On June 23, President Joe Biden announced a comprehensive strategy to ensure public safety. To implement his strategy, the president has offered to make available federal law enforcement officials to work with local police agencies to target violent criminals and “keep guns out of the wrong hands.”
Moreover, to address the root causes of crime, the Biden administration will partner with 15 cities, including Baton Rouge, to create community violence intervention (CVI) programs. This collaboration will include a number of philanthropies, which will provide training and technical assistance to identify best practices, integrating proven and innovative public health approaches.
The Biden administration will also provide tools and resources to help address summer violent crime; invest in evidence-based community violence interventions; expand summer programs, employment opportunities and other services and supports for teenagers and young adults; and help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter their communities.
Although New Orleans is not one of the 15 cities in the CVI Collaborative, it's not too late for the city to take action.
Biden is “calling on mayors across the country to follow the lead of these local officials by using their ARP (American Rescue Plan) funding or other public funds to launch and strengthen CVI programs in their communities.”
The administration will allow ARP funding to pay overtime for community policing, community-based anti-violence groups. More importantly for us in New Orleans, cities suffering with high crime will be able to hire more police officers than they had before the pandemic. ARP money can also be used for summer jobs and organizations that intervene with kids before they commit a crime.
Biden has also opened applications for the Justice Department’s FY21 $276 million Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which provides critical support to local governments. In soliciting grant applications for this program, the department recognizes the importance of addressing the backlog of cases caused by COVID-19. The DOJ has made clear funding can also be utilized to facilitate virtual appearances, enhance case management systems, build tools to support diversion and alternatives to incarceration, or even retrofit courthouses to mitigate risks to staff.
In New Orleans, we have an award-winning Reentry Court, Veteran’s Treatment Court, Mental Health Court, Drug Courts, and organizations such as the First 72+ and Workforce Development to form the basis of a CVI.
But it cannot happen unless the mayor, city council, district attorney, public defender’s office, police department, sheriff, judges, mental health professionals, drug addiction experts, education officials, businesses, religious communities and citizens create a holistic public safety policy, with benchmarks and performance measures.
This is what we can do now to fight, reduce and prevent crime.
In an all-hands-on-deck approach, the chief, deputy chiefs, and ranking and non-ranking officers (except those who work in the Homicide Unit, Crime Lab and Evidence Division, Public Integrity Bureau, Recruitment and Application Unit, Professional Standards and Accountability Bureau, and the Police Academy) should deploy to patrol the streets for an immediate impact. This will send a message to the criminals, support the district officers and reassure the community.
Let’s be clear, this deployment of more police officers can only be a temporary Band-Aid. We cannot arrest our way out of the problem. Nor is opening the jailhouse door, without mental health and addiction treatment, the sole answer.
We must also offer universal early childhood learning, summer camps in the neighborhood public schools and a skilled job training center in order to attract companies to locate in New Orleans.
If we provide effective mental health and addiction treatment for nonviolent offenders and opportunities for our children from early childhood to early adulthood, we will save people, enhance academic achievement, increase economic opportunity and reduce and prevent crime.
We don’t have to live like this. We have seen the headlines and TV news. Our children and too many others have felt the pain, sting and loss from violent crime.
Robert Kennedy once said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. ... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.”
If our leaders would lead and join, we can become that “City upon the Hill."
Former Judge Arthur L. Hunter Jr. was a New Orleans police officer. He served in Criminal District Court as chief judge and judge of Mental Health Court, Reentry Court and Veteran’s Treatment Court.
