Community stakeholders address violent crime wave

Published 11:00 am Saturday, December 18, 2021

Fighting violent crime.

It’s something that many residents from all walks of life have vowed to do of late in Milledgeville and Baldwin County. Law enforcement officials are being joined by community groups seeking to put a stop to the violent crime that has impacted the lives of local communities this year.

Several community stakeholders gathered at Milledgeville City Hall on Wednesday night to discuss ways to combat the issue. Among them were elected government leaders, educators, church pastors, business people, members of various community organizations and residents. Members of the law enforcement community met with them, too, including Baldwin County Sheriff Bill Massee and Milledgeville Police Chief Dray Swicord.

They shared a common goal: seeking an end to the violence.

Authorities said nearly 300 crimes, all involving guns and the majority of them drive-by related, have occurred in the city and county thus far this year.

On Tuesday, Milledgeville Mayor Mary Parham Copelan held a press joint press conference at the City Hall with city and county officials.

The mayor said she wanted everyone in the community to know that government leaders and law enforcement authorities are well aware of the ever-growing violent crime rate in the city and county.

“Are we disheartened, yes we are, and if we could change it overnight, we would,” Parham-Copelan told reporters. “Our job, primarily, as elected officials deals with budgets; it deals with local ordinances and how we institute them from our law enforcement (agencies) to carry out. Do we want to continue to stand for this type of behavior in Milledgeville and Baldwin County — no, we do not.”

The mayor said she and other local government officials, along with law enforcement officials, want to send a clear message.

“We want this type of behavior to be curtailed,” Parham-Copelan said. “We want people to feel like they can come out of their homes and sit on their porch or go shopping or whatever they choose to do in our community. This has always been a quiet community, a nice place to work, live and play.”

 Baldwin County Commissioner Henry Craig said the community’s local governments were prepared to try and find whatever resources that law enforcement authorities need — be it money or political will — to drastically reduce crime.

“But more than anything else, I think what we need is the help of our community,” Craig said. “We need our community to help us determine who are the lawbreakers. We need families to take care of their kids. We need community (people) to encourage kids to do the right thing and to report them if they are doing the wrong thing. It’s very important that we work together to get through this.”

On Wednesday night, Massee and Swicord addressed stakeholders.

Massee said he and Swicord have several major investigations ongoing, but he could not discuss them in detail.

He also talked about the need for those in the community to help them.

“We know what we’re going to do,” Massee said. “We’ve got active investigations going and we’re going to make arrests. But we’ve got a lot of people in the community who have some other ideas and things that we need to be doing other than law enforcement.”

The sheriff said there have been more than 80 shootings in the county this year alone.

“We are extremely lucky that we have not had a large number of deaths to go along with this,” Massee said. “We’ve been blessed or lucky.”

The police chief, meanwhile, said police officers and detectives had investigated more than180 shooting incidents within the city limits thus far this year.

Swicord noted the recent shooting on the campus of Renaissance Park at Central State Hospital involving the occupants of two vehicles shooting at one another amid more than 300 guests attending an event in the Pecan Grove.

The guests were part of a group of parents whose children are now attending Georgia College as freshmen. None of them were injured in the exchange of gunfire.

Cynthia Ward-Edwards, executive director of Communities In Schools of Milledgeville-Baldwin County and president of the local NAACP branch, called the latest stakeholders’ gathering as a strategy meeting.

“Just know that this is a strategy meeting tonight, it’s not so much a question and answer meeting because we don’t have all the answers yet,” Ward-Edwards said. “The people that are in the room tonight, you represent Milledgeville-Baldwin County. You are our leaders here in Milledgeville and Baldwin County. Everyone in Milledgeville and Baldwin County looks up to us, you. We’ve got to do something. We may not have all the answers, but I think the people who have most of the answers are here in this room.”

Ward-Edwards said the problem is bigger than just the number of shootings that have occurred this year.

“We’ve got bigger issues that stem from how we take care of getting these gangs, these people off the streets from these shootings,” Ward-Edwards said.

Baldwin County School Superintendent Dr. Noris Price also attended the stakeholders’ meeting.

She leads a public school system that has nearly 5,000 students.

“The majority of our kids come to the school every day to do the right thing,” Price said. “And that is to learn. So, we have a very small percentage of our kids that have challenging behaviors and make poor choices or decide that they don’t want to finish their education and end up dropping out. And those are the students who end up getting in trouble and into the juvenile justice system.”

One of the biggest issues is poverty, she pointed out.

“And we have to own up to that,” Price said. “This is a wonderful community, a retirement community, and it has so much to offer. But we have a poverty issue in our community.”

She described it as generational poverty.

“And when you have poverty, you have lack of hope,” Price said. “And when you have lack of hope, you resort to things that normally you and I would not do. And so, you have that and you have gang members that are taking advantage of the fact that you have people that are desperate, desperate for money, desperate to buy things, and getting involved in selling drugs or other crimes is a quick way to make money.”

Price said children in the community must be shown the value of an education.

“And I’ve said it over and over again, the only way we’re going to get break the cycle of poverty in this community is through education,” Price said. “All of us in this community have to wrap our arms around every single child in this community. We own every single child in this community and we have to come together and make sure first of all that they get a quality education, graduate from high school and have options.”

Price said those options are limited in this community, especially when it comes to jobs.

“So, what are we going to do as a community to make sure that our young people have options,” Price asked. “We have to have more after-school activities. We do the best we can in our school district. We go after grants. We have after-school programs for our pre-K kids all the way through 12 grade.”

 Some students are not involved in any of those programs. Instead, they go home to empty homes — to places where there is no supervision, the school superintendent said.

“And if they don’t have anything to take up their time, they’re going to figure out a way to entertain themselves,” Price said. “And there are folks out there that see that and are able to attract our kids to do things that they know they shouldn’t be doing.”