There are moments in public service that never leave you.
For me, one of those moments was the Summer of Violence in the early 1990s. It was a time when Denver was making national headlines for all the wrong reasons. Young people were killing young people. Entire neighborhoods were living in fear. And as mayor, one of the hardest responsibilities I carried was attending funeral after funeral for children whose lives had barely begun.
Those funerals still stay with me.
I remember standing beside grieving parents who should have been planning college visits, weddings and careers — not memorial services. I remember looking into churches filled with the victim鈥檚 classmates trying to make sense of the unimaginable. I remember walking back to my office asking myself the same question every Denver resident was asking:
How do we stop this?
Today, as I read about another rise in homicides and the heartbreaking increase in violence involving young people, I cannot help but think back to those years. The circumstances may be different. The people may be different. But the pain is exactly the same.
The good news is that Denver has faced this challenge before, and we learned some important lessons. The first is that there is no single solution. Anyone who tells you this can be solved by one law, one budget, one police initiative or one social program simply wasn’t there.
What changed Denver was an entire city deciding that violence would no longer define us.
Law enforcement had to be part of the solution. We supported our police officers, focused resources where violence was occurring, strengthened partnerships with federal agencies and held violent offenders accountable. Public safety begins with protecting innocent people, and there is no substitute for effective policing.
But we also learned that arrests alone would never be enough.
Every teenager we buried had a story that began years before the crime. Too many had fallen through cracks in our schools, our neighborhoods, our families or our mental health systems. Too many lacked positive adult role models. Too many believed they had no future worth protecting.
That realization changed our approach.
Instead of treating violence only as a police problem, we treated it as a community problem. We brought together educators, pastors, neighborhood organizations, youth mentors, recreation leaders, business owners and nonprofit partners. We expanded after-school and summer opportunities because we knew the hours between school and dinner could determine the course of a young person’s life. We invested in neighborhood recreation centers, mentoring programs and community policing. We encouraged officers to become familiar faces rather than strangers responding only after tragedy struck.
Perhaps most importantly, we stopped working in silos.
City Hall could not solve the problem alone. Neither could the Police Department. Schools could not do it without parents. Parents could not do it without neighborhoods. Business leaders could not simply hope someone else would fix the problem. Real progress came when everyone accepted responsibility for part of the solution.
That lesson is every bit as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.
Today’s challenges include social media, more powerful firearms and new pressures on young people that simply did not exist in the 1990s. But the fundamentals have not changed. Young people still need adults who believe in them. Neighborhoods still need police officers they know and trust. Families still need opportunity, hope and support. Communities still become safer when neighbors know one another and refuse to surrender their streets to fear.
One thing I learned during those difficult years is that leadership cannot be reactive. If all we do is respond after another child is killed, we have already failed. Leadership means investing in prevention before the next headline appears. It means having the courage to fund both public safety and youth opportunity, even when budgets are tight. It means measuring success not only by arrests made, but by lives redirected.
Denver eventually emerged from the Summer of Violence not because one person solved the problem, but because an entire community refused to believe that violence was inevitable. We chose collaboration over finger-pointing. We chose persistence over despair. We recognized that public safety and opportunity are not competing priorities–they are partners.
Those lessons have not expired.
No mayor should have to spend a summer attending funeral after funeral for the city’s children. No police officer should have to knock on another family’s door. No parent should have to bury a son or daughter whose future should have stretched decades into the future.
Denver has overcome this before. We know what works. The question before us is not whether we have the answers.
The question is whether we still have the collective will to put those lessons into practice.
Wellington Webb was the mayor of Denver from 1991 to 2003.
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