Guilford County Commissioner Skip Alston didn’t want the Guilford County Board of Commissioners to vote on funding a local Cure Violence program at the board’s Thursday, June 6 meeting – but he sure did want to talk about it.
The commissioners had been scheduled to vote on whether to spend about $250,000 in county money on the program that enlists ex-felons and others with a criminal past to go into designated crime-ridden areas and attempt to bring down violence levels with a message that the potential perpetrators can relate to.
However, just hours before the June 6 meeting, Alston – who no doubt was counting votes and knew he didn’t have enough for passage – pulled the item off the agenda. The other commissioners, who didn’t want a heated drawn-out debate on the matter on a night when the board held a long public hearing on the county budget – agreed to remove Cure Violence from the agenda. It will come back later, likely at the next commissioners meeting on Thursday, June 20.
While that action did save everyone from having the debate on Thursday night, it didn’t keep Alston from voicing his dismay at the fact that the Board of Commissioners wasn’t ready to enter into an agreement with the City of Greensboro, and with the non-profit One Step Further Inc. in order to start up a Cure Violence program in Greensboro. Adding to an already controversial program is the fact that the executive director of One Step Further is City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson. About $400,000 of the $500,000 for the program would be paid to the nonprofit that she heads.
During the commissioners’ comments toward the end of the meeting, Alston passed out a report from the Greensboro Police Department that showed local homicides stats. He then reeled off the race and age of the city’s homicide victims in 2018.
“For age, the first is zero and black, a black 16-year-old, a black 17-year-old, black 19 year old…”
Alston went through 35 victims.
“Of the homicides in Greensboro, 32 out of the 35 were black in 2018,” he summarized.
Alston repeated the same details for the 2019 homicides in Greensboro and said that, of those 17 homicides so far this year, 13 of the victims were black.
He also said there were 532 victims of assaults with firearms in Greensboro injured last year and 387 were black.
“I just wanted you to hear that report, Mr. Chairman,” Alston said, “and the question is: Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?”
The board’s other two African-American commissioners – Carolyn Coleman and Carlvena Foster – also reiterated the importance of Alston’s message that night.
Coleman tied the homicides to the discussion of education funding that was the major theme of the June 6 meeting.
“I can almost assure you that most of them are high school dropouts,” Coleman said of the victims.
Since Alston pulled the item from the June 6 agenda, the question of Cure Violence funding will be addressed later – though it remains highly questionable whether Alston will be able to find the one or two additional votes he needs to get that funding.
This is not new. This has been a problem all along and Skip, Carolyn and every other Afro-American commissioner, including those in the past 24 years knew it was a problem. They knew because I told them as sheriff. I also told them that 70-74 percent of the people in our jail on any given day were Afro-American. Were they listening. I met with the Afro-American leadership including Skip and Carolyn, as well as the church leaders and the NAACP, were they listening. The numbers have not changed for the better, instead they have gotten worse. The problem will not be fixed or even helped by rewarding the bad behavior of the convicted criminals they want to hire for the Cure Violence program, giving them salaries for going into the community to talk with those who would commit violent crimes out of passion, greed or revenge. We would be better served if leaders like Skip and Carolyn would stand up, calling out those who commit these crimes and the community showing their actions are not acceptable, just as two judges did recently while passing judgement on those who committed the crimes. This will cost nothing but a little intestinal fortitude.
Thankyou for having the guts to tell it as it is. They are a problem in the UK too, in exactly the same way.
Not so long ago as I recall, Greensboro City Council spent quite a while lecturing the city police about the imbalance in the number of minority stops and/or arrests vs other races. It seems to me this pretty much explains the intensification of law enforcement in the black community. Where were these facts and figures then? Why do they only acknowledge the truth when they want more “program” money?
Skip Alston read the age and race of each victim. Skip Alston neglected to state the age, race and reason each one of these tragedies occurred. Skip has a one sided view. Skip continues to be negligent and without due regard to include all the information. Skip are the the majority of these crimes black on black? Please tell the rest of the story.
Gang related? Drug related? Why does the high crime community areas protect drug dealers and gang members?
Money would be better spent putting more police in these high crime neighborhoods. Race should not be an issue. City council shall stop worrying about being politically correct and provide your police department with the resources they require to address the increasing violence. Your negligence and irresponsible to the citizens of Greensboro will continue to cost lives.
I’m assuming that Alston didn’t recite the race of each criminal who murdered the victims he named. That wouldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, but it might have pointed out why all the programs he can come up with won’t work.
Really Skip ? You are just now noticing that black youths have a criminal problem?
And you believe throwing more money at the problem will somehow help?
Given the conditions many of those black children are raised in it’s no wonder they are wild.
Their home lives are chaotic and violent with open alcohol and drug abuse. They are treated
as a burden and routinely bounced from dysfunctional household to another.
By the time they are 12 years old they have reached a irredeemable milestone in mental development.
Much of how they view the world is mentally cemented.
Maybe you would just like to band-aid fix this problem with scams like Cure Violence so you can
bridge this problem over to the next generation. The real fix requires a Herculean effort to
interrupt and change the brutal and corrupt culture that has been festering in the black
community for the last 50 years. How you’ve managed to not see this until now is very fascinating.