Several city board members, community leaders, and organizations from across Columbia met at City Hall Wednesday evening to discuss the progress of Mayor McDavid’s Community Violence Task Force. City Council Member Michael Trapp said the city was spurred on to create the task force in August of 2013 after several violent, high-publicity gun crimes in May of 2012 in order to combat and prevent violent crimes in Columbia.
Wednesday’s open forum provided attendees the opportunity to comment on the recommendations the task force made to city council members and the status of their implementation.
“Laura Nauser, a city councilperson had a longstanding recommendation to have a task force or commission in regards to youth violence in Columbia,” Trapp said. “So I echoed that call at a press conference that city council had and the mayor made the suggestion that Laura Nauser and I co-chair the mayor’s Task Force on Community Violence with 13 citizens of diverse backgrounds to explore and understand violence in Columbia and come back with recommendations.”
Beginning in 2013, the task force compiled a report of, over the course of 15 months, of recommendations it provided to the city council to better combat violence in Columbia.
There was some confusion regarding the agenda for the meeting, and whether more emphasis should be put on reviewing the material of the report or discussing what is currently being done to address the violence. On Monday of last week a status update on the task force recommendations was given in a city council meeting. Some attendees held strong opinions on what should be focused on more.
“Violence moves through communities in much the manner that disease patterns do,” Trapp said. “So I would like to see the health department take a proactive role in bringing their community health experience to assimilate research to come up with a model that would work in Columbia in the form of violence interruption programs.”
Not everyone at the open forum was pleased with the creation of the task force report at Wednesday’s meeting.
“I think that the document itself is not a good document and it’s not what the people were expecting, which was ‘what are you doing in regards to the recommendations, and so each one of these items is like a homework assignment, and that’s not what people wanted,” Traci Wilson-Kleekamp, an activist for the group Race Matters said.
Wilson-Kleekamp said better communication between the city government and the organizations involved in the task force may better address the recommendations in the task force report. She also said many of their programs should be targeted to areas that are struggling. The task force plans on having future meetings and forums to address these concerns but none are currently scheduled.