Tougher sentences on illegal guns
A collection of guns that were confiscated from the Cutthroats Gang are displayed during a press conference at Cleveland Police Headquarters in Cleveland on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015.
(Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer)
Zack Reed represents Ward 2
Despite all the wonderful projects and initiatives going on in our city, especially in our downtown district, some of our neighborhoods, both east and west, have become danger zones riddled with gun violence.
So far this year, we have seen at least 33 fatal shootings in our city, five more than we saw at the same time last year, and there appears to be no sign of de-escalation. Over the last six years, we have seen 519 homicides, 12 of which, over the last two years, were babies.
Nearly every day, we see media reports of fatal shootings resulting from domestic fights, gang wars or random drive-by assaults. But those reports don't quite tell the whole, scary story.
Aside from all the coroner's cases, there are nonfatal shootings that rarely get reported in the media. Over the last six years, we have seen 3,947 nonfatal shootings. So far this year, there have been 425. At the same time last year we had 215.
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Sadly, a significant number of shooting victims are teenagers.
And, sadly, those pulling the triggers are young people, as well. There are just too many handguns in the hands of teenagers and we, as a society, must take action.
A week ago Monday, I stood on the floor during a City Council meeting detailing the escalating numbers regarding gun violence and calling on Mayor Frank Jackson's administration to give us a game plan to quell this violence.
Coincidentally, on my way home from the meeting, I was sitting at a traffic light at the intersection of Kinsman Road and Union Avenue, when, right before my eyes, I witnessed a gunman in a grey Ford Escape shooting at two young men standing on a corner.
A bullet struck one of the boys in his leg while he and his buddy were fleeing on foot. I called 911.
The wounded boy was taken to a hospital and treated. He was the third boy in three consecutive days to be shot in drive-by assaults in Cleveland. Since those incidents, a two-year-old girl was shot in a drive-by while she was at her grandmother's house in the Fairfax neighborhood. And just last Monday, two boys, ages 17 and 18, were shot in their home by a drive-by shooter.
Cleveland councilman Zack Reed witnesses shooting on East Side
We are witnessing an epidemic of gun violence in our city, and despite Cleveland's progress as a comeback city in recent years, this trigger-happy madness continues to persist and grow.
We must treat this scourge on our community as a public health threat, as a contagious disease. I have been advocating for a program that utilizes violence interrupters -- everyday citizens -- and hospitals to ensure that one shooting doesn't beget another.
Ninety percent of the shootings are retaliatory, so when a gun-shot victim is brought into an emergency room, hospital staff will contact the violence interrupters to enlist their support.
The interrupters, working with hospital officials, will get all the details of the shooting and who was involved. They will then mediate between the perpetrator and the victim to dissipate any seething rage.
The interrupters will approach both sides with the mindset -- "It ain't worth it brother, let it go."
I have seen this type of approach work. A Chicago-based group called Cure Violence practices similar mediations in more than a dozen cities across the nation and has seen reductions of between 40 percent and 70 percent in shootings in targeted neighborhoods. Cleveland.com's Leila Atassi reported this week on the success of Cure Violence's Baltimore program, Safe Streets.
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We need to apply the Cure Violence model here. I have invited officials from the group to come to Cleveland next week and brief City Council. The group has accepted my invitation.
I am pleased that City Council has already set aside $75,000 to get a similar program off the ground, but we need more resources to be effective.
I don't believe government can solve this problem alone. Therefore, we need corporate Cleveland to step up as it did decades ago when the city, just out of default, was struggling with huge debt. In recent years, corporate Cleveland also helped us reform our struggling school system.
And now we need the private sector again.
This is serious. This is urgent. We need a public/private partnership to deal with the gun violence in the city of Cleveland.
So consider this writing a call to action.
Zack Reed represents Ward 2 on Cleveland City Council.
This column has been updated to remove editing comments.