KALAMAZOO, MI (WKZO AM/FM) – A weekend shooting in Brady Township leaves a man dead, and an accidental shooting left a 10-year-old boy in Kalamazoo wounded.
Those are just the latest incidents in what has been an uptick in gun violence this summer and this year.
This week, the Kalamazoo city commission got an update from the Blueprint for Peace on how their gun violence prevention efforts are going.
So far, it’s a work in progress.
Dr. Kenlana Ferguson, the executive director of Michigan Transformation Collective, says the numbers are up this year over last, but these crimes are caused by a lot of things that they may have no control over, and it’s best to look at long term trends.
The trends show the numbers are still at a ten year low.
“We don’t ignore the data, but we also need to look at the trends over time, how we’re doing as a collective, around reducing gun violence in Kalamazoo,” says Dr. Ferguson.
The coalition of 150 organizations has been focused in the early stages in bolstering the efforts of the city’s Community Violence Intervention workers, setting up a certified training course at KVCC to train more of them.
Dr. Ferguson says that’s had the greatest impact on reducing gun violence.
“Because there’s no way we can start working upstream when we’ve not attended to the people who are in the moment, impacted most by the harm.”
Dominica Sims is one of those front-line workers who says their job begins before there is need to call police.
“And so we do a lot of mediations before they hit paper just to stop violence from continuing on in our community, and this is causing like a lot of healing within the community,” Sims says.
Longer term, the aim of The Blueprint for Peace is to tackle the root causes of gun violence, like racism, poverty, unemployment, housing instability, and lack of access to mental health resources.
Addressing those issues will take longer.
There have been cuts in state funding for these kinds of programs, and Ferguson says they would like to find more permanent and sustainable funding, rather than relying on local grants that may not be renewed.
A bipartisan package of legislation on fire-arms safety has been endorsed by ten democrats and ten republicans in the U.S. Senate and it includes funding for community violence intervention programs.
It would be the first gun bills in decades to pass, but given the current state of politics in Washington, it’s hard to predict its future.
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