In the wake of escalating gun violence and an outcry from the community to do something about it, Toledo City Council could declare gun violence a public health crisis in the city of Toledo.
Councilman Theresa Gadus plans to introduce the resolution at Tuesday’s agenda review for the Dec. 20 meeting. The proposal comes one week after Toledo City Council’s Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform Committee held a public hearing on the topic of rising violence in the city. Such action would formalize the city’s commitment in addressing the issue, Ms. Gadus said.
“It’s a promise to the public that this is council’s top priority,” she said. “When we heard the people talk at that meeting this was something that they needed to hear from us, that we are coming together as a council, and we are focused on driving this.”
Such a resolution could also put the city in a better position to receive federal or state funds to address the issue violence, she said.
“I really think that it’s going to take existing community networks, community partners, and community members to really look at this in a comprehensive approach to address the socioeconomic and systemic factors that promote gun violence,” she said.
This is not the first time that gun violence has been declared a public health crisis in the city of Toledo. In 2020, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz declared gun violence a public health crisis and launched a new initiative challenging residents, community partners, city officials, and law enforcement to join together in finding solutions to end it. Conversations and proposed strategies to address the problem followed.
Although the mayor has already made such a declaration, Ms. Gadus believes that Toledo City Council needs to repeat it. She also supports the development of a task force to study the last 500 shootings in the city to gain a better understanding of every element that contributed to each incident, including the criminal justice system.
“The more data we have, the more we know how to take our resources of the city and put them into the right areas,” she said.
Councilman Tiffany Preston Whitman plans to introduce legislation in January requesting that the Toledo Police Department submit a biannual crime reduction report and a comprehensive public safety plan. In addition to providing council a framework in which decisions could be referenced, the information will also be shared on the city’s website.
“I feel like Chief [George] Kral has done a great job in sharing real time information with us,” Ms. Preston Whitman said last week. “But there are other groups, neighborhood groups who make plans based on what is going on and they can also use this data.”
Ms. Preston Whitman is frustrated that council and the administration are not further along in rolling out specific initiatives to address violence. She acknowledged that the mayor’s month-long moratorium to deny city leaders the chance to meet one-on-one with members of the council slowed that progress. The mayor implemented that directive at the beginning of November over an employee dispute involving the city auditor, but it has since been lifted.
In the meantime, the Coalition for Peaceful Toledo Neighborhoods, a grassroots group founded by four former Toledo mayors, has held several public meetings focused on finding gun-violence solutions. The group that includes former mayors Carty Finkbeiner, Donna Owens, Mike Bell, and Paula Hicks-Hudson, has called on Toledo leaders to fund the expansion of block watch programs.
Ms. Preston Whitman isn’t fully convinced that block watch programs are effective and cautioned about negative ramifications that could come from such initiatives.
“For me, there has been a clear history sometimes with formalized neighborhood groups with who’s policing and that can go wrong,” she said. “That’s what I want to be cautious about, and also, we don’t want retaliation. There is a role for neighborhood groups, but it must be planned out and executed well or people could get hurt.”
Councilmen have met with the families of shooting victims, and the councilmen have stepped in when needed during the investigations. They have also reached out to community organizations, are working on sustainable youth programming, and have supported initiatives to clean up blighted areas, Ms. Preston Whitman said.
The most recent shooting Thursday brought Toledo’s reported homicide number to 62 for the year. For Ms. Preston Whitman one shooting is too many, and she joins her colleagues in understanding the enormous challenge city officials face in working to solve the crisis.
“The reality is we’re still experiencing a lot of crime and violence and youth engaged violence,” she said. “Youth-engaged violence is way too much, and there is so much more that we could be doing.”
First Published December 12, 2022, 8:17 p.m.
