Columbus looks to future after year of unrest

In August, Carrie Strickland sensed a dark cloud hovering over her North Highland neighborhood.

Tamir Harris, 33, had just been killed not far from Truth Spring Academy, where Strickland serves as board chair. It was the third homicide in Columbus over a three-day period, and the latest in a string of criminal activity in the area.

“Like seasons of life, there are seasons in a neighborhood,” Strickland told the Ledger-Enquirer at the time. “There are seasons of calm and then you have seasons of unrest, and I would say that this would be a season of unrest for North Highland.”

Strickland’s sentiments were shared by many Columbus residents in 2017, and not just in the North Highland neighborhood. As the year progressed, a sense of unrest seemed to permeate the city, which appeared trapped in a year-long cycle of violence, including revenge killings among young black men.

By year’s end, the Columbus Police Department had reported 35 homicides being investigated as murders — 63 percent of the victims in their 20s or younger.

Add to that the heated community debate over how to address the growing alternative education population at Muscogee County public schools —as well as the death of a 17-year-old Columbus foster girl found slain on an Atlanta roadway — and a picture emerges of a society in which many local youths are falling through the cracks.

Now, as we enter 2018, the question is: What can be done to address the problem moving forward?

“It has certainly been an interesting year when you look at statistics and the challenges in our community,” said United Way President and CEO Scott Ferguson, whose organization raises millions of dollars each year for local nonprofit agencies. “... I would think that a lot of it may be connected to our high poverty rate and people who don’t have any hope.

“I do believe the programs that we fund, especially the youth programs — many of them after school prevention programs — are helping with this disconnection that many of the youth of today feel. But it is one child at a time, and how do you accelerate that?”

Mayor Teresa Tomlinson said what Columbus experienced in 2017 is not unique to the city, but part of systemic socioeconomic problems that America’s urban centers have struggled with for decades.

“If you’re going to cut across everything from foster care, to special needs students, to crime, you’re talking about the unraveling of the social fabric that has been going on for probably 40 years, since the late ’70s, early ’80s,” she said in a recent interview with the Ledger-Enquirer.

She said some of it is due to the suburbanization that occurred in previous years, as the public and private sectors divested in urban centers and invested in the outer rings of cities across the nation.

One of the biggest challenges that leaders face is people wanting to fix a complex problem by narrowing it to one solution, Tomlinson said, referring to frequent calls for more police officers, better educators and faith-based activities, for example. But many leaders have come to realize that the situation is multifaceted and simple solutions won’t work, she added.

“We are only just now learning as a national community how to deal with issues of poverty and all that it touches, and that includes crime, education, workforce, mental health and physical health,” she said. “It requires a financial infrastructure that is much in debate politically as to whether we as a people are going to invest in that.”

The city is making progress, the mayor added.

“ ... I think we’re seeing, now, this effective partnership, in Columbus anyway, where we do all pitch in,” she said. “We have more mentorship programs than we’ve ever had. We have more partnerships between the school board and Parks and Rec, for instance, and neighborhood associations and law enforcement officers. So we’re starting to get the hang of it, but I think few people have a true appreciation for the complexity of the social unraveling that we’re now trying to mend.”

When it comes to the number of murders in Columbus this year, Tomlinson said, the community has a right to be outraged, but people should also take action.

“... When you talk about retaliatory murders, that goes right to the heart of the anti-snitch culture, to the lack of the faith in the justice system that some people grapple with, and we need to heal those things as a broader community,” she said, “or we won’t get the right people where they need to be, which is off the streets where they’re endangering others and, frankly, becoming a danger to themselves.”

Columbus 2025 is one local initiative launched by the Chamber of Commerce to help address many of the problems that the city is grappling with from a socioeconomic perspective. A group of the city’s most prominent leaders unveiled the plan in January of 2017 as an effort to spur economic growth and increase prosperity in the region.

The plan focuses on five action areas: targeted economic growth, talented and educated people, enterprising culture, vibrant and connected places, and cohesive image and identity. Committees have been set up to implement each segment of the plan, and the results will be evaluated based on a series of baseline, best-practice metrics.

Leading the effort are Billy Blanchard, partner and board member of Jordan-Blanchard Capital; Audrey Tillman, executive vice president and general counsel at Aflac; Jackie Lowe, a retired Georgia Power executive; and Jimmy Yancey, retired chairman of Synovus.

Muscogee County School Superintendent David Lewis, who sat on the Columbus 2025 steering committee, said he believes education is a big part of the solution, but schools can’t do it alone. He believes the public-private partnership developing in Columbus is a move in the right direction.

“As I say frequently, schools are microcosms of society,” he said. “And everything that’s happening, good or bad in the community, comes into the schools as well. We are seeing children with more intense and more frequent social-emotional issues that we are trying to address through our Project Aware grant and trying to provide more mental health identification and wrap-around services. And often times you see the social-emotional issues result in acting out and behavioral issues.”

In 2017, Lewis faced strong opposition from parents and other concerned citizens when he proposed hiring Camelot Education, a private, for-profit company based in Austin, Texas, to run three alternative education programs for $6.4 million annually, serving students with severe emotional or behavioral problems, severe discipline code violations and those who are over-age and under-credited.

In May, the school board rejected the controversial recommendation by a one-vote margin, and an alternative education committee was formed to research the issue. The committee developed a report that recommended against hiring an outside provider.

In a recent interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, Lewis said 2017 was a tough year for the city, and providing a better future for the city’s youths will require all hands on deck

“This is an issue that needs to be addressed in combination with the home, the community and schools,” he said. “To me, it’s similar to the metaphor of a three-legged stool, and if any of those is weakened, then it weakens the whole structure.”

He mentioned the RiverCenter Readers program as an example of community involvement in the schools, as well as wrap-around services that many nonprofits are providing for school children. Such services include clothes closets at local high schools and a Mercy Med of Columbus medical program at Fox Elementary School. The superintendent says he’s also planning to work with local dentists because dental care is the No. 1 reason why children miss school.

Lewis said it’s also important that parents get more involved in their children’s education, bringing them to school on time so they can be there for reading classes, and preparing them for learning before they even reach school age.

“In my opinion, from birth to age five, that’s the foundational, critical period that’s important for all the efforts to be focused on from the standpoint of communities, schools and family, working collaboratively,” he said. “There are enough areas where we can all pull together, and we’re seeing some of that now in the school system. But it’s going to take a community effort and working, particularly, at the early childhood level.”

The Rev. Ralph Huling is president of the Interdenominational Alliance, which helped lead a mock funeral procession down Veteran’s Parkway one day in September to denounce “vigilante killings” in the black community. Nine funeral directors participated in the event.

Last week, in an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, Huling said the organization remains concerned about the level of violence in 2017.

“One of the things that I surmised is that we’ve got to do more economically for our city,” he said. “A desperate people are a hopeless people. So we’ve got to level the economic playing field in our city and we’ve got to do more as far as encouraging parents to be parents and bringing back a level of civility where we care about one another. That is citywide, and we have to get rid of the north/south divide.”

Huling said ministers have already begun speaking with local politicians and state representatives about ways to address the problem.

“They realize if we’re going to attract business, if the playing field is ever going to become level, we’ve got to do something about the crime,” he said. “They’re just as concerned as we are.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2017 at 3:53 PM with the headline "Columbus looks to future after year of unrest."