Last year, the two-county area served by the Central Florida Prevention Coalition lost 17 young people to gunshot wounds and another 17 to drug overdoses. When Kathleen Sager Blackburn, community awareness coordinator for the coalition, looked at the deadly parity in those numbers, they made an impression."The thought struck me that the problems are equivalent," she says. "We also know they're interrelated, that there's a direct correlation between the two. That's why we focus on both."
The CFPC, which is located in Orlando and serves Orange and Seminole counties, is an excellent example of a substance-abuse organization that has expanded its reach to address the related problem of gun violence as well.
Two years ago, for instance, CFPC joined forces with another group, the Central Florida Partnership for Nonviolence, as well as the Orlando Police Department, to sponsor a gun buyback. With the assistance of a funding partner, a company that provided $50 vouchers for each gun turned in, the sponsors bought back 400 firearms in three hours.
The group also sponsors annual Martin Luther King Day "youth memorial" marches, in which participants carry posters of youths who have died, to raise public awareness. "We march to the memory of the youths who died untimely deaths due to drugs, guns, and suicide," Blackburn says.
A third project that CFPC has organized with an eye toward easing the threat of gun violence is called the Village Houses program. "Village houses" are designated homes of volunteers in high-risk neighborhoods where children can go after school or on weekends and feel relatively safe in a gun- and drug-free environment. There are currently 20 Village Houses in the CFPC service area. "One of the major problems for many kids," Blackburn says, "is that they don't have a safe place to go after school when both parents are working and drug dealers are on every corner.".
Another locale that has recently begun to expand its interest in gun-violence prevention is Youngstown, Ohio. With a population of about 100,000, Youngstown has drawn attention as a particularly troubled city for gun violence. Last year, the city recorded an astonishing 66 homicides, making it the deadliest city in Ohio and the fourth worst in the nation.
By all accounts, the gun-violence problem in Youngstown is directly related to drug trafficking, as Mayor George M. McKelvey emphasized in a letter to President Clinton, heavily publicized in the local press, last November. In the letter, McKelvey asked Clinton to dispatch his drug czar, Gen. Barry R. McCaffery, to Youngstown, to assist the city in finding ways to deal with drug-related violence. "Youngstown is being held hostage by armed criminals terrorizing our city with the gun violence that goes hand-in-hand with their drug trade," McKelvey wrote.
One part of the community's response is based in Youngstown's St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Funded by a three-year grant from the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and the Joyce Foundation, the hospital trauma center is now a lead agency in studying the problems of drugs and gun violence in Youngstown. Meanwhile, the city is assembling a program funded by a Justice Department grant for the purposes of developing more effective law-enforcement strategies to combat drug-related violence. A third effort is occurring in the Juvenile Justice Center courthouse, where a grant from the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is funding a new program to initiate strategies to counteract youth violence.
In Baton Rouge, La., the Baton Rouge Partnership for the Prevention of Juvenile Gun Violence, formed in 1997, grew out of a task force that was formed in 1989 to combat a crack-cocaine epidemic. Aided by a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the partnership seeks to reduce gun violence through a variety of methods, including high-intensity monitoring of known multiple gun offenders; universal gun traces; working closely with the local Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But it also includes an educational component that covers training of life skills, school-based programs, and anti-violence clinics. In addition, the partnership works to create summer jobs, cultural and recreational activities for youths, and teen summits.
According to Yvonne Day, project director for the Mayor's Anti-Drug Task Force in Baton Rouge, says, the results have been noticeable. Since the birth of the Partnership, violent crime among juveniles has declined by 22 percent, she says.
But just as important, Day says, is the fact that the city has built a structure that can move forward. "For the first time in our community," she says, "we have a multi-dimensional community initiative that's not just 'lock 'em up."
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