AUSTIN (KXAN) — The U.S. surgeon general declared gun violence as a public health crisis Tuesday, and he urged communities to adopt prevention strategies similar to what Austin already has in place.
The timing of Dr. Vivek Murthy’s announcement comes almost two weeks after a shooting at the Round Rock Juneteenth celebration killed two women and injured at least 14 others. For the local groups working to prevent these kinds of deadly tragedies from happening, this all underscores the importance of their missions.
“The fact that more guns are on the streets, we’re seeing the rise in violent crimes involving guns, and it is our job to respond to those trends,” Shana Fox said Tuesday.
Fox serves as executive director of the Council on At-Risk Youth (CARY), a nonprofit that started 25 years ago to address the problem of youth violence. This year alone, it helped more than 1,800 students in the Austin, Del Valle and Manor Independent School Districts with skills to avoid violence and crime.
“We are a school-based mental health program, where we do individual and group counseling, and we’re at 20 schools around Central Texas,” Fox explained, noting her group’s services are free for the students who are referred to the programs by school staff members.
Early intervention like what CARY offers is part of the recommendations outlined Tuesday in Murthy’s health crisis advisory — along with investing in community violence prevention programs, like ATX Peace. This is a more recent effort launched almost two years ago by the leaders of these three nonprofits: Life Anew Restorative Justice, Jail to Jobs and the Hungry Hill Foundation.
“Our mission, number one, is to end gun violence, period,” Sherwynn Patton with Life Anew said. “Now, the way that we do that is that we have violence interrupters. We call them credible messengers or trusted messengers — people who have lived experiences in our neighborhoods, who have been involved in the past in sketchy activity, but now they want to serve as agents of change.”
“They’re putting themselves in between two people sometimes that want to harm each other with guns, and they’re standing in the middle of those two people trying to stop that violence from happening,” Eddie Franz, executive director of Jail to Jobs, said. “We see the effectiveness of it in data.”
Patton and Franz said ATX Peace and its trusted messengers helped stop at least 15 retaliatory shootings from happening since their effort began. They applauded the surgeon general advocating for a public health approach to bring down gun deaths and violence.
“It’s a great stance to take because it is a public health problem,” Franz said. “Law enforcement is not the only solution. There needs to be a multifaceted approach to stopping gun violence. Gun violence doesn’t happen because of one reason every single time. It’s multifaceted — it’s very difficult to address and so you need an ecosystem. You’ve got nonprofits, the city, the council members. You have the faith communities. You have law enforcement, all working together to address an issue that is very difficult to stop.”
“We do not plan on stopping until there is an end to gun violence,” Patton added. “And so when gun violence comes down to a zero in our city, that’s when you’ll see us rest. We have a lot of work to do. The work continues.”
The City of Austin partnered with these organizations and provided financial support to them through its Office of Violence Prevention, which local leaders created in 2021 using money redirected from the police department.
Council Member Alison Alter of District 10 pushed for the creation of this office after the city put together a gun violence task force following the 2019 deadly Walmart shooting in El Paso.
“We don’t have to live with guns everywhere. We don’t have to live with that violence,” Alter said. “We’re limited as a city to what we can do, but we can take a public health approach. We can try to make it so that people don’t resort to violence when they have altercations. We can help them find other mechanisms. We can address the root causes for the need to resort to gun violence in different ways. We can provide support to those who are at most risk of relying on a gun to address things, and therefore we can make those communities where we see most gun violence happen safer.”
Additional funding from the city, Fox said, allowed CARY to expand and offer support at several high schools rather than just at middle schools. She said her organization tracks its impact by regularly monitoring the students enrolled in its programs for a 10-year period.
“CARY conducts external evaluations annually to demonstrate statistically that there are improvements not just in attendance and grades, but a serious decrease in behavioral incidents on campus and off campus,” Fox said.
She and the city’s other nonprofit partners said they’re counting on the surgeon general’s latest announcement to possibly give them a boost during the city’s next budget process despite all the competing priorities facing local leaders.
“This crisis declaration comes at a good time,” Dr. Desmar Walkes, the Austin-Travis County health authority, said Tuesday. “We need more funding to continue to support the efforts that we have already in place.”
Anyone interested in ATX Peace employment opportunities, including information on how to become a trusted messenger, should call the group’s hotline at 512-366-8131.
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