from these conversations: the industry responsible for putting guns into our communities in the first place. For more information on Youth Gun Violence Prevention, go to JJIE Resource Hub | Youth Gun Violence Prevention
The gun industry in this country is massive. From 2014 to 2018, nearly 47 million guns were manufactured domestically and another 21 million were imported, totaling 68 million new guns for sale in American communities.

gun violence: Chromed handgun on black background with smoke

Opinion: What Surge in Juvenile Homicide Means, What To Do About It

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The U.S. Department of Justice recently released two statistical reports that appear to stand in contrast. A report released in June of this year states that in 2018, law enforcement agencies made the fewest number of arrests of juveniles in almost 40 years. But a different report, released in April, shows that juvenile homicide cases spiked by 35% between 2014 and 2018, which overlaps with the period of the June report. 

The ostensible discrepancy between these two reports, if viewed without sufficient context, can potentially lead to some misinterpretations and misunderstandings. In particular, given what is occurring currently with regards to the Black Lives Matter movement and heightened tensions surrounding police-community relations, caution should be used when these statistics are directly cited in relation to cases involving Black residents in urban communities. 

Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has previously pointed out the problematic nature of centering the statistical rise in homicides around a narrative about tensions between the police and Black communities. This idea, pushed by some commentators in the popular media, that the increase in homicides was attributed to law enforcement agencies reducing their policing in Black neighborhoods as a result of police-community tensions, is often referred to as the Ferguson Effect.

gun violence: hand held up to stop speeding bullet

Time to Invest In Proven Solutions to Violence, Our Communities

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Three months ago, the entire nation was rocked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. In the weeks since his murder, a movement has taken shape to demand not only an end to policing, but a refocusing on community-led public safety that saves lives by stopping the use of officers with a firearm in our neighborhoods. 

This national reckoning is based on decades of righteous and rightful anger from Black organizers and community members on the front lines of combating violence. Communities across the country have taken steps to scale back ever-growing police budgets, to strip departments of military-grade equipment that terrorize our streets and to invest in public safety and mental health without putting communities at further risk. 

But while our nation finally tackles systemic racism, economic inequality and discriminatory policing, we’re also experiencing a surge in gun violence — disproportionately impacting communities of color. Shootings in New York are up 53% from the same time last year; in Chicago they’re up 46%, in Atlanta, 23%. This summer of violence has taken the lives of dozens of children across the country, including Amaria Jones, a 13-year-old who was killed in her living room by a stray bullet while showing her mom a TikTok video. 

The coronavirus pandemic and the countless deaths of Black people have exposed and exacerbated the systemic racial inequities and lack of access to opportunities for Black, Brown and Indigenous people — the same people who bear the brunt of the gun violence pandemic.

Alabama activists say defunding police rooted in legacy of southern organizing article video image

Alabama Activists Say Defunding Police Rooted In Legacy Of Southern Organizing

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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Black freedom fighters in Alabama once changed this country.

Speaking onstage in Kelly Ingram Park on Juneteenth, Celestine Hood, a woman who witnessed radical change during the Civil Rights Movement, said Alabamians had the power to do it again.

Hood was a child in this park in May 1963, one of the young students participating in a demonstration for racial equality when Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered attack dogs and firehoses on protesters. Images of children enduring that brutality enraged the world, sparking international support for the movement.

In May of this year, a video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in custody for allegedly spending counterfeit money, shocked the world again. Protests erupted in big cities and rural towns, demanding an end to police and vigilante killings of Black people.

“We had dogs and firehoses,” Hood said. “You’ve got tear gas. You’ve got rubber bullets. It’s the same fight.”

The crowd of a few hundred — Black, brown and white, young and old —nodded, raised their fists.

police: smiling man with red shirt, khaki pants leans on SUV labelled Jacksonville Police

Alabama Police Chief Discusses Whether Policing Can Be Safer For Officers, Communities

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JACKSONVILLE, Alabama — When Marcus Wood was a kid, he said, the neighborhood police hosted barbecues for his community, handing out sticker badges, teaching him and his friends to fish. “I grew up in what you would call the projects,” Wood said. “Those cops influenced my life in a very positive way.”

Today Wood, 34, is the first Black police chief in Jacksonville, a small university town. A native of Weaver, Alabama, he previously worked as an Army police officer, a National Guardsman, a corrections officer, a fugitive investigator and a trainer for the state’s police academy at his alma mater, Jacksonville State University. 

This year, as Black Lives Matter protests assembled in cities around the world in the wake of Minnesota police killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill, protesters gathered for days in Jacksonville to discuss police brutality and racism in the justice system. At the time, in June, Wood told a local TV news station: “We appreciate [protesters] being a force for us, because we don’t want bad cops in law enforcement.” The comment came with the announcement of a citywide curfew.