Just before the end of the school year for many Cleveland-area students, the city and Cuyahoga County laid out plans for stemming summer violence.
Those plans include creating a new office of violence prevention, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne said at a news conference Thursday. For now, the office will have one employee, an administrator. That person would serve as the county’s liaison with grassroots groups, faith leaders, law enforcement and others who work to reduce violent crime.
The new office isn’t meant to duplicate work already being done by nonprofits that try to interrupt violent confrontations or offer summer jobs and activities for young people.
“We’re not here to reinvent any wheels,” Ronayne said. “We’re here to bring wheels together, to connect what’s already working and make sure the entire community knows what’s available.”
The job opening is already posted online. There is no salary range listed. Ronayne said he hopes to fill the position by the summer. The funding for the position will come from the county’s public safety budget, he said. Although the violence prevention office will start with one person, Ronayne said he aims to hire more staff in the future.
Thursday’s news conference drew dozens of people — including public officials, violence intervention activists, nonprofit representatives and law enforcement — to Martin Luther King Jr. recreation center in East Cleveland.
Among the speakers was Nancy Mendez, the CEO of the nonprofit Starting Point. She said her organization had launched a new website, afterschoolfinder.org, to help parents and guardians find out-of-school programs for their children.
Homicide numbers in Cleveland have been on the downswing since a pandemic-era spike — falling from 188 in 2020 to 127 last year, according to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office data shared with Cleveland City Council.
“Behind every number, there is a name, there is a story,” said County Council Member Michael Houser, who represents East Cleveland, part of Cleveland’s northeast side and a few other East Side suburbs.
Houser described the county’s new office as a “promise” that the county will not accept violence.
“Violence is a public health emergency, a neighborhood sustainability challenge and one of the most pressing human rights crises of our time,” he said. “But I believe we can reduce violence. We can save lives.”
Cleveland eyes violence ‘hot spots’ and sends a message on street takeovers
Earlier this week, Mayor Justin Bibb said he plans to focus City Hall’s attention on parts of town where there’s more violence crime. He and Police Chief Dorothy Todd answered questions about the city’s summer safety plans at a news conference Tuesday.
“There’s a small portion of our city that’s responsible for a majority of violent crime,” Bibb said. “We’ve identified those hot spots and we’re going to be doing neighborhood walks in those hot spots. We’ll have targeted law enforcement in those hot spots.”
That means more than just having police focus on those places. It also means asking every department to tend to quality-of-life issues there, installing speed tables, fixing potholes, clearing illegal dump sites and mowing vacant lots, he said.
Bibb said that city staff with iPads will walk through neighborhoods this summer, filing 311 reports on resident complaints about city services.
Police will also work alongside the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies, Todd said. The city is again drawing on the help of the Ohio Highway Patrol for traffic enforcement.
Asked how the city planned to respond to drivers who spin their tires and do donuts in intersections, Todd drew a distinction between car meetups and street takeovers.
She described meetups as social events in which people show off cars and spin tires, but don’t take over streets. While meetups cause a disturbance, participants usually leave once police arrive to break things up, she said.
Takeovers, on the other hand, are “complete lawlessness,” Todd said. Police arrested 17 people on felony charges in connection with takeovers last September, she said.
“We’re going to be very aggressive that this nuisance, problematic behavior is not acceptable in the city of Cleveland,” Bibb added, “and as we saw with the arrest from the street takeover in September of last year, we use the full weight of the law to hold those accountable, and we’ll do the same thing if those happen this summer as well.”
