The time for questions is over, Columbia City Council. Pass the gun violence prevention office
Let’s make this easy for the Columbia City Council members who are questioning a new proposal to create a gun violence prevention office.
How much money does it need? As much as it can get.
How many people need to work there? As many as its office can hold.
Can you waste more time in acting to reduce gun violence? No. Council members have had almost a year to ask questions about how federal dollars could be spent on gun violence prevention and a month to consider the proposal for a new office.
Council members need to quit with the questions and take some action by approving Mayor Daniel Rickenmann’s plan to put about $800,000 into the new gun violence prevention office.
As reported by The State’s Morgan Hughes, “Columbia leaders likely will move forward with some iteration of a program meant to reduce gun violence in the city. But what form that program takes has stirred conflict on the City Council, where members disagree on how much to spend, how many people to hire and where to direct the program’s efforts.”
“Rickenmann has pitched spending just under $803,000 of federal pandemic dollars on a new office of gun violence prevention that he hopes will cut shootings in half over the next three years,” Hughes reported.
As someone who reported on the devastation to families brought by gun violence in Columbia and Richland County, who at times became nauseous because of having to write about another shooting and who now has an aversion to seeing guns in films and on television because of writing about so many shootings, let me address these council members’ questions to stop any further delays.
Councilman Howard Duvall asked “how closely the mayor’s program mimics a similar violence prevention program in the city run by the organization Serve & Connect. Duvall shared concerns that the city was duplicating existing efforts.”
As a nonprofit, Serve & Connect does not have the leverage of a municipality. Serve & Connect has great initiatives, from supplying groceries to families in need, to helping injured officers and, yes, violence reduction, but it is not solely focused on reducing gun violence as the office Rickenmann has proposed would be.
Duplicating gun violence prevention efforts? Is this serious? Quadruple these efforts. Young people’s lives are at stakes.
In Hughes’ report, Councilman Joe Taylor said “he supports the effort but said the city’s priority should be fully staffing its police department.”
This scenario in which Columbia has to prioritize police retention and recruitment over the violence prevention office presents a false dichotomy. The city can do both simultaneously because the two efforts are funded from different sources: the police department from the city’s general funds and the prevention office from federal money.
If the Columbia Police Department has any staffing issue, it’s because people aren’t exactly lining up to be officers right now. The dangers of the job are one reason for that, including, and maybe most prominently, the potential of being shot. If Columbia reduces shootings, it’ll get more officer candidates in the long run.
But hiring more police officers isn’t the answer to preventing shootings.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, the longest-serving law enforcement leader in the Midlands, has consistently said we aren’t going to arrest our way out of a violence problem. He’s preached that anti-violence education, especially for young children, is the best means of preventing shootings. Solicitor Byron Gipson of the Richland County prosecuting office has said “we can’t prosecute away this problem” of shootings. The proposed gun violence prevention center can help carry out the anti-violence education that’s needed.
In his call for more police, does Taylor think Black teens and young men, who are disproportionately affected by gun violence in Columbia, are running to police officers to try to report a beef that might turn into a shooting? They are not because of long-held mistrust of police, and rightfully so. Might they go to a non-police office? It’s much more likely than a police office.
Councilman Ed McDowell and Councilwoman Tina Herbert, whose districts are most impacted by gun violence, were supportive of the center but had questions and reservations, Hughes reported.
“I think the dollar tag is a lot,” Herbert said. “I don’t know if we need to start off with three people for three years.”
Herbert is hesitant to spend money when Rickenmann, a Republican through and through even if Columbia’s council is nonpartisan, wants to drop more than $800,000? It would be funny if the purpose of the money wasn’t so serious.
Does Herbert understand the scope of the shooting problem Columbia has? Do any of these questioning Council members?
A report from last year by the Columbia Police Department said gun violence has been “severe in the past half-decade” and that it will continue to be “unless there is an effective response to this problem on the part of the City of Columbia and its partners.”
In 2021, 93 people were shot in Columbia, the most in the last five years, according to Columbia Police Department statistics. From Jan. 1, 2022, to Oct. 17, 2022, 82 people have been shot, including nine fatally. In the spring, Columbia had a “running gun battle,” as Chief Skip Holbrook called it, that wounded five and killed one near a Vista apartment complex. A shooting at a mall injured 15. That’s two mass shootings in about month’s time.
Is that enough answers for you, Columbia City Council members? Stop wasting time and fund the gun violence prevention office as proposed.