CINCINNATI — The effort to address youth violence in downtown Cincinnati is being called the largest collaboration effort in 20+ years by council member Scotty Johnson, the Cincinnati Police Department and other youth violence advocates.
It comes one month after videos surfaced of teens attacking individuals in Government Square and Fountain Square.
“Going downtown to Fountain Square every day has taught me a lot about our youth,” Michelle Robinson told council members Wednesday morning. “They don’t feel like we care about them.”
The message volunteers are trying to send to those teens is that even if they might not be getting love at home, there are “people out here who really do care,” she said.
Including more than a dozen adults who have gone to Government Square every day after school since Jan. 31. Not to watch the teens, they say, but to see them.
Advocate Dorron Hunter said many of the kids he’s interacted with don’t get told ‘I love you’ enough.
“We’re there to be an ear, to be a listener, to let them know that ‘look, there is another way, if you make a better choice, the outcomes will be different,” he said.
The focus is on Government Square because hundreds of teens congregate there after school. That’s the spot where they can make an after-school bus transfer, and they have a four-hour window to do so.
Johnson said discussions with Metro have been productive, but there are considerations of closing that window. Student work schedules are a factor.
Longtime advocate Iris Roley, who is heading up the initiative in Government Square, said many teens use the location as their “third space,” a location that is not home or school where they can feel social and safe.
“One of the questions that I ask is, ‘Why do you come down here?’” Roley said. “The answer that they give me is because they don't feel safe in their neighborhoods.”
While a short-term goal was to address the behavior of teens in the Square, a long-term goal is to connect them with the youth program that they are most interested in. There are dozens across the city.
Roley said these efforts mark a new phase of the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement: “Typically when [I] make a call, it's about police accountability. Now we're on the flip side of the collaborative agreement, which is around public safety.”
She’s got the city’s alphabet soup of agencies involved: CPD, CPS, 3CDC, JFS and more partners like Metro and Kroger.
“We need to work with the city to ensure that the city allows for the opportunity of children to participate in the city,” Roley said.
Council member Johnson said it was a sprint to start the work downtown, but it’ll be a marathon to finish.
“We start strong on a whole lot of things,” said Johnson. “But consistency and getting to the finish line is where we failed. And this morning, I’m hearing people saying I’m all in.”
