FLORISSANT — Hiring a director is one of the next big steps for a regional effort to reduce homicides and other shootings across the metro area.
The initiative, called Save Lives Now!, has begun looking for someone to fill the post, members of an advisory council were told Thursday at its first meeting.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones and St. Louis County Executive Sam Page are co-chairing the council, which also includes 57 other people so far from various parts of the region.
“Transforming public safety does not happen overnight but that does not mean we are helpless,” Jones said in opening comments at the session, held at the Florissant Valley Branch Library in Florissant.
Page said the city of St. Louis ‘’can’t do this by itself,” nor can law enforcement.
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The initiative, endorsed in March by the regional East-West Gateway Council of Governments, aims to cut murders in the metro area by 20% in three years, focusing on the relatively small number of people involved in many homicides here.
The plan calls for using a “focused deterrence” strategy in which police and social service agencies give people repeatedly involved in violence a choice in meetings with police and others.
Job training, schooling, mental health services and drug treatment will be offered, while those who continue to engage in violent crime are to get targeted enforcement efforts.
The plan also calls for increased use of street outreach workers in high-crime areas in St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Clair County where most of the region’s murders take place.
Thomas Abt, who heads the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland and is helping steer the effort, told reporters after the session that he believes the director should be someone who already has “significant experience” in the St. Louis region.
“If you want to have collaboration among regional folks, you need folks who know the region,” Abt said.
Jones, in remarks to reporters, said because the program will be based at East-West Gateway, it will have “staying power” and would continue even when she, Page and other elected leaders are no longer in office.