CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — In Cleveland Heights, the mayor is calling for gun violence intervention in his community after seeing two shootings in the first eight days of 2024, but some groups are already doing it.
The first took the life of a 15-year-old girl on New Year’s Day, then three days later, a 22-year-old man was shot and killed.
Vincent Evans spends his days trying to prevent violence among youth.
“Our day-to-day basis is basically getting on both sides of the gun, the perpetrator as well as the victim,” said Evans, an outreach worker for Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance.
For four years, he's worked with the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance, where they go to high schools and talk to students about guns, safety awareness and better ways to handle situations.
“We try to do this to let people know, guns are not safe, they don't make you safe. Guns don't make you safe, it is a false sense of security,” said Evans.
Oronde East was a teacher in Philadelphia who moved to Cleveland to work with the Safe Passage which is also a preventive program that’s sponsored by CMSD schools.
“We mainly have a presence in and around the building and make sure that children who may feel threatened or may not feel safe, they have someone that they can speak to,” said East.
For East, he learned from years of teaching that violence intervention in schools is essential for students to learn successfully and safely.
“So, if students bring certain issues from the home or the community inside a classroom, and those issues are not resolved, then teaching can't take place,” said East.
The areas they work include cities like Cleveland Heights, where Mayor Kahlil Seren sent a letter to residents to talk about the rise in gun violence, writing the following:
"It has been a difficult week. Within the first four days of 2024, we had as many homicides in our city as we had in all of 2022 and 2023.”
The mayor then went on to say there needs to be a focus on reducing the violence, especially among the youth. Evans and East believe that violence is due to a few factors, including social media and the lack of safe spaces.
“For one, there's a lack of communication among the youth and adults and we need to bridge that gap,” said East.
“When we look at it now, we have a generation especially in impoverished communities, social media is definitely responsible for a lot of the things that we're seeing,” said Evans.
Seren adds they have $400,000 in grant funding that they plan to aim toward violence prevention, but Evans says that’s just one piece of the solution.
“We need more support. We need more people. We need more outreach workers, more violence interrupters, more mentors, more case managers that will go into these communities and make a difference and have real impact. That's all we want, real change,” said Evans.
East adds that it'll take a village to make neighborhoods and schools safer.
“The solution is in one word is unity. Putting the ego to the side, organizations, and community leaders, activists, working together on the same foot to save our children and sunlight in our community,” said East.
RELATED: 15-year-old girl found dead inside Cleveland Heights home; 14-year-old suspect turns himself in
Watch previous coverage of the violence in Cleveland Heights below:
