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Under Fire: Residents say years of disinvestment to blame for escalating violence

The Blade - 9/20/2021

Sep. 20—Second of three parts

LEBANON, Ohio — While incarcerated in 2013 for illegally carrying a gun, Lil Heads gang member "Maniac" said he wanted out of the streets to make a better life for his children and him.

"Just being out there is going to lead to nothing but jail or death," he said in The Blade's award-winning series mapping gang territories, published in 2013. "That's what Toledo is about now. Kill or be killed. Or go to jail..."

His premonition came true.

He's currently serving 40 years to life for the 2019 robbery and shooting death of 24-year-old Tyler Carr.

Speaking recently from Warren Correctional Institution, a prison between Cincinnati and Dayton, the 30-year-old told The Blade he still can't fathom a trajectory for young Black men in Toledo that doesn't involve a cell or a coffin, because little has changed to fix the "certain environments" in Toledo that he says seem to lead them there: poverty and a lack of support, job opportunities, affordable housing, entertainment, or a feeling of safety in their own neighborhood.

In fact, it seems to be getting worse.

Last year was Toledo's most murderous, with 61 homicides, setting a new record that hadn't been touched since 1980. This year is already on pace to surpass it, with 51 homicides reported through Sunday.

"What we're doing is a repeated cycle," he said, now preferring to use his legal name, Dominique Roberts. "There were people who sat at the table before me and you and spoke on this same topic and asked the same questions, 'What could we do to better the community?' 'What could we do to help these youths out?' It's a repeated cycle."

'A gang problem'

Though city officials have declared the escalating gun violence a public health crisis, they're still figuring out how to treat it.

Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz has called it "a gang problem."

In July, the city's then four dozen homicides and 1,209 shooting incidents in 2021 — resulting in 174 injuries — were "not exclusively, but...almost all gang-related," he said, assuring that, "The average Toledoan who plays by the rules and is simply trying to raise his kids, go to work, pay his bills, take his kid to soccer practice...is so mathematically unlikely to be a victim of what we're talking about..."

The implication was that if residents are not in a gang, they have nothing to fear.

But with shootings now occurring at crowded block parties, malls, public parks, and downtown bars, innocent bystanders are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs.

Of the three homicide victims who were memorialized on billboards at Bancroft Street and Detroit Avenue, only one was confirmed to be in a gang, police said. Yet, all three died by gang violence: Glenn Scurles, Jr., 18, and Christopher Carrington, 34, happened to be present when gang members opened fire on a nearby rival. James Smith, Jr., 19, was shot for mistakenly being associated with a Crips gang.

They aren't isolated incidents:

—In March, 74-year-old John Toyer, Jr., was inadvertently struck by gunfire while sitting in his truck at an area gas station.

—Four months later, 17-year-old Stephon Johnson was killed and 11 others, ages 11 to 51, were injured in a mass shooting at a Fourth of July block party that sent more than 300 community members scrambling for their lives.

—Two weeks after that, 28-year-old father of two, Stormy Clere, was shot while waiting for an Uber in a parking lot near a downtown Toledo restaurant.

None of the three killed were gang members.

Toledo Police Chief George Kral calls the tragedies "the exception rather than the rule," though he couldn't put a number on how many of the city's homicides are suspected to be gang related because some associations are hard to pin down and many shootings remain unsolved, "some with zero leads," according to his gang sergeant, Mel Stachura. But each supported the mayor's premise that "nefarious activities" and the general gang lifestyle does increase a person's risk of dying by gun violence.

It's statistics, Chief Kral said: The more shootings there are, the more likely innocent victims will be "caught up in the fray."

Made with Flourish

Those statistics, though, skew against residents of the city's poorest neighborhoods, where gang culture and rising crime disproportionately places them — involved or not — in the line of fire.

Where the probability of residents in West, East, and most of South Toledo encountering gunfire in their home neighborhoods is relatively low, the probability for residents in parts of North and Central Toledo is as high as 1 in 12, a Blade analysis of 2020 shooting incidents found.

That's not a gang problem, Toledo Council member Vanice Williams said.

She represents District 4, where shooting incidents are most concentrated, and said the way city officials tend to oversimplify the causes of gun violence, "irritates my soul, because none of them have experienced it."

In her view, shootings are not exclusively a gang problem, they are "the PTSD of poverty."

"Look where all the shootings are at," she said, reviewing a Blade study of where gun violence is most prolific and calling it a map of disinvestment.

