Mayor’s reaction to killings leaves city wanting
Strong leaders can channel our collective emotions, whether sadness, fear or joy. Even anger has its place, especially as a community works through trauma.
Listening to Mayor Andrew J. Ginther last week made me angry, for all the wrong reasons.
Last week, Columbus bore witness to an especially horrific act of violence in a year already chock full of them.
Demetrius Wall-neal, 9, and his 6year-old sister, Londynn, were shot and killed along with 22-year-old Charles Wade as the three sat in a car in the parking lot of the Winchester Lakes Apartment complex on the city’s Southeast Side.
At a news conference the following day, Ginther continued to push his false narrative that the violence Columbus is experiencing is somehow new.
It is not.
“The violence we’re seeing in this city, and cities around the country, we’ve never seen the likes of before, and it requires new strategies, new techniques and new tools and we’re committed to doing that,” he said. Let’s go over this. Again.
Yes, Columbus and many other large cities are seeing the number of homicides spike considerably this year. Criminologists aren’t sure exactly why, but largely agree that the systemic societal problems that have long given rise to violence were exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
So in that singular, narrow sense, this might be viewed as different. But in every other way, this killing is achingly familiar.
Columbus is now drawing close to 200 homicides. In terms of sheer numbers, this year became the new record
after surpassing last year’s total of 175 homicides in November. But a better way to gauge this is to adjust for population.
When we do that, a total of 200 homicides this year would put the city at almost exactly the per capita homicide rate that we saw in 1991, when 139 homicides occurred but the population was far lower.
So there’s that.
But as revealed in October, even the mayor’s own recent data shows that his claims are untrue. A study of this year’s homicides confirmed that a relatively few individuals, many of them involved in a handful of gangs, drive much of the violence.
That was as true in 1991 as it is today. A good number of gangs that existed in 1991, as a matter of fact, remain on the list of gangs included in this latest study.
At last week’s news conference, Public Safety Director Robert Clark repeated Ginther’s false suggestion that this was untrodden ground, saying, “We understand that we are in a very unique era of random and senseless violence.”
Senseless. Absolutely. Random? Rarely. And unique?
Sadly, no.
This is not quibbling over semantics. The words of the mayor and his top officials carry weight, and imprecision does us all a disservice.
What is really disconcerting, though, is the nagging sense that Ginther is relying upon this new, violent world order imagery to buy himself time. Increasingly this feels like lip service.
“We cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized, numb,” he said last week. “It can never be normal for 6 and 9 year olds to die in this community. Babies facing violent deaths in our city cannot be tolerated.”
Compare that remark to this one: “We cannot tolerate children being killed in our city or allow ourselves to become numb to neighborhood violence.”
Ginther said that after the murder of De’ontae Fisher.
I covered De’ontae’s death in 2017, and if you remember him as I do, that might be where your mind went after last week’s killings of Londynn and Demetrius.
The cases share grim parallels.
De’ontae was 7 years old when he died. He was seated in a car with his two younger siblings and a young gang member who police said was the intended target. They survived. You’ll find the name of the gangs involved in that recent report.
After De’ontae’s death, Ginther said that while the city is working to make the neighborhoods safer, “I call on all our parents, educators, and neighborhood, civic and faith leaders to redouble our efforts to end violence in our community.”
Last week, the mayor made the same appeal, for citizens to come forward and do their part, by helping the police find the killers, by volunteering to help atrisk youth.
And of course those are good and necessary aims.
But especially in cases like these, there always are people who step up and share what they know, sometimes at great risk to themselves and their own families. Police Chief Elaine Bryant acknowledged that explicitly at the news conference, saying it would be false to suggest that the community doesn’t render vital assistance to the police.
Columbus police and prosecutors secured convictions in the death of De’ontae Fisher, and odds are they will make arrests in last week’s homicides. When babies are involved, people will always talk.
There also are scads of people doing essential and hard work with at-risk youth, fighting against violence and the myriad, ugly societal realities that feed it from beneath.
What these folks need is real support and coordination from on high.
They need a leader in the trenches beside them, someone who feels their anger and frustration and channels it into action, not rhetoric.
They need a leader who doesn’t continue to push a false narrative to buy his administration time that Columbus does not have.
They need a leader who doesn’t dust off a four-year-old script to find the words to describe the slaughter of a city’s children. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker