Friday, February 22, 2019
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
The nine young men lined up in municipal court Thursday were told the choice is theirs to live a better life.
“Stop the violence,” they were told repeatedly. The key to a better life, to staying out of prison, or the morgue at an early age, is theirs and theirs alone.
It might be awhile before the results are known, but the young men were participating in a Community Initiative To Reduce Violence call-in at the municipal court.
The young men are people who already have some sort of criminal background, but officials want to impress on them the need to make better choices.
Law-enforcement officials, including Chief Robin Lees and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Toepfer, spoke to the men as did a number of representatives from social service agencies to help them find housing, jobs, employment and treatment for addiction if necessary.
A man who goes by Demetrius, who was recently released after a 20-year prison stint for aggravated robbery and kidnapping, told the men they have to take advantage of the opportunity before them. The system, he said, is dispassionate and will send them to prison without hardly breaking a sweat if they get in serious trouble.
“It’s not you that they target, it’s not you that they dislike,” Demetrius said. “It’s the lifestyle that they hate.”
Mayor Jamael Tito Brown told the men they could succeed if they wanted to. He urged them during Black History Month to make not just a choice for history, but for their family’s history. The mayor told them how his father had spent most of his life in prison yet Brown said he made the choice to not be involved in a lifestyle of crime. He said those he was speaking to could make the same choice.
“I want you to make some great choices today,” Brown said.
Guy Burney, CIRV coordinator, could not attend the call in because a flight he was take to Youngstown from a conference was grounded because of snow. But he said by phone the more informed the men are, the better choices they can make.
That is why social services are also featured in the call in, so the men know there is help. Burney said those in the program know the consequences, good and bad, of the choices they make.
“These are things we talk about constantly,” Burney said.
About 400 people have taken part in call ins since CIRV began earlier this decade.
Although several speakers said they wanted to help the men, Lees said he was not one of them. Lees said his job is to oversee a force that investigates, arrests and prosecutes people who break the law.
“We are going to stop the violence one way or another,” Lees said.
Lees showed the men crime scene pictures of a former CIRV member who participated in the call ins who did not return to the program. He wound up dead on a front porch on the South Side from several gunshot wounds, and the men viewed photos of his body on the porch, surrounded by evidence markers. He died with his phone, his gun, his state ID card and Burney’s card in his wallet, Lees said.
“He wasted this opportunity,” Lees said. “You should take advantage of it.”