Tag: Memphis Gun Down

Categories
News The Fly-By

Memphis 2016 Homicides By the Numbers

On March 28th, 22-year-old Reginald Burke was shot while driving near the I-240 North/I-40 East flyover, the apparent victim of a road rage incident between himself and Tarrance Dixon and Robert Chaney, both 21. Dixon and Chaney were charged with second-degree murder.

Burke was able to flag down another driver for help and was transported to the Regional One Health, where he eventually succumbed to his injury, making him the city’s 59th homicide victim.

Burke’s murder is one of 79 homicides in the city so far this year, a number that’s nearly double from 2015’s 47 homicides to date. According to statistics released in April by the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, the murder rate was up 69 percent over 2015 and 43 percent over 2006 (the year the commission launched their Operation Safe Community crime-fighting plan).

Reginald Burke

Those high homicide numbers appear to be skewing the overall violent crime data, pushing citywide major violent crime up by 16 percent from January to March 2016 versus the same period in 2015. And homicides haven’t seemed to slow in April or May either.

“It is almost impossible to predict when a homicide will occur. There is no statistical data that will alert us when someone has made the decision to commit murder,” said MPD Interim Director Michael Rallings.

Of the 79 homicides so far, 55 of the murders have been solved by the MPD, 42 arrests have been made, and three warrants have been issued for suspects who remain at large. Four of the 79 homicides have been ruled as justified by the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office. In 34 of the 79 homicides, the victim and suspect knew one another. Only 11 of the 79 homicides are believed to be gang-related.

“By saying gang-related, I mean the suspect, victim, or both are known gang members, and the homicide occurred due to some type of gang activity,” Rallings said.

Rallings said 65 of the 79 murders to date involved firearms.

Memphis Gun Down, a program that launched in 2012 under former Mayor A C Wharton’s Innovate Memphis (formerly the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team), has made it a goal to reduce gun violence in the city. The program’s 901 Bloc Squad sends reformed gang members into high-crime areas in Frayser, Orange Mound, South Memphis, and the Mt. Moriah corridor to connect with those who are caught up in the gang lifestyle.

“They’re trying to show diplomacy and influence these young people who are gang-involved to put their guns down and resolve conflict in other ways,” said Memphis Gun Down Director Bishop Mays.

Memphis Gun Down also has a hospital intervention program at Regional One Health, through which they make contact with shooting victims to try and prevent any retaliatory crimes. Additionally, the program offers youth an outlet during the summer through its “twilight basketball” games in the above-mentioned target communities.

“We need to align our resources throughout the city. We can’t put everything on the backs of the police officers,” Mays said. “We’re in a state now where we must pay attention or we will lose a lot of youthful assets in our community. We need to not judge and be willing to reach out to those who will accept help.”

Rallings echoed Mays’ statement, saying that the police can’t curb violence without help from the community. At a press conference last week, Rallings urged citizens to alert police any time they see an altercation occurring or someone suspicious in their neighborhoods.

“It takes everybody working together to make this a safe community,” Rallings said. “People are waiting on the police to solve all these problems, but the police are just one aspect. The clergy, everyone in the educational system, and individuals in the community all play a part.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Memphis Gun Down Faces Budget Cut

CREDIT: Dreamstime.com

A budget request for Memphis Gun Down was shot down last week in a Memphis City Council meeting in favor of a smaller budget for the youth violence prevention program.

The city program that has shown success in reducing youth gun violence in certain target areas of Frayser and South Memphis had about a quarter of its budget request slashed.

Representatives from Memphis Gun Down, an initiative established by the city’s 2011 Bloomberg Philanthropies grant funds, approached the Memphis City Council last week to request $250,000 to keep the program going. But the council ended up passing a resolution to cut their budget by $62,000.

“We are very appreciative of what they have given us, and it will still allow us to move forward, but it will cut us short on a program manager,” said Memphis Gun Down Director Bishop Mays. “And we won’t be able to robustly pursue other models and strategies that we were looking at. We may not be able to expand our program to as many other parts of the city as we had planned.”

The cuts were proposed by Councilman Harold Collins, who thought that Memphis Gun Down’s mission sounded too much like that of the mayor’s Memphis Youth Ambassador (MAP) program. But other than working with at-risk youth, the two programs actually don’t have much in common, according to Mays.

MAP is a year-round program that helps more than 400 kids in grades 10 through 12 develop life-building skills and college and career readiness. Memphis Gun Down focuses on youth violence, and they work specifically with gang-involved youth through programs like the 901 Bloc Squad, a team composed of people who were formerly caught up in street life and who now mentor at-risk youth.

