Declare state of emergency over city homicides

Chicago has topped 700 homicides with a month left in 2016. We have dealt with police shootings and a self- inflicted genocide of killing each other. We need to call for a state of emergency, as I have been saying for over a year. But don’t bring in the National Guard, bring in national resources. The federal government spends money to help people and communities after floods, fires and tornadoes. Well, we have a flood of violence, and our nation is drowning. A fire rages in our communities, where there is double- digit unemployment, underfunded and under- performing schools, foreclosures and a lack of affordable housing. There is a tornado of individuals coming back from incarceration with nothing more than $ 20 and a bus card, and a lack of opportunities for a large number of our population— African- American youth— who are neither in school or employed. Combine these national disasters with the proliferation of guns, and you have whole communities with present traumatic stress, hopelessness and anger.

If you can put two lions in a cage and don’t feed them, they develop a survival mentality, and one will kill the other. If you cage in a whole community and don’t feed them with the necessities of life, you create the same mentality and get the same result.

We need resources and help, but we also need to decide as a city that we will regain our moral compass and refuse to accept the killing of our youth, whether it is from a police officer or a brother from the block. We must decide, as a city, that we will not allow guns to become part of our wardrobe and our first line of offense and defense. And we will not allow the city to continue to be the poster boy of violence in America.

We don’t need Donald Trump’s “stop and frisk” or militarized police. We need a reformed Police Department, federal resources and a made- up mind to stop killing each other.