Terri Jackson’s daughter is 20 years old, and she knows at least 20 young people in Denver who have been killed or died by suicide.
“This is very personal to me,” Jackson said, speaking to a panel of city and state leaders at the Clayton Early Learning campus on Saturday morning.
Jackson was one of about 40 people who attended a community meeting organized by the Colorado Black Round Table to address a recent increase in deadly shootings in Denver.
Six people were killed in the first 10 days of April, and although Denver police investigators have said the homicides were not connected, that does not lessen their impact, community leaders said Saturday.
“Gun violence in general is continuing to go down, but unfortunately we are starting to see a higher lethality rate,” Police Chief Ron Thomas said after the meeting. “A lot of it has to do with the proximity in which those occurred, in very close proximity conflicts. Itap certainly shocking.”
In the wake of a rise in violence, there’s a danger in under- or overreacting, Thomas and other community leaders said Saturday. Although DPD took steps like adding more street cameras and increasing patrols, over-policing a community will just create further distrust, Thomas said.
“I don’t believe in reacting in a way that doesn’t produce sustainable results for the sake of doing something,” Al Gardner, executive director of the Denver Department of Public Safety, told the crowd. “I think we need to do something that produces results.”
Community members asked questions or gave statements to the panel of government officials for more than an hour, moderated by Colorado Black Round Table Director John Bailey. Folks brought up ideas for violence prevention ranging from improving K-12 education to expanding youth employment programs.
Bailey called on Denver’s major league sports teams to invest in the city’s young people.
Although speakers talked about funding as a major hurdle for growing violence prevention programs, state Senate President James Coleman described it as another problem that needs to be addressed at its foundation.
For funding to be sustainable, there needs to be an ecosystem based on a Black community that supports Black businesses which in turn support Black nonprofit organizations, he said.
“When we as Black people decide we will invest in ourselves and bet on ourselves, thatap when the money will be sustainable. Until then, we will always be behind,” Coleman said.
Several community members said they want to see more action to back up the ideas raised Saturday, including community organizer Helen Bradshaw, who said she wants more collaboration between the very people who came to the meeting.
“If you need something, reach out. If you want something, look within,” she said after the meeting. “All of this just asking for money to do the same thing – itap offensive for me to see you just stand up and give a title and continue on as usual. Where has that gotten you? The resources were right in this room.”
Although coming together as a community to talk is good, people need to put words into action and actually do something, said Jason McBride, founder of Denver nonprofit McBride Impact.
“The only true currency we really have is our youth, and we need to make more of an investment into them,” he said. “Those are the kids that are going to change and make things better for our community, but we’re not showing them how to do that or giving them the resources to do it.”