Gun Down also offers midnight basketball games for youth who might otherwise be getting into trouble late at night. And they run a hospital violence intervention program, where mentors meet with young adults who end up in the hospital following violent incidents in the hopes of helping to turn those kids around.

“What the Office of Youth Services is doing [with MAP] is needed. They are able to expose kids to positive alternatives for their futures, like going to college. But we’re different,” Mays said. “They don’t have persons who are directly connecting with gang-involved youth. We’re reaching out to that segment, and to compare us just isn’t fair.

There’s also a chance that Collins misunderstood exactly what Memphis Gun Down does.

Dreamstime.com

“I said, ‘You tell me the number of guns that you have taken off the street since your program started.’ And the director [Mays] said, ‘We don’t take guns off the street.’ And I said, ‘Well, how could you have a Gun Down program if you don’t take guns off the street?'” said Collins, explaining an exchange between he and Mays in last week’s council meeting.

Mays said Memphis Gun Down focuses on preventing youth from picking up guns in the first place.

“Getting guns off the street is more of a function of the police. There are armed individuals out there, and the police are armed. They’re equipped to do that,” Mays said. “We’re not law enforcement officers. We’re trying to change the desire to pick up that gun.”

Earlier this week, Mayor A C Wharton praised Memphis Gun Down’s success in an article he wrote for CNN: “We will always have more work to do, but we are seeing results.”

And according to crime stats, it looks as though Memphis Gun Down is on track to reduce crime among teens and young adults. From 2012 to 2014, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery were down 23 percent for all ages and 21 percent among people under age 24 in their target area in a portion of Frayser. Those same crimes decreased by 25 percent for all ages and 55 percent for people under 24 in their focus area in South Memphis.

“We’re providing them with positive alternatives, like Summer Night Lights [a program that provides youth with recreational activities like art classes, pizza parties, and dancing on summer nights], which we believe has impacted the desire to commit gun crimes in those areas,” Mays said.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Draw Your Weapons

Art can have positive impacts on society, but can it reduce gun violence? That’s what a handful of Memphis College of Art (MCA) students are hoping for.

MCA students have created images that visually convey the youth gun violence dilemma in the Frayser community for an exhibition called “Fight [gun] Violence.”

The exhibition is on display in the main gallery of MCA’s Rust Hall through January 29th.

Twelve students from the institution’s Sustainable Design Studio and Design of Advertising courses collaborated with Mayor A C Wharton’s Innovation Delivery Team for the exhibition. By September, the team hopes to have reduced youth gun violence by 10 percent citywide and by 20 percent in selected areas of Frayser and South Memphis through its Memphis Gun Down initiative.

John Wilbanks, a 21-year-old design major at MCA, created two posters for the project. One displays a close-up shot of a mouth with a sucker on the tongue and the words “Guns Suck” in small text. The other is a whimsical illustration of colorful balloons with typography of the words “The Future Is Not Bulletproof” sketched on them.

“A lot of the stories that we heard from the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team involved the idea of the future of Frayser and how the current rate of gun violence was threatening Frayser and the future of its children,” Wilbanks said. “I started playing with childlike imagery to see if I could create some type of visual story that would relate to the idea of how gun violence that happens right now is affecting the future.”

According to the Memphis Police Department (MPD), 1,343 people between 13 and 24 years old were arrested for gun-related crimes in Memphis in 2012. Over that same time period, more than 2,300 people were shot or reportedly shot at. Of the 157 homicides that took place in the city in 2012, more than 80 percent were committed with a firearm.

MCA students met with the mayor’s team to discuss the city’s youth gun violence dilemma and learn strategies that the team is using to help lower its gun violence crime rate. MCA students also conducted their own interviews within Frayser and were provided tours of the community by MPD’s Community Outreach Program unit.

“I really want them to challenge themselves and their role as a socially conscious designer, in order to advocate the city of Memphis as a sustainable community,” said Hannah Park, MCA assistant professor and the project’s organizer. “The designer has been known as a problem solver focusing mainly on the aesthetic concerns, but we believe that designers should be more proactive as a part of the community.”

After completing the posters, students showcased them to residents of Frayser, Cooper Young, and the Overton Park area, in hopes of creating a conversation about local gun violence and sparking ideas for how it can be reduced.

“This is an excellent opportunity to raise public awareness,” said Bishop Mays, director of Memphis Gun Down. “Not only should a message of non-violence resonate with conflicted youth, but the general public as a whole should pay more attention to our community needs to combat gun violence.”