With the end of 2021 approaching, the City of Peoria soon will close the book on one of its most violent and deadly years in recent memory.
The city has budgeted $1.3 million of funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) over each of the next two years to go toward anti-violence efforts.
Mayor Rita Ali says the city is collaborating with community leaders to develop strategies and programs to address Peoria's gun violence scourge.
She talks with reporter Joe Deacon about how they intend to use the anti-violence funding to make a real impact on community safety. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Joe Deacon: How does the city plan to use the ARPA money that has been budgeted toward anti violence efforts over the next two years?
Mayor Rita Ali: We've been, through the Safety Network, we've been exploring various ideas, researching evidence-based initiatives that have taken place and proven to be successful in other cities across the nation. We've explored proposals or suggestions made by organizations (and) individuals, so that we can get some idea of kind of the taste or flavor of what Peorians think is best for this area. This has included many leaders in the community weighing in on what has worked in the past (and) what has not worked, looking at the target population that's been involved in the shootings, who are the victims.
So we've had proposals similar to CeaseFire, that has been taking place in Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, and other mostly larger urban areas, but also Decatur, Illinois, had a successful CeaseFire program. CeaseFire is also called Cure Violence; that was kind of the elevated name that was used by that initiative, but it's all the same. But it calls for intervention.
We need street intervention. We need interventionists. We need case management. We need youth support: wraparound support and development for our young people who are getting involved. We need early intervention. We need prevention. So there's a lot of different elements.
We had Chris Patterson here from the (Illinois) Department of Human Services, appointed by the governor to be kind of the state lead on gun violence prevention. He was here, brought by leader (State Rep. Jehan) Gordon-Booth. Really, we are so much in line with what they're asking for, and Jehan acknowledged that we've really got a head start and (are) very much aligned with what they're asking for.
So what we're going to do is put together an RFP (request for proposal) for the local money, something that probably aligns also with the state initiative so that we're all in sync and working together in collaboration. There's no organization that can do everything, so it has to be a collaboration for the state money as well as for the local ARPA money that we're going to use.
Discussions and committee meetings, those are all one thing. But people want to hear about actual, concrete steps. What actions are planned? Where's the money going and what does it fund?
Ali: So again, there's going to be a strategy that's introduced through the request for proposal process, and it's going to say, “we need to target these areas.” We need street intervention. We need youth outreach, development, after-school programming, perhaps some in-school type programming as well. That intervention with the families, the wraparound support. The money will go in several different areas. But again, it takes a collaboration of community resources to really make it work.
The recommendation language calls for “community violence programs that have been proven to be effective at reducing violence” — and that is pretty broad. So what does that mean? I mean, can you define it or give us some more examples?
Ali: Again, when I say “case management,” when I say “street outreach,” I mean looking at those individuals that have been involved or potentially are going to be involved in the violence. We have a list — school District 150 has a list — of over 124 kids that are potentially at risk of getting involved in violent events. We need to get mentoring and intervention for those kids right away, or they're going to be … many can be lost to the streets. So wrapping support around — that's a youth intervention area that needs to be applied.
Then we have the support for some of the families that have already had someone involved in either being a victim or a perpetrator of gun violence, and they have other siblings that are very likely to get involved. So we have to wrap support around that family (and) try to make sure that those young people are redirected, those families are getting the support that they need to sometimes protect them, but sometimes to prevent further involvement and gun violence prevention.
And we also need to figure out how to get these guns off the street. There's illegal guns throughout our community, and we have to find a way to reduce the access and availability of those guns.
That was actually going to be my next question. What kinds of proactive steps can the city take to reduce the number of illegal guns on the streets?
Ali: There's been different strategies that have been practiced. Certainly, (the police have) been accessing … weekly, they've been keeping up with how many guns they're collecting; we're seeing an increase in the number of guns that we're collecting. But on the back end, there's also more guns coming into our community, and those come from stolen guns through either burglary, home invasions, stealing them from cars — because sometimes people leave the guns unlocked in their vehicle — and then the burglarizing of gun shops. We don't know … maybe the police know more detail in terms of where they're coming from in terms of other cities, but there are guns coming in our community from other areas.
It seems to me like one of the issues is that people aren't accepting what the repercussions of their actions may be ... whether it's robberies or shootings and things like that. How do we get people to start realizing that they have real consequences to their actions?
Ali: One, we have to catch the people who are committing the homicides, and we have to be more proactive. We have to use more tools in order to do that. So we are using more tools in terms of security in street lights, camera surveillance, license plate detection — broader surveillance, in terms of maybe identifying a car, maybe a person involved in the crime. The more cameras that we can get out there, and especially in the high crime area, the more likely we're going to catch the criminals.
So, I would say there's a very small percent of the population that's committing these crimes. If we can be more successful at catching these criminals, we're going to deter the others from getting involved because they're going to be locked away for a long, long time.
