Motion seeks public health response to violence
Chris Glover will introduce a motion to have violence treated as a public health issue.
Toronto District School Board trustee Chris Glover is slated to present a motion to the Toronto Board of Health on Monday that proposes remedying community violence with a public health approach.
Included is the use of fixers who, knowing the lay of the land of their respective communities, will be able to mediate disputes before they arise and intensify.
“There are turf wars happening in the city right now and we need people with the credibility to negotiate peaceful resolutions to save lives,” Glover said. “The most radical part is to bring in the Interrupters program to Toronto, where you hire and train ex-convicts to negotiate peaceful solutions in neighbourhoods to reduce gun violence. You need expertise in culture and you have to know the players.
“The police alone, and that criminal approach, is not solving the problem,” he continued. “We need to do something different.”
The program Glover was first proposed by a Chicago epidemiologist named Dr. Gary Slutnik, who, after working on the AIDS file in Africa with the World Health Organization, returned to the U.S. and devised a strategy to combat violence much the same way you would an epidemic: knowing how to cut off what’s feeding it. The result of his work is “Cure Vio- lence,” an NGO based at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
“The idea is really applying the health lens, or the community lens, to violence prevention,” said Brent Decker, Chief Program Officer of the organization, which operates in 12 countries. “We think that a strategic, citywide plan includes education, law enforcement, but really having the health and public health sector make for a better impact and more lasting outcomes.”
The organization started in West Garfield Park in 2000, and, during its first year, it reduced violence by 67 per cent in the community, considered one of Chicago’s most violent neighbourhoods, according to its website.
Asked how the people on the ground work to quell violence, Decker said they have estab- lished network systems in place, making them trusted fixtures in their communities, heightening the success for a peaceful solution.
Violence, Glover said, is a social determinant of health, as people who experience it grapple with different forms of trauma, have lower life expectancies and are at a greater risks to pick up a gun and use it — a vicious cycle that has to be broken, he said.
“Gun violence doesn’t just affect the perpetrator and the victim and their family, it affects entire neighbourhoods,” he said. “They call it street trauma.”
According to a research report, co-written by Glover, there were 375 shooting incidents involving 565 victims in the city in 2017.
Glover, who sits on the health board, said that he didn’t want to single out Toronto communities struggling with the problem “because a lot of them are stigmatized in the media and there are a lot of good things going on in those neighbourhoods.” Zero Gun Violence Movement is one of the anti-violence groups that supports Glover’s motion and Louis March, its founder, will speak at the Monday meeting.
“Community violence has to be taken seriously by the political leaders, decision makers, funders,” he said. “The motion is important because it brings a different perspective on community violence. It’s not just a policing or corrections issue. It’s a community health issue, because we all pay for it in some shape or form. There’s a larger cycle of violence that’s not being addressed that we continue to see.”