JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Mayor Alvin Brown announced Wednesday that he will be asking the Department of Justice for technical assistance to help Jacksonville fight its recent outbreak of gang violence.
Brown said he will be working with the U.S. Attorney General, the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other organizations to find out what the best practices are for dealing with gang violence.
"What are the strategies that we can use to deal with gangs right now?" Brown said. "They know that."
Brown said he also plans to intensify the efforts of the intervention and prevention programs he's implemented over the last four years, including the Learn to Earn Program, Summer Jobs Program, Youth Advisory Council, Renew Jax and Community Empowerment Days.
He said he plans to reopen and extend the hours at community centers, expand summer park programs, expand neighborhood accountability and teen court, open evening reporting centers for juvenile offenders, and work with pastors and community groups.
"I want to make sure that as the mayor of this city we continue to work together and leverage our assets and resources," Brown said. "I cannot stand by and continue to watch this violent crime take place in our city."
Brown said he's concerned that the violent riots in Baltimore sparked by the death of Freddie Gray in police custody could happen in Jacksonville if the city doesn't get the violent crime under control.
"Enough is enough," Brown said. "We are not going to tolerate the violence in our city. This is the wrong city to do that in."
Lenny Curry, Brown's opponent in next month's mayoral election, questioned the timing of Brown's announcement.
"After four years of acting like there's not a violence (problem), there's not a murder problem, three weeks before an election, the mayor suddenly appears interested in solving this problem," Curry said. "It's tragic what's happening in our neighborhoods and in our city. And this mayor has ignored it for four years."
The City Council received a plea this week to institute a curfew in a part of Northwest Jacksonville recently plagued by gang violence.
While it's hard to say whether a curfew will become a reality, the mayor and sheriff are responding to the gang violence.
Sheriff John Rutherford told News4Jax that he's planning to re-institute Operation Ceasefire in the area. Brown said Wednesday that he supports that move.
Ken Adkins is a local minister and activist who sent a request to the mayor and governor requesting a curfew for the section of Northwest Jacksonville with all the recent violence and Tuesday night he brought that plea to the City Council.
"What we're saying is this. It's an emergency happening in the city of Jacksonville. That if the police is gonna be very strong and proactively go after the gang whether that be six-week or eight-week or 10-week session, people need to be very careful and not to be out," Adkins said.
It's uncertain whether the council will back the idea. The governor's office responded sending a letter back to Adkins essentially telling him this is best dealt with on the local level.
That was an initiative used successfully in years past to flood high crime areas with officers, but as far as the temporary curfew goes, no elected official has publicly backed the idea.
News4Jax crime and safety analyst Gil Smith said that from a police perspective it would be hard to pull off.
"That would be a nightmare actually because he's proposing to have a curfew set just for certain neighborhoods. Now you have the difficulty of boundary lines. Two streets over these people are okay. Once you go over two streets then we have to stop them. And they would have to practically stop every car to see if they're going to work or an emergency or something like that," Smith said.