On June 26, 2016, a 15 year old young man was shot in the arm in the area of 27th and Moore Sts in Wilmington. He was taken to the hospital and I presume he is recovering. You would be forgiven if you read that and thought that this is the normal flow of criminal activity in Wilmington. This young man was the 500th victim of a shooting in Wilmington since Mayor Dennis Williams took office.
500.
You can look at it as .7% of Wilmington’s population (I used 70,000) being directly victimized by gun violence. I couldn’t begin to guess at how many others are indirectly victimized — parents, siblings, children, neighbors who are directly traumatized by this violence. We already know that we don’t have enough resources to help these people through this trauma, so the effects of this violence go in Wilmington’s Violence Bank so that some of these folks experiencing this trauma — the sheer normalcy of this trauma — will certainly resort to this same violence when given the opportunity in a few years.
It’s completely heartbreaking. Because the thing Wilmingtonians know, is that while this Mayor came into office on a wave of belligerent assurance that everything will be different soon, this Mayor is now utterly overwhelmed by this problem. Overwhelmed enough to where he won’t appear in a public debate to account for his record. Overwhelmed enough to not accept money from the AGs office to help fund foot patrols because he doesn’t want to account for how the WPD is actually deployed. Overwhelmed enough essentially eliminate the Community Policing unit at the WPD, now demanding that neighborhood leaders who want to discuss their crime issues present themselves at meetings at the new Data Center where you won’t be able to establish a relationship with your local officers. Overwhelmed enough to just give lip service to the recommendations of the Wilmington Public Safety Commission in hopes that no one will know that management at WPD hasn’t changed. Overwhelmed enough to ignore the fact that the Cease Violence program is virtually invisible and mainly ineffective across the city. Overwhelmed enough to be MIA in asking landlords to stop being slumlords. Overwhelmed enough to ignore the Wilmington residents and businesses who are desperate for leadership and a solution for this crisis. Overwhelmed enough to create videos with Pastor D to ask kids to stop shooting — a decidedly pathetic effort which assumes that any of these kids think Mayor Williams has any credibility here, much less that anyone will see that video. (Wish I could link to this.)
When Williams was inaugurated, he told the crowd that if he couldn’t solve the City’s crime problem he “didn’t need this seat”. I’ve included the video again in this post. You don’t have believe me — the man says it directly.
Time to take Mayor Williams at his word and make sure he does not get another 4 years as the most ineffective Mayor in recent memory. We can’t afford another 500 shootings and we can’t afford a Mayor who doesn’t have the backbone or the energy to help his own community. We can’t afford another Mayor who is going to be stuck in the usual limited solutions that characterize what passes for leadership in Wilmington — eternally mired in what and who we know rather than doing the work to learn something about best practices and getting them implemented, no matter what your cronies think. Time to break up the status quo that is suffocating us — which is why I am going to vote for Eugene Young.
