As summer came to a close, with shootings still occurring throughout our neighborhoods and in African-American communities nationally, local organizations were convening to see what if anything could be done to halt the scourge of violence in the Black community. One such group, the South Pittsburgh Coalition for Peace, called an emergency meeting.
The Violence Prevention in South Pittsburgh gathering was a call to action of combined organizations, to begin a dialogue that would turn into action items resulting in the cessation of the violence, peace in communities and healing in the homes and hearts of those impacted by almost daily shootings.
The meeting was held at the Lighthouse Church on Fisher Street on Pittsburgh’s South Side just a week or so following the killing of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., Pastor Maurice Trent, who has led the Church for the past seven years, shared his thoughts about why this location was perfect for this community conversation.
“The Church has to be a major player—we cannot lock our doors and act like the problem exists outside of the body of Christ,” he said. “Families need healing, and as a church we are bound to help facilitate that healing.
“Churches hold the responsibility of bringing the “truth” to young men and women—that the gang, drugs, and killings are NOT glamorous as often presented via the media. The job of the Church is to expose the lie so they can not keeping walking in ignorance,” Pastor Trent added.
He sees the next steps as coming together with the ideas generated from this meeting and putting together an agenda and developing a strategy to effect a redirection of this negative energy.
Reverend Eileen Smith, advisor to the SPCP and a lead convener of this event, shared that this event was their efforts to bring groups with like minded missions to come together to attempt to begin the quest of saving lives, by getting to the root of the problem. Reverend Smith sees as the next steps, an outgrowth of this group.
“This meeting is just the beginning of the community coming together—unified to bring about the change we want for our neighborhoods.”
Fifty-two organizations responded to the call to participate in the conversation which began with a panel discussion of the issues. Panel members included state Representative Jake Wheatley, Pastor Trent and Commander Catherine R. McNeily of Zone Three police. Each panel member shared his/her perspective on the situation in our communities and the audience had the opportunity to share what his/her organization was doing or planning to do to contribute to solutions.
Commander McNeily presented a short power point presentation that generally outlined the number of reported crimes against persons committed in each section of South Pittsburgh; Allentown, Beltzhoover, Bon Air, Carrick, Knoxville, and South Side. Over all it showed that of the measured crimes, the highest were in aggravated assaults; and that between 2013 and 2014 they were slightly increased in 2014 in South Side, a greater increase in Knoxville, were the same for the two years in Carrick, and actually shown a decrease in 2014 in the other sections.
Wheatley, said of his participation, “Whenever there is a community conversation about how to advance the community role in dealing with the violence; I am all for being a part of that discussion; what I know is that the Government alone cannot resolve this issue.
“There are root causes that have more to do with culture than anything else. Too often we instill in our youth that retaliation and basic misbehavior is acceptable, and that low expectations as the norm; this is the culture shift we will have to make if we are to begin to see change in our communities—We can do that better than the government.”
Comments from other participants were as varied as the number of groups represented in the room; some were as follows—“Parents need to be more involved in the lives of their children, if they knew who their children were hanging out with and who the families were, youth would be less likely to get involved in gangs.”
A representative from CeaseFire PA said, “I appreciate what this coalition is trying to do, but there is no magic bullet to keeping the guns off the street. We should be able to go to legislature—the gun laws do need to be changed—gun violence is everyone’s problem, not just disenfranchised neighborhoods.”
Audience members also expressed that part of the problem with providing resources to the community is the duplication of services, there needs to be a clearing house of services so that there is a one stop shop as opposed to so many organizations doing the same thing.
When it was over all concluded that at the end of the day, as a community we can either continue to stand by and watch our youth be snatched from us and our families be devastated by violence, waiting on the city, state or federal government to care enough about us to “fix” us, or we can be proactive in this effort, and embrace the concept that it is “we” who are the change.
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