Thomas MacMillan Photo
Assistant U.S. Attorney Felice Duffy.
How can we tell kids they shouldn’t be fighting on the street when our own agencies can’t cooperate together? Amy Meek asked a roomful of law enforcement officials, street-outreach workers, and clergy.
Meeks, the coordinator of the city’s prisoner re-entry initiative, put out the question at a Tuesday afternoon gathering in City Hall. The Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s office organized the event to bring together a variety of people working to curb violence in New Haven. It’s the second of three planned meetings in Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford.
Some 50 people — including cops, state and federal prosecutors, probation officers, outreach workers, non-profit directors, and school officials — convened in the Aldermanic Chamber to discuss ways to tackle violence. The meeting came shortly after the years 31st homicide and the day after a man was shot in the chest in the Hill.
To seed Tuesday’s discussion, Assistant U.S. Attorney Felice Duffy showed a new documentary called “The Interrupters.” It’s the story of three Chicagoans struggling to stop violence in the streets of that city.
After the film, Duffy said the purpose of the meeting was to bring together the “isolated” and “fragmented” pieces of New Haven’s response to violence.
In the hour-long discussion that followed, attendees offered varied perspectives on various facets of the problem: job availability, job readiness, job retention, gun availability, poverty, fear, and obstacles to police cooperation.
Many speakers echoed the need for cooperation between all the actors in the room, but no concrete suggestions were offered.
“We have a lot of resources in New Haven,” said Meek, who’s agency put together a 100-page resource guide for ex-offenders returning to New Haven.
“There are so many job-readiness programs.” But it’s difficult to get all the resources to work together, Meek said.
Her rhetorical question about asking kids not to fight drew chuckles and scattered applause from the room.
Part of the problem is that not-for-profits are often competing for funding, Meek said. She mentioned in particular the difficulty of getting job developers to cooperate. “That is a cut-throat business.”
Duffy later agreed with Meek that the limited availability of grant funding can lead to a lack of cooperation between organizations.
The meeting wrapped up with a promise for all the attendees to communicate by email and to have another meeting in two or three months with a more focused, solution-oriented agenda.
As with every other work group over the past 20 years (and there have been dozens), all talk, no action.
Simultaneous to all the talk, we are cutting our teen summer employment program.
How do we talk about jobs to cut youth violence, then cut those jobs? So that we can export more and more salaries and benefits to our increasingly (and now almost entirely) suburban city workforce?
The rest of the nation knows how to cut violence- do a Google Search. We just aren't interested in doing it here, other than the scattered programa without meaningful magnitude.