"Tell me where the grocery stores are at over there. Tell me the community center that's got thousands of kids. Tell me the park that's been well maintained and manicured," she said. "You got low-income housing concentrated in one area with no resources. What the hell?"

'It was the family that people were looking for'

Ms. Williams understands better than most the life circumstances that residents, especially Black men, from underserved parts of Toledo feel put them on the fast track to prison or death.

"I lived it," she said.

She grew up on the 600 block of Palmwood Avenue, an area long fraught with poverty and crime. Two homicide victims died on the street in 2020 alone.

She experienced her first shooting at age 10, when two men fighting over a game of dice used guns to settle the score.

At 12, she dodged bullets cutting through Smith Park to get to the pool.

When she was 13, her brother was shot twice in the leg.

In high school, she saw a man get shot in the head.

"Shootings were normal to us," she said, now age 42. "We didn't realize that this was chaos because we were functioning through the chaos."

Poverty not only trapped her in that culture of violence, she said, it drove her family further down a path they never would have otherwise taken.

They never seemed to have enough money. Her mother was addicted to drugs. Her father was absent. Two of her sisters became pregnant at 16.

Her brother, just 18 then, felt responsible for supporting them all.

"He turned to the gang for family to support him," she said. "It was the family that people were looking for."

"To support us," she continued, "he turned to the streets."

From the outside, she understands how her brother's actions, which included fighting or selling drugs, could be viewed as "bad, bad, bad." But from the inside, as they were living it, it felt like a necessary means to an end.

"He had to get it how he needed to get it," she said. "We were in survival mode where we felt like we were fighting for everything."

Living in areas of poverty and high crime does not intrinsically motivate people to join gangs, commit crimes, or participate in violence, Daniel Hammel, chair of the Geography and Planning Department at the University of Toledo, said.

"But it does mean that, to avoid crime and to avoid that kind of activity yourself, you're going to have to get really lucky, in some cases, and try really hard," he said. "Much more so than a kid that lives in a place that doesn't have those kinds of things going on."

Made with Flourish

Studies show that people living in households with incomes below the federal poverty threshold — about $26,000 for a family of four — have more than double the rates of violent victimization, compared with individuals in high-income households.

It's no surprise then, Ms. Williams said, that gun violence is most concentrated in her district. It also has the largest concentration of poverty in the city.

Of the top 25 census tracts where shooting probabilities range from 1 in 12 to 1 in 94, more than half (14) have poverty rates over 40 percent, according to the most recent American Community Survey. Only one of the tracts reports a median household income above the federal poverty level.

At least a dozen of the tracts fall within Ms. Williams' district, including Tract 29, which has the highest poverty rate in the city, 73 percent, and the third-highest shooting rate, 1 in 13. It's also home to the Greenbelt Place Apartments, a Section 8 housing complex where about a third of the shots fired calls were reported.

Conversely, census tracts with higher incomes tended to have lower shooting rates.

"Violence is happening everywhere. It just happens more in District 4 or District 3 because of the poverty or the blight," Ms. Williams said.

Disinvestment

The coronavirus pandemic only seemed to compound the problem by further limiting already scarce resources in some neighborhoods, experts say.

Unemployment skyrocketed. Fear and uncertainty increased. The nation went into lockdown — nonessential businesses closed; entertainment venues closed, schools and day cares closed, community centers closed, all sports were suspended.

"That's got to be a lot of this," Mr. Hammel said of the sharp rise in crime in 2020. "This pandemic has been rough on a lot of people, but if you're poor, it's really rough on you."

It might be presumed, then, that as the economy starts to recover and the hardships of the pandemic recede, crime will naturally improve, he said. But the root causes of the violence stem from decades of disinvestment, especially in Central Toledo, he said.

He largely traces the disinvestment back to 1930s redlining, the practice of discouraging mortgage loans in certain neighborhoods predominantly based on race.

It widened the financial divide already disproportionately impacting Black residents and effectively corralled the poor into neighborhoods they couldn't afford to move out of and wealthier residents didn't want to move into, leaving the properties with "almost no value," Mr. Hammel said.

The 15 census tracts encompassing all of Toledo's redlined areas were some of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods, a 2019 Blade analysis found. In 11 of the tracts, the poverty rates were more than 40 percent. Nine of the 15 were majority Black.

Many of them overlap with today's high-poverty, high-shooting areas.

The urban renewal effort in the early 1970s further exacerbated the problem by forcing out at least 70 Black-owned shops, grocery stores, doctors offices, and other businesses that once lined Dorr Street and sustained Toledo's Black community. Residents never recovered. Neither did the area — there were at least 15 homicides near the corridor in 2020.

