By Tom St. Myer
Gun violence served as the entry point, but a roundtable consisting primarily of elected officials expanded into a broad conversation about Black-on-Black crime, fatherless households, mental health, socioeconomic issues, and the negative influence of social media and video games.
Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons organized the gun violence roundtable Tuesday night in the Brownsville Community Center in the wake of a deadly shooting earlier this month at Bellview Athletic Park. The roundtable attracted about 100 community members and included three county commissioners, two state representatives, a state senator and a city councilman.
Simmons opened the roundtable discussion by citing statistics related to o 25 homicides currently being investigated or already cleared by the Sheriff’s Office. He said the homicides were predominantly Black males killing Black males in poor neighborhoods.
Commissioner Lumon May said Black-on-Black crime is a longstanding problem with no easy solutions. He noted that more Black people were killed at the hands of a fellow Black person in 1977 in the U.S. than the number of soldiers who died during the entirety of the Vietnam War.
May spoke in favor of incentivizing employment opportunities, particularly for young adults who grow up in low-income families. He said low-income children grow up without the proper tools to succeed and that falls on the elected officials to figure out how to provide those to them. His words motivated the crowd to respond with applause.
“I agree with what he said 100%,” said Hassan Hills, a reformed drug dealer who founded the nonprofit Youths Left Behind after his release from federal custody. “At the end of the day, you can put 100 programs in place, you can say 100 things we need to do, but the root of the problem is we have to go into those communities that are considered risky behavior, high crime, underserved, low income and give these young adults the opportunity and show them a more excellent way.”
Fellow Commissioner Jeff Bergosh recommended finding means to incentivize families to stay together. He said 40% of children grow up without a father in the household.
“If you’re born in a house without a dad, the deck is stacked against you,” Bergosh said.
Dr. Michael Roberts lent an educator perspective to the roundtable. Roberts serves as the middle school director of Escambia County Public Schools. He said children today are desensitized to violence from playing popular shooter video games and that their violent tendencies are detectable as early as pre-kindergarten.
Simmons plans to hold another roundtable discussion with the same panelists by no later than January. At the recommendation of Bergosh, Simmons asked each panelist to email him short-term and long-term goals as they begin to craft an action plan.
Hills suggested that Simmons expand and form a second roundtable that includes those directly impacted by poverty.
“I’m hoping that at the next roundtable, we can get more people from the community, the low-income, urban community, to be a part of this,” he said. “I’d like the panel that was there to be at the roundtable, but for them to design another roundtable for those in the urban community, underserved in high-crime areas, and bring them to the roundtable and figure out what can we do to make things better for you.”
Local law enforcement has yet to arrest anyone in the murder of 22-year-old Kaderrick Teamer. According to Simmons, two men wearing masks gunned down Teamer and injured another man while a youth football game was being played nearby at the Bellview Athletic Park.
Simmons spoke at the roundtable about local law enforcement investing more in technology to prevent and reduce crime. He estimated the county will utilize a real-life crime center within 6-12 months.
A real-time crime center is a state-of-the-art hub that enables analysts to merge information gleaned from street cameras, body and dash-mounted cameras, license plate readers, integrated computer-aided dispatch systems and police-operated drones, among other technology. The information is overlaid onto a mapping system and immediately relayed to officers.
“I’ve already identified the location and some of the funding sources,” Simmons said. “We have to make sure we get the right one. We’ve isolated a program. To move forward, we’re going to get some bids and make sure that’s the right one.”
According to FDLE numbers, there have been 416 murders in Escambia County between 1999 and 2020. The annual average works out to be 19 but the number fluctuates all over the place from 8 in 1999 to 32 in 2020. FDLE has yet to release the 2021 numbers. It would be interesting for Sheriff Simmons to report at the next meeting who killed whom in the murders that we do know about. I think the problem is more than just young Black males in poor, single parent families led by mothers killing each other. Of the seven murders I know about in recent years within about a mile of my home, only one was a Black male killing a Black male, a drug related killing. I also know of a young Black woman who lived in Scenic Heights but was killed outside of the city. From what I was told about her by those who knew her from Washington H.S. it seems highly improbable that she was involved with drugs. In the end, there are two statistics that need to be explained. First, why has Escambia County’s per capita crime rate risen from #35 (2000) in the state to #3 (2020) with the 2021 yet to be released by FDLE? Second, why has the City of Pensacola’s per capita crime rate been above the state average every year after 2001? Blaming poor, Black mothers in single parent families is not the answers.