Recommendation to direct City Manager to provide a progress update on the Long Beach violence prevention and intervention strategies, and, further, engage with the County of Los Angeles to explore funding opportunities to accelerate the implementation of the SAFE Long Beach Violence Prevention Plan and intervention strategies through the recently adopted Measure J and other potential funding opportunities.
Thank you. Next item, which I think is 17. Item 17 Communication from Vice Mayor Richardson. Councilwoman Cindy has Councilwoman Sarah and Councilwoman Allen recommendation to direct city manager to provide a progress update on the Long Beach violence prevention and intervention strategies. Vice mayor. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have a presentation on this recommendation here. There's been a lot of progress over the last year on violence prevention. Some of it was touched on last week in the youth. Youth Development Office work. But there's a lot more that's taking place. And I think we need to highlight and understand that's created some opportunities for us that I think we can use now more than ever. A little bit of background. We've had a violence prevention plan since 2014. Important. It's an important plan. And we believe that it's the philosophy. I'll save Long Beach that talks about making investments, investing in youth, using data to understand what are the what is the violence? What is violence that is at its root and how can we intervene early? But it's sort of a long term plan for many years. That plan was, you know, as we would say, sitting on it, sitting on a shelf. We didn't have the investments necessary to actually implement this plan. Last year, things changed. There was a motion that the city council made to explore other ways to accelerate this that ultimately led to a Long Beach Active Safe Communities program. It's a $1.1 million grant that began and piloted in the Washington neighborhood in Central Lobby. So let's go to the next slide. And then, you know, we we adopted we unanimously adopted our racial equity reconciliation initiative, which really double down on violence prevention as a public health issue. It has a strategic goal on violence prevention, which it calls for increasing funding and investment into into these things and community based intervention strategies and focusing on reentry. So City Council adopted that. How do we respond? Let's go to the next slide. We we responded. We invested three point $2,000,000 million, implement certain recommendations related to this. And more specifically, we invested in creating one reentry position and additional position on violence prevention to complement the one position we had. And then with the grant from Long Beach acting safe communities, we added a separate position as well in addition to additional funding to go out and work across the community. So we went from essentially 0 to 1 staff for violence prevention in the city. Now for staff for violence prevention, that adds incredible capacity for us. Let's go next time. And so this is this highlights some of that background and funding that we talked about. So between the framework funding, the B C program, that gets us a good start, but there's still more that we can do to expand it. And I think the next slide will help illustrate that. So this map was put together by our health department to really show the areas of focus with the LBC. And there is focus in Washington and the Stevens Center. Long Beach has $1,000,000 investment going in. But if we if we know what we all know is that we've had you know, we've we've had violent crime across the city. And there was in North Long Beach, we really don't have the funding to really implement the types of strategies that are being implemented in Washington and in Stevens neighborhood. Let's go to next slide. So. So what does that mean? It means there is a gap. So we know that that there's, you know, increasing rates of violence, particularly since the beginning of COVID 19. What are our opportunities to take this capacity that we've built additional staff to implement our plan and invest into communities? Well, if we know that we have $1,000,000 invested in the in the central Long Beach area, we should identify now that we have capacity, additional resources to invest in north and west parts of our city where we know that there is a direct overlay with violent crime. Now. You know, I want to be clear. This isn't the for that. This is it. This is in place of crime suppression or police work. This is investment in the community that when you have crime, you don't you don't abandon that anything. You double down on these investments when you need it most. It's like when folks say, you know, when the stock market goes down by as much stock as you can. You want to invest. It's a long term play. That's what we have to do here. We have to identify resources to invest in violence prevention more than we're doing right now. Next slide. I think that might be both. Okay, great. That's the last slide. So. So the proposal here is let's identify let's work together. And we're starting with some, you know, some initial direction here. We know that L.A. County adopted Measure J. It may be some time until Michigan is ready, but they're already having convenings and meetings about how to appropriate measures. And measure J is direct alignment with our youth work and our violence prevention work. It's 10% of the of the non dedicated operating budget from from the county. It has to be spent in these ways. So we should get to the table with them and begin negotiating that. Additionally, we should seek other resources. If we have the capacity now to move, we should invest those resources, go into community partners, those resources going to go into prevention. That's where those resources go to help amplify and accelerate what the violence prevention strategy. So this is something I believe in. I believe that we should continue to invest in violence prevention. We have to continue to invest in youth. We need to make sure that we are being creative and leveraging these resources that we put forward over the last year. We leverage them to get as maximum of an impact that we can get in order to have a long term impact and reduce violence within our city. And so that's the that's the proposal here. And I'm happy to make this motion. I urge City Council for support. Now you can take down the slideshow. I have Councilwoman Sara, please. Thank you, Mayor. I'm very happy to cosponsor this item because as somebody who's work with young people and particularly around violence prevention, it's really critical that while important, we do have violence suppression. We need Metron and long term solution. I don't think that violence prevention necessarily have to have you see results in the long term. You can actually have them alongside, you know, short term strategy that can show up in different ways. You know, my chief of staff is really a results of a programing where it's afterschool programs saved his life because there was a place , a safe place he could go to, surrounded by mentors that helped shape his path. So it's hard, short term and long term impact. And I also want to express support that that we do need to make sure we are addressing violence and tackling them head on. Because I believe that gun violence is a public health issue. It's a disease that really spread. And we really just don't target the the the spots and the area that's highly needed. And so I think that it's important that we really go to them and we've seen huge spikes in central as well as West and North Long Beach. So for those reason, I support this item. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Public comment on this item. Yes. We have Sri in Senegal. Good evening, mayor. Vice Mayor on council members. Thank you, Vice Mayor, for bringing this item forward and for the council members who coauthored it. I have heard a lot of comments about policing to stop our gun violence, but this is not the solution. Investment in our youth development. Ensuring that our brothers and sisters coming home from prison have the opportunities to build better lives, mental health support, trauma based education programs, and propping up our community based organizations that are on the ground across the city that are working with intention. I support this item tonight, but I have to agree with Councilwoman Sorrow that it is important for us to recognize gun violence as a public health issue. And I urge City Council to take the steps to make it that so that we can have long term prevention that is sustainable. Thank you so much. Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Thank you. I do have calculators in the house. I think in there in there, as we all are aware, of violent crimes and gun violence, especially then on the rise in Long Beach in the past couple of months and especially in my district, we have seen overwhelmingly increases in gang violence. So I am very supportive of this item and and look forward to the item that I brought forward a couple weeks ago as well. And so thank you very much. Anything that we can do to really bring attention to the the issue that is gun violence in our in our city is very important. So thank you, Vice Mayor, for bringing this forward. That concludes comments. Roll call vote, please. Councilwoman Sun has. All right. Councilwoman Allen. I. Councilwoman Price. I. Councilman Sabrina. Right. Councilwoman Mongo. I. Councilwoman Sara. I. Council Member Oranga. I can't say I'm in Austin. Councilman Austin. I. Vice Mayor Richardson. My motion carries.