They've appropriated $35 million to children’s programming annually in recent years. In an area where, compared to whites, Blacks have double and Latinos two-thirds the rate of poverty, city officials have directed resources toward what they view as long-range crime prevention efforts. “We are suggesting that, until the city actually looks at economics as an intrinsic part of this problem, all those other things are simply Band-aids being applied to an open and festering wound,” said Frazier, whose nonprofit organization, the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, advocates for social, racial and economic equity.īlack poverty rate is double, and Latinx rate is two-thirds higher than whites' (Throughout much of the nation, sheriff agencies, which oversee jails, are separate from police.)Ĭity officials believe the “fallacy,” said activist Ben Frazier, that they can “arrest themselves out of the problem,” when inequality is a major driver of many crimes.Ĭlaire Goforth City officials believe the “fallacy,” said activist Ben Frazier, that they can “arrest themselves out of the problem." More than a third of Jacksonville’s $1.4 billion fiscal 2021 budget went to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which doubles as the city’s police force and runs the county jail. In Jacksonville, critics of how city officials have opted to spend taxpayer dollars cite, for example, the $114 million in tax refunds, infrastructure improvements and $26 million in cash that the City Council in October approved for NFL Jaguars’ owner Shad Khan’s riverfront hotel development. This is a well-established trend that holds in every city or non-urban setting in which it has been studied.” Within cities, gun violence is concentrated in a small set of disinvested neighborhoods, and within these neighborhoods, such violence is even more concentrated within a small set of ‘micro-geographic places,’ like particular streets. In their November 2021 report, “Want to reduce violence? Invest in place,” they wrote: “ … Pay attention to the long-standing relationship between violence and place. Researchers at the Brookings Institute are among the latest to link poverty and crime. But elected officials, instead, have poured what those critics argue is a disproportionate amount of tax dollars into policing and propping up the well-to-do. Nelson, other expert observers and some residents contend that the duality also is reflected in the local murder rate in an area where 80% of murders were by firearms in 2020 and Black men killed by gunshot dominated the body count.Īt least in part, residents also argue, that rate reflects a failure to invest in employment, anti-poverty and child development programs and even park maintenance that many residents on LeCount’s side of town believe is critical to cutting crime. That lack, symbolically, reflects a proverbial tale of two cities, said Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney Melissa Nelson of Jacksonville. But you don't have no park managers to manage that park, that would have cared for that park, that would have cared for your children.” “Right now,” he says, “if you go in our community, we have parks that you have access to. They had bats, gloves, balls and other equipment that many parents in the mostly Black neighborhood couldn’t afford to buy for their children. The parks hosting young athletes like the elder LeCount were well-maintained and -staffed back then. Our energy was in the sports and in different activities.” Today, he’s a Disciples of Christ pastor whose own son, then 21, was shot and killed in Jacksonville in 2003. That's how we dealt with a lot of things. LeCount, now 63, said, “We had football rivalry, we had basketball rivalry, we had baseball rivalry. Adrift after his father was shot and killed during an argument with a man at a Jacksonville bar, then 14-year-old Robert LeCount spent several years burnishing his reputation as a drug-dealer and star athlete.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |