Several former Toledo mayors lambasted on Saturday the current administration’s consideration of hiring a Louisville firm to consult on curbing Toledo’s violence, saying the city should consult its residents who know well the violence that plagues the city.
“It appears that when we’re talking, trying to bring everyone together, it’s falling on deaf ears,” said Mike Bell, one of three former mayors to speak during the Coalition for Peaceful Toledo Neighborhoods gathering at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church in central Toledo.
Yet current Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz is ready to spend “$150,000 to tell us what we know,” Mr. Bell said.
Donna Owens, whose mayoral tenure from 1984 through 1989 marked the last time Toledo elected a Republican as its mayor — albeit when the city still had an administrator and the mayor’s role was largely ceremonial — said she was “on the warpath” and “throwing the gauntlet down to the mayor and city council to take some action” following the shooting death Friday evening of a 15-year-old boy in South Toledo.
“The kids are dying. How much more of this are we going to take?” Ms. Owens said before remarking on the mayor’s, and most councilmen’s, absences from Coalition meetings after Mr. Kapszukiewicz attended the first one.
And three-term former Mayor Carty Finkbeiner particularly mocked the proposal to enlist Louisville-based Cities United, with which Toledo already has spent more than $16,000, as its violence-reduction consultant.
Several Toledo officials attended a Cities United conference in Baltimore late last year.
“Baltimore is one of the most crime-ridden cities in America, and we’re going to hire a firm out of Baltimore to solve our problem?” Mr. Finkbeiner said after calling it a “cockamamie idea.”
While a typical Cities United contract costs between $100,000 and $125,000, so far the Kapszukiewicz administration has presented no formal contract to Toledo City Council.
Several audience members agreed that communicating with people in Toledo’s neighborhoods — particularly young people — is vital to addressing the problems that underlie Toledo’s post-pandemic spike in homicides, including a record 71 in 2021 and last year’s 65, which holds second place.
And several of the recent homicides have involved teen-aged victims, including three of the five this year and a particularly notorious case from December in which two boys’ bodies were found in the basement of a burned-out North Toledo house 13 days after they went missing. Eight people, including two other teens, have been charged with kidnapping and murder in connection with those deaths.
On Friday afternoon, Donald Hogan, 15, was shot in the 500 block of Shasta Drive and later died at a nearby hospital. Dr. Jeffrey Hudson, a deputy Lucas County coroner, said Saturday young Hogan had been shot once in the chest, and ruled the death a homicide — Toledo’s fifth of the year.
Police so far have neither described any suspects nor released any other details about that shooting.
Kantrell Cantlope, an audience member at the meeting Saturday, said one way to find the roots of youth violence is to “go into the schools. Ask them what’s going on. Ask them what’s bothering them.”
Ms. Owens said that during her administration, “we did that at Scott [High School], and what we found is that they don’t have hope.”
Much of Toledo’s youth crime problem is rooted in negative influences and unstable homes, Ms. Owens later added.
“They don’t know what love is,” she said, and many who gravitate toward street gangs do so because it gives them a sense of belonging.
“They’re really behaving normally for their abnormal situations,” said the Rev. Tony Gallagher, a retired but active priest at St. Martin de Porres.
What such youth need, he said, is someone to understand them and help them so they know “there’s an adult who cares about them.”
Barbara G. Baumgartner, meanwhile, urged fellow group members to consider becoming court-appointed special advocates, a role for volunteers to work with youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
Ms. Baumgartner said that while her efforts there don’t solve all the problems, “I make dents” and “you can influence a kid if you become a CASA.”
Several dozen people attended the meeting Saturday, and Mr. Finkbeiner urged the group to be resolute and not be “disappointed that there aren’t 150 people here.”
Mr. Bell, meanwhile, said it also would help for concerned citizens to attend Toledo City Council meetings more often and hold council’s feet to the fire on addressing neighborhood issues.
“When there’s no one down there, it looks like you don’t care,” while if a union-related issue were to arise, “the union would have the council [chamber] full,” Mr. Bell said.
First Published February 4, 2023, 11:12 p.m.
