‘We don’t give up.’ Lexington faith coalition pushes Mayor Gorton on violence prevention
Dozens of members of a Lexington faith group gathered outside Lexington’s city government headquarters Tuesday evening to demand that Mayor Linda Gorton implement a specific program to reduce gun violence.
Members of BUILD, which stands for Building a United Interfaith Lexington through Direct Action, want the city to contract with the National Network for Safe Communities to set up its Group Violence Intervention program.
BUILD, a coalition of 26 Lexington congregations, has been trying for years to get the city to implement the program. The number of homicides in Lexington has continued to climb, which members say is evidence of the need.
“When people are being killed, we can’t afford more of the same,” Rev. Nathl Moore, who co-chairs the group and pastors First African Baptist Church, said at the news conference. “Unfortunately, we continue to get more of the same from Mayor Gorton, and people continue to die.”
The group is rallying community support for its annual Nehemiah Action, a gathering that usually draws hundreds of participants who hope to meet publicly with city officials to demand action and hear them respond on issues related to poverty and injustice. The event is scheduled for 7 p.m. May 3 at Central Bank Center.
“The one thing about BUILD is, we don’t give up,” said Cheryl Birch, whose son Jermaine Birch died in a shooting in 2009. “We’re not going to back down.”
She said it took seven years for the group to have success with getting an Affordable Housing Trust Fund set up.
“The homicide numbers keep going up,” Birch said. “They’ve been doing things, but it has not reduced the number of homicides.”
Gorton responded in a letter to BUILD members Tuesday evening that she is still concerned that this particular program could damage police or city government’s relationship with minority communities and that it has been unsuccessful in some cities.
“I have consulted with Police Chief Lawrence Weathers, law enforcement, the Director of One Lexington, street outreach workers, community activists, faith leaders, the ACLU, NAACP, and the Human Rights Commission,” Gorton wrote. “All expressed serious concerns about the targeting aspect of GVI, and the serious damage it could do to the relationship among government/law enforcement and communities of color.”
Moore, the BUILD co-chair, told attendees at the news conference that there is no evidence that the Group Violence Intervention program targets Black men and said members of the Black community are the ones asking for it to be implemented.
“You can be certain, if I had the slightest worry that this strategy would target the Black community in which I pastor, I would not be demanding that the mayor implement GVI,” he said. “Our city needs GVI, that we may stop burying our neighbors, our family members and our children.”
Gorton also said her administration researched the use of GVI in other cities to see whether data there indicated fewer homicides. She wrote that representatives of the organization that runs it said last fall “that they were at a loss to explain why GVI wasn’t working in some cities.”
“The above two factors combined to make it clear that GVI is not the program Lexington should emphasize right now,” Gorton wrote.
She said the program has positive aspects “that are similar to other violence prevention and intervention programs that I fully support, and have ensured that our team prioritizes.”
“Numerous social and economic factors play a part in violence,” Gorton wrote. ”Along with proactive, community-focused policing, we also focus on the upstream, root causes of violence. For example, every day we work to address affordable housing, homelessness, strengthening our workforce, youth programming, job training, substance use disorders, and rental assistance, just to name a few. This represents a significant increase in funding for our community violence intervention program.”
Sherry Warsh, a member of Consolidated Baptist Church who serves on the board of BUILD, told those in attendance that such programs “are good for the community as our youth need to see that they could have a better life if they chose options that would lead them away from the streets. But these programs aren’t dealing with those who are the perpetrators of the violence we are seeing.”
She said that’s why the city needs the GVI program.
“We can’t afford for another person to be killed,” she said.
Moore, the BUILD co-chair, also voiced concern about the city’s plan to partner with Flock Safety to install video cameras that can read license plate numbers on streets in high crime areas.
He said placing the cameras based on crime data “is alarming because crime data is skewed.”
“Since there are more police officers in Black neighborhoods, there will be more crime data in Black neighborhoods. Communities that are already over-policed will be under constant surveillance by the city.”
Gorton responded in her letter that “Flock looks at crime analysis data across the board to recommend placement of its cameras.”
“For BUILD to make a statement about the mayor installing cameras in already ‘over-policed communities’ without even knowing where the cameras are is problematic,” she wrote.
This story was originally published March 15, 2022 at 9:34 PM.