By 2009, some neighborhoods had fallen so far behind that they couldn't be impacted by the otherwise crippling foreclosures of the housing crisis, because the majority of residents couldn't afford to own their home in the first place.

"There was just no money left to take out of those neighborhoods," Mr. Hammel said.

Money never got put back in either, even after the economy recovered.

More homes were abandoned, businesses moved elsewhere, and crime rose, further stigmatizing the areas as undesirable places to live. Families who could afford to moved out to suburbs perceived to be safer, such as Sylvania, Maumee, and Perrysburg, taking their capital with them.

Over time, the neglect may have created a sort of confirmation bias that the areas were dangerous, forgotten, or worthless.

Little has changed to suggest otherwise, Ms. Williams criticized.

"Just look at this park," she said, motioning around Navarre Park in East Toledo on a Monday in August. She was hosting a boxing camp meant to divert youth away from area gangs and gun violence, but she was frustrated that the city had waited until that morning to cut the overgrown grass.

"This is a low to moderate-income neighborhood and the grass is all jacked up," she said. "If the neighborhoods look messed up, guess what I'm gonna feel? I'm gonna feel messed up."

The city has started taking steps to address some of the negative aesthetics, including replacing all streetlights with LED fixtures, which the mayor says will "make our streets safer, more illuminated...," and repaving 109 streets. The Lucas County Land Bank also has been tearing down vacant, abandoned, often dangerous buildings and turning them into green space, though they say money is running out.

Simply fixing up every neighborhood to look nice will not cure gun violence, Mr. Hammel said, because "the problems really come from much deeper social issues of chronic under and unemployment, limited economic opportunities, and limited buy-in to the system — the idea that if you work hard and get a good education you can do really well."

But it's a start.

"It shows that somebody cares and that the neighborhood has not completely been abandoned by the folks that have wealth and power," he said. "This is not a hopeless situation by any means."

Opportunities

Roberts remains skeptical.

He joined the Lil Heads at age 10, partly because his friends on the block were in the gang, but also because the adult members became his de facto caregivers while his mom was working. They offered him opportunities to make money to help support his six siblings, which sometimes involved committing crimes, he admits.

But after racking up 16 felonies and 20 misdemeanors, and spending large stretches in confinement, he says he tried to turn his life around.

He left the gang in 2015 and moved to the east side to avoid the temptations of his former life, though he admits, "I will always be in some sort of contact with the Lil Heads. It's forever." He also got a job at Continental Structural Plastics in Carey and in 2018 successfully completed his parole.

But the problems that he said drew him to the lifestyle in the first place persisted, namely poverty and the constant fear that he had to watch his back.

He continued to accumulate criminal charges for not answering the door for police during a domestic violence investigation, stealing an air conditioner from Lowe's, and possession of marijuana. At the same time, his friends keep dying, the latest of them 27-year-old Christopher Kinnebrew, who was killed in a drive-by shooting at his home in July.

Though Roberts denies being involved in Mr. Carr's death and plans to appeal his conviction, he speculates that incarceration may be the only thing that has saved him from joining the list of homicide victims — the streets "lead to nothing but jail or death," he said.

While officials have begun beefing up enforcement to combat some of the contributors to gun violence, like illegal gun ownership, gang activity, and after-hours clubs, Mayor Kapszukiewicz said he recognizes that gun violence cannot just be arrested away.

"If all you're doing is focusing on the crime and punishment, then you're just treating the symptoms and not the disease," he told The Blade last summer.

Help should be coming.

Toledo was recently awarded $180.9 million in federal funding through the American Rescue Plan Act, which the mayor wants to use to stabilize the city's budget, invest in housing and blight reduction, expand youth programming, and create more job opportunities in trades and safety services.

The city also is funding a new initiative to end gun violence.

Roberts is leery about whether those efforts can reverse decades of neglect, but he has to hope they can. Because while it may be too late for him, he said, he needs to believe there's a possibility of a better life for his children, the oldest of which is now 9.

"I don't want them to follow in my footsteps and be a menace to society, be labeled as a menace to society when you really not...," he told The Blade in 2013. "I want them to be better. I want them to do things I didn't do..."

That wish hasn't changed, he said, but for it to be realized his children will need more reassurance and resources than he had.

"It's going to take more than just people getting out of gangs to do it," Roberts said. "We're going to need more jobs, more education, more opportunities for young youth."

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