Rep. Joe Morelle is pushing for the passage of a decade-long community violence prevention program.
On Tuesday, at the Boys and Girls Club of Rochester, Morelle said that the $5 billion would pour more federal money into schools, health care, and other organizations across the country for over a decade.
It's a part of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. The funds would be used for techniques like street outreach, violence interruption programs, and trauma-based cognitive behavior therapy.
“There are far too many sons and daughters, neighbors and friends, that are never coming home to their loved ones,” Morelle said. “We’ve seen it for years, we saw it during this past summer, (we) see it now."
According to the latest Rochester Police data, the city has had 68 homicides in 2021, by far the most in the last 10 years, and 68% of the slayings were by firearms.
Nonprofits like the Boys and Girls Club could see a windfall from Morelle’s bill. But whether or not his organization receives the money, Executive Director Dwayne Mahoney said it's most important the area’s leaders take aggressive action about rising gun violence rates.
He said that violence regularly hit home most recently on Nov. 2, when 15-year-old club member Ja’Mere Wade was killed on Peckham Street near Hudson.
“Ja’mere used to come in and deliver food to a couple kids who were his relatives literally every day,” said Mahoney. “The question is now who does that for them?”
Mahoney said guns are easy to access and these funds could be used to teach kids that other options than violence.
“For me, it's about trying to get young people to not turn to guns to solve their problems and for them to be in the right places at the right times all day long,” Mahoney said.
Morelle said he’s optimistic the community violence prevention bill could be passed in the next week or two. It's one of several bills that the Irondequoit Democrat argues could make a difference when it comes to gun violence. The other measures include a creating an interagency council to ensure that gun violence victims get counseling, and two bills that create new requirements for gun shop owners to better track and secure their merchandise.
“If you’re a pharmacist, at the end of the day, you have to secure all the drugs, which makes sense because of the trouble we have with opioids, but if you’re a gun shop owner, you don’t have to do anything like that,” Morelle said.
