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Former Long Beach Councilman Steve Neal said the goal was to create a team of city government officials, nonprofits, religious groups, mental health professionals and former gang members to share how to prevent violence from continuing to spread across the streets.
“We’d like to build a network here to connect the dots to address social ills, particularly gun violence,” he said.
Overall, 381 shootings took place across the city in 2020. The previous four years had an annual average of 232 shootings.
The townhall, called LBC Peace Makers, was co-hosted by local activist and entrepreneur Shirin Senegal, founder of the nonprofit Ronnie’s House.
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“This is not normal,” Stark said, after two shootings occurred within earshot of his apartment on two consecutive nights in December. Since then, Stark has taken up listening to a police scanner and monitoring local Facebook groups to scrape together a better sense of what’s going on in his neighborhood.
Because the Long Beach Police Department does not regularly release statistics about shootings, it’s been hard for Stark to quantify his gut feeling about a spike in shootings, but data obtained by the Long Beach Post through public records requests shows he’s right: Gun violence in the city has been surging.
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In an article published Thursday on the education news site EdSource, ex-superintendent Carl Cohn argued that Gov. Gavin Newsom should bargain directly with statewide unions for teachers and classified staff, simplifying a tangled process of reopenings across the state that currently involves individual districts negotiating with their employees unions.
That would mean temporarily suspending local collective bargaining, a radical step, but one that’s needed, Cohn argued.
“Schools aren’t going to reopen anytime soon across the state if the details and agreements on in-person instruction have to be reached through local collective bargaining agreements and memoranda of understanding in more than 1,000 school districts,” he wrote.
On Jan. 7-8, 2021, the Long Beach Police Department arrested 4 suspects in connection with the Dec. 16, 2020 shooting death of 14-year-old Long Beach resident Arthur Touch.
Through their investigation, detectives uncovered evidence indicating that a dispute took place between the victim and the four suspects. The dispute escalated to a physical assault which led to the victim being shot prior to the suspects fleeing the scene.
“Any loss of life due to violence is unacceptable, but the murder of a 14-year-old should be an outrage to our entire community,” stated Chief of Police Robert G. Luna. “I want to thank our Special Investigations Division detectives for their relentless efforts to identify and arrest the suspects responsible for this senseless crime.”