SAN ANTONIO — After a week where a toddler was shot in the leg and two young teens were shot to death in east San Antonio, community leaders and neighbors are coming together to work on building a safer environment.
District 2 representative Jalen McKee Rodriguez said crime is up nationwide, but local solutions are possible.
"This is an opportunity for us to see, as a community, how can we combat crime, how can we prevent it. We're going to have community organizations, neighborhood leaders, as well as elected officials there to talk about what each of our roles is," McKee-Rodriguez said.
Ananda Tomas of Act4SA is one of the panelists leading the discussion.
"This is especially important in under-served communities because they are often the ones that aren't given these opportunities to have these conversations, but they're also most affected by poverty, which is the leading pre-cursor to crime," Tomas said. "That's why we really need to have these conversations in these certain areas of our community and our city, to find the solutions that work best for us."
McKee-Rodriguez said police budgets have continued to rise, but violence is also up, so solutions have to be more broad-based.
"I want people to walk away with a sense of what their responsibility is and what are the things they can do to make our community safer, whether they're joining an organization or whether they're running for office or supporting a neighborhood organization." McKee-Rodriguez said.
McKee Rodriguez said they need input from everyone to create a new path to success.
"The vast majority of solutions to crime that we have are responsive in nature, and they are reactionary and so we have to walk away from this meeting knowing how do we prevent it?" McKee-Rodriguez said. "And what is our role in doing that and what are going to be the new solutions that we haven't tried out and I'm hopeful that we'll learn a little bit about that today."
"What I'm really hoping to add is that there are alternative solutions to policing to address crime - that until we are addressing poverty, until we're addressing food insecurity, joblessness, houselessness, that we're never going to build that safer community that we want to see, so we need to start exploring alternatives, other than adding more and more police, which has really had no effect on crime in a decade," Tomas said .
The meeting is free and open to anyone citywide. It runs from 6:00pm to 8:30pm at Second Baptist Church at 3310 East Commerce, just south of the AT&T Center.