Nate Monroe: Gun violence, politics, and Jacksonville's terrible truth
COMMENTARY | Unimaginable, unthinkable: a 13-year-old boy — a child, Prince Holland; what a gorgeous name — shot dead Saturday on the way home from football practice. Caught in a drive-by. A senseless, crushing death.
Except it's all quite imaginable, utterly thinkable, senseless in its rendering but clinically sensible in its construction, crushing in its finality for this young life and crushing because it will surely happen again in this city. Holland is the 11th kid 17 or younger killed this year. And remember Kearria Addison? Tashawn Gallon? Heidy Rivas Villanueva? Aiden McClendon? They are the tragedies of recent years past filed away in the record books like our city's own haunting Advent calendar.
The press conference Monday felt almost perfunctory. "Jacksonville will not, and I repeat will not, tolerate violence for one more day," one city leader thundered.
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But: won't we?
The killing and maiming of children and teenagers due to gun violence is such a routine occurrence in Jacksonville it has warped our politics and, I fear, changed our hardwiring in even deeper, more meaningful ways than that. The heart aches and the head falters: what more can be said?
Death of DreShawna Davis spurs change
It wasn't always this way: in 2006, the death of 8-year-old DreShawna Davis — killed by a stray bullet while she was watching a movie in the home where she lived with her grandmother — prompted then-Mayor John Peyton, a new father at the time, to launch a locally unprecedented multi-million dollar suite of prevention and intervention programs with buy-in from Duval County Schools and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. He dubbed this mammoth effort the Jacksonville Journey. Its list of programs was dizzying. There was money aimed at boosting literacy rates, reducing truancy and dropout rates, expanding after-school programs, propping up concepts like neighborhood accountability boards, creating rehabilitation programs for ex-offenders, and budgeting more money for traditional policing efforts, all under a large but coordinated umbrella of city staffers and dedicated volunteers.
These days, people talk about the Jacksonville Journey as if it's part of a glorious but inaccessible past, perhaps the consolidated county-city government at its most efficient, compassionate, powerful best. The community buy-in the Journey got, the enlistment of people across the ideological spectrum, the commitment of resources, the damn sense of purpose — all lacking in our benighted present.
Today, we are balkanized and leaderless, our sprawling municipal government weak and unresponsive. Mayor Lenny Curry is termed out and his would-be successors are waiting in the wings; the sheriff, T.K. Waters, won a special election last month to fill out a term that expires in just a few months before he must run again; the School Board has had a fraught relationship with City Hall for years; and the superintendent, Diane Greene, has long been viewed suspiciously by the pro-charter donors who write the biggest checks in city campaigns.
And the Jacksonville Journey? Gone.
It was a noble effort but one even its biggest backers have come to realize was flawed. At the last moment, Peyton backed away from a push to create a sustainable funding source to ensure its continued existence. He didn't, in other words, pursue a dedicated tax to pay for all these innovative programs. So the millions he budgeted, the buy-in he won, the drop in homicides in the succeeding years many credit to the underwriting of so many prevention-and-intervention programs? The most charitable story is that it all got rebranded. In truth, the Journey — the aspirations its authors had of it, and the civic energy that gave it life — vanished.
It vanished because new mayors have new priorities, and the Peyton administration was two mayoral administrations and one Great Recession ago.
Jacksonville underfunds, underthinks and under-develops anti-violence programs
This lack of continuity from one mayoral administration to the next is a common criticism of Jacksonville's consolidated county-city government. I also imagine this is the sort of thing that sounds and feels pretty abstract. What does that mean? What it means is this: the city underfunds, underthinks and under-develops all the kinds of programs aimed at reducing gun violence in the city — all except for police spending. That has exploded in recent years, even as annual homicide numbers have reached decades-long highs. But the rest? Every four or eight years, Jacksonville takes a hard reset. No sustained funding means every program relies upon the generosity of the mayor and City Council year after year.
Abstraction: that's another problem, isn't it? The city is so geographically large — the largest by area in the contiguous United States — that the immense concentration of gun violence in just a handful of the more than 30 ZIP codes within the city limits obscures the immediacy of all this. To someone who lives off San Pablo, or in Atlantic Beach or Nocatee, perhaps the 5700 block of Moncrief Road may as well be Oakland instead of, possibly, the street your kid's little league teammate calls home. Maybe you're stretched thin with work and family and bills and taxes and the government and inflation and in-laws and whatever else — and it's all just noise and abstraction and a different part of town and the culture and absentee fatherhood and what do you want from me anyway?
I don't know how to fix this. It seems, at one time, it didn't need fixing. The Jacksonville Journey happened. People bought in. Our leaders bought in. Things were going to change. We were going to wrap our hands around this — until, of course, we didn't. Time slipped away. Political capital got spent. People got elected. Priorities changed, the world moved on. We got comfortable.
And then more kids died.
So we live with our status quo because we know no other way to live, and our leaders tell us we are done with the violence and we won't tolerate it and it's not who we are.
And maybe we delude ourselves into believing those insipid lies because confronting the truth about what we are willing to tolerate — acknowledging the bargain we've actually made, and speaking out loud the terrible price it exacts from all of us — is simply too much to bear.
Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Gun violence, politics, and Jacksonville's terrible truth shooting
