Anti-Violence Crews Summit, Look Ahead

As summer set in, grassroots gun-violence prevention leaders compared notes about ongoing efforts to keep people safe in Newhallville, and heard a plea to step up their game in conjunction with a broader anti-poverty strategy.

That message emerged at a summit held Thursday afternoon at First Calvary Baptist Church at 609 Dixwell Ave. 

The event was organized by Newhallville Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith, who declared that the neighborhood needs more attention from the city, social services, and violence prevention leaders. 

The event reflected how many people are working hard in different ways to tackle violence in the neighborhood, and how much work remains to be done.

Police reported at the meeting that there have been five homicides, 11 shootings, and two self-inflicted shootings in Newhallville from May 2021 to June 2022.

Meanwhile, Avshalom-Smith reported that as of 2019, 43 percent of Newhallville children were living in poverty. He cited studies that concluded that youth living in neighborhoods with high poverty levels have higher homicide rates. And that gun violence is directly associated with poverty.

“As an underserved community in the city of New Haven, Newhallville suffers from large-scale social economic and sociocultural process that contribute to gun violence and gun-related deaths,” Avshalom-Smith said. 

Avshalom-Smith said he plans to continue hosting community panels like Thursday’s in the hope of getting people working together, re-establishing neighborhood block watches, and cultivating partnerships to bring financial literacy education, vocational training, and career pathways to Newhallville to help create generational wealth. 

“I want the residents in my community to have the same opportunities as others,” he said. ​“We’re supposed to be tending to those most critically injured and that’s us.”

He described Thursday’s panel as a cry for help to the panel of organizers and leaders.

After an introductory prayer, Avshalom-Smith led the panel discussion with two major questions:

• ​“What are you or your agency doing to address gun violence, with a specific focus on Newhallville?”

• ​“How can we blend prevention strategies in an effort to overcome the tendency within many community service system to operate in silos?”

Panel speakers included Ice the Beef President Chaz Carmon, State Sen. Gary Winfield, State Rep. Robyn Porter, Acting Police Chief Regina Rush-Kittle, Asst. Police Chief Karl Jacobson, top neighborhood cop Lt. Dana Smith, Ward 21 Democratic Co-Chair Raymond Jackson, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal, city Department of Community Resilience Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo, city Health Director Maritza Bond, CT Against Gun Violence (CTAGV) Director Jeremy Stein, CTAGV Community Engagement Coordinator Sean Reeves, CT Violence Intervention Program Director Leonard Jahad, and city Youth Services Specialist Ronald Huggins. 

CTAGV’s Reeves, a lifelong Newhallville resident, recalled losing his 16-year-old son in 2011. A perpetrator of gun violence himself in his youth, Reeves recalled struggling to find support and resources once out on parole in 2004 after three felony convictions. 

“Carpentry was my salvation,” he said.

That hard journey led Reeves to do the grassroots work with youth that he does now. Through CTAGV, he has helped to host listening sessions over the past year targeting the city’s six lowest-income areas to help a create blueprint for the new Office of Violence Prevention. He has offered youth mentorship through the organization he co-founded, S.P.O.R.T Academy. And he informally shares information with neighbors.

“I know what it take to help transform a person. It takes a lot of patience,” Reeves said.

Police officials spoke at the gathering about how the department has revived its shooting task force, doubled efforts to address problem areas like Winchester Avenue and Starr Street, resumed ​“customer notifications visits” to young people most involved in violence in partnership with Project Longevity, hosted gun buybacks, and trained officers to listen and make ​“equitable” decisions to build trust with the community. 

Jacobson, who has been nominated to become the next police chief, said the department is also working on reviving a walking beat in Newhallville. 

This year Lt. Smith worked with Alder Avshalom-Smith to put a no-trespassing order at a problem liquor store in the neighborhood. He is also working with Avshalom-Smith to establishing a loitering ordinance for the city to address local business concerns. He spoke of having special beat patrols make six stops times a day in areas like Winchester, Starr, and Shelton avenues. 

From May 30 to June 30, Lt. Smith reported, police have taken six firearms off the streets in Newhallville. Two were ghost guns, two were reported stolen, one came from a firearm arrest, and one came from an 18-year-old. 

City government’s Dalal, Sosa-Lombardo, Bond, and Huggins reported on prevention efforts over the past year that have been made to provide youth and other New Haven residents with ​“a clear path to opportunity.” 

The Department of Community Resilience is a new part of city government, created to complement law enforcement efforts with social services, Dalal said. 

Sosa-Lombardo reported that the new department is partnering with local organization like Project Longevity, CT Violence Prevention Program, and Project M.O.R.E. on case management and a ​“road of services” to residents for people coming out of prison or in danger of landing there.

“The vision is creating a whole system approach where we bring together stakeholders and agencies to make sure we are targeting the root causes of violence,” Sosa-Lombardo said. 

Bond added that the city is focused on gathering data to avoid reacting and instead prioritize prevention of gun violence through policy change and funding opportunities. 

Huggins defined crime as stemming from two sources: desire and opportunity. 

“While we can’t limit a person’s desire to commit crimes, there are things and programs that they can get involved in that will limit the opportunities that they have to engage in those criminal activities,” he said. 

Huggins highlighted several events, programs, and actives that his office has hosted like summer family fun days; distribution of bicycles (35 over the past year), Ring cameras (30), and winter coats; a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway; youth employment pop-up shops; an LGBTQ+ task force with community engagement; expansion grants to youth service organizations; and expansion of the Youth Connect Program to Newhallville. 

Sen. Winfield said the issue of gun violence can’t be solved with just additional programming or law enforcement. Gun violence must also be addressed through laws and policies that minimize poverty, he said.

“My focus is on how do we change the equation for people before they become the people on the street,” Winfield said. ​“Nobody is born with the desire to go out and commit a crime. They’re born with the desire to survive. They’re born with the desire to be in a community that’s flourishing.” (Click here to read about a shooting that occurred in April outside Winfield’s home on Winchester Avenue.)

Rep. Porter agreed with Winfield that ​“poverty is a policy choice.” 

“This system is not broken. It was designed to do exactly what it’s doing,” she said. 

As a lawmaker, mother, and grandmother, Porter said, she has worked successfully in Hartford to help boost the minimum wage, create a paid family medical leave program, and decrease barriers for the reentry population. 

Carmon reported that, in the face of 6,000 chronically absent students in the district, Ice the Beef knocked on thousands of doors this year to get connected with families and help them obtain food and clothes and help get their kids back to school.

At the conclusion of the event Avshalom-Smith asked that the panel begin collaborating on a strategic plan that will target the root causes of gun violence through financial support, community engagement, and economic development to ​“save” his neighborhood.

Before leading a closing prayer, Rev. Boise Kimber recalled the neighborhood stepping up to clean up the former Mudhole, a notorious drug-dealing spot now reborn as a busy community gathering and programming space known as the Learning Cooridor.

“We are able to clean up where we are today with the help of all of you,” Kimber said. ​“We can do what is right by this community.”