Violence in Cedar Rapids is a public health issue

The city of Cedar Rapids has suffered many losses of young life within the last year do to the use of gun violence. The losses are not just the deaths of these young people, but also the loss of life to those who pulled the trigger. Not only do we as a community experience the loss of a loved one knowing that they will not enjoy living a long, full life, but the ones who caused those deaths also will be without enjoying a long, full life with the expectancy of growing up and becoming a credit to our community and to the world at large. Because of these tragedies, many lives have been lost and destroyed.

Our entire city is affected by these deaths. Not one thing happens in our community that does not impact who we are and how we go about our daily living. The gun violence is not just an area of Cedar Rapids problem. We cannot afford to look the other way and believe that this problem is simply the problem of a particular section of our community. We have to begin to understand that we, as a community, have to embrace the issue of gun violence among Black youth and treat it as a pathology. Just like any other disease, research is needed in order to find out its origin. Study it for underlying causes and come up with methods to eradicate it. We can no longer look at the symptoms, the surface of these deaths and how they have occurred, no more than we can look at the symptoms of a child with a very high fever and not understand that there is something deeper going on that needs further study. We are at the place of further study to this problem.

As our police chief has said, Cedar Rapids is not going to be able to 'arrest its way out” of the problem of violence involving our young people and firearms - meaning the violence in Cedar Rapids is not only a law enforcement issue, but also the symptom of much larger social issues that must be addressed broadly and over the long term. But a lack of good data has left the many violence prevention and community building groups wishing to address this complex issue wondering how to begin or where to focus our efforts.

Researchers have identified a number of risk factors that increase a person's likelihood of committing a violent act including, but not limited to: having been a victim of or witness to violence; unemployment; having a history of child protective services investigation or out of home placement. These are but a few risk factors and they will vary from community to community.

Many of these risk factors exist in Cedar Rapids. It is imperative that a deeper study takes place in our community in order to get at permanent solutions to a very devastating problem. 1Strong Coalition feels very strongly about getting at the root causes and believes that one of the ways to do it is to bring in the Center for Disease Control to study precursors to violence in our city. This is a public health problem. We have to deal with the pathology of this disease and end it. This type of investigation has been done in Wilmington, Del., (pop. 70,000), a city that has been struggling with violence. I believe our city desires to help and save the lives of our youth. This is one way we can do it together.

' Carletta Knox-Seymour is a member of the 1Strong Coalition. Comments: carlettav@gmail.com