A 9-year-old girl in Rochester, ill-trained police and the need in all cities for more community help

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Feb 3, 2021

That’s a major reason why, as I have written before, cases like these call for something other than the conventional police response. A surprising number of nonemergency calls have less to do with law enforcement than with other social failures.

Much of last year’s political debate was embroiled in a call to “defund the police,” a misleading slogan that many reformers refashioned into the more helpful “rethink policing.”

Thinking anew about policing encourages innovations such as Rochester’s “Person in Crisis” teams, crisis-intervention services of social workers and other counselors that Chicago and a growing number of other cities offer.

But we also need civilian involvement at the neighborhood level. Cities plagued by high crime rates in recent years share similar problems with widespread distrust of police by local citizens — and vice versa.

Just hours before the incident in Rochester erupted, some mothers who have lost children to homicide announced a new national movement called Voices of Black Mothers United to raise awareness and organize grassroots efforts at the neighborhood level.

“We’re not saying ‘defund the police’ because, yes, we want more police in our community,” said executive director Sylvia Bennett-Stone in an online news conference Friday. She lost her daughter in 2004 to a stray bullet. “But we also want them to be accountable.”

That calls for constructive support by citizens whom police are sworn to serve and protect, said Robert Woodson of the Woodson Foundation, which convened the group as part of his 40 years of work with grassroots organizations. “We believe the solutions come from the same ZIP codes as the problem,” Woodson said.

I wish them the best of luck. Other mothers have organized against violence and had some success and, in some sad cases, tragedy.

Two Chicago mothers, Chantell Grant and Andrea Stoudemire, participated in daily vigils organized by Mothers Against Senseless Killings in 2015 until the two were fatally shot, senselessly and cowardly, at a troubled intersection in the city’s Englewood neighborhood.

And the city’s surge of violence — Chicago homicides in January hit 51, the highest for the wintry month in the past four years — continues. So does the need for better cooperation nationwide between police and the communities they patrol.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)