Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke pledged in his State of the City address Monday to spend $1 million over the next two years to invest in public safety measures that would help combat the type of gun violence the city has experienced over the past two weeks.
He has no guarantee that a pledge to spend $10 million would alleviate the problem, but he has to try. A city voted in a magazine contest last year as Best Town Ever should do no less.
Unfortunately, like the radical Muslims populating the Islamic State in the Middle East, Berke is dealing with a relatively small number of bad people amid a sea of good ones. Yet, he must deal with not only the perpetrators of the violence but also the witnesses too scared to speak up about what they saw and a community that feels powerless to change its lot.
The $1 million expenditure will cover both cameras that will be deployed - with the help of neighborhood leaders and clergy - in problem areas and information technology infrastructure for the police department. The hope is that additional cameras - on churches, in neighborhoods and elsewhere - might be linked to a system to give police a better eye on the streets and on the cars that travel it.
Is Big Brother watching? Well, not exactly.
The police don't care about the vast majority of people who pass within the cameras' range, but they need the cameras to be the witnesses that people on the scene haven't been willing to be.
Last week, Berke announced two other measures related to safety. The first involves the purchase of ballistic technology to match guns to specific crimes. Often, police are able to get illegal guns off the street but cannot immediately match them to possible violent acts they've been used to commit. With the technology and the city's expanded partnership with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, they'll be able to make more headway in that direction.
The second involves a Citizens Safety Coalition he has asked Olivet Baptist Church pastor Kevin Adams and Brainerd High School vice principal Charles Mitchell to lead. Will such a coalition be any more effective than others that involve the church and community? It's too early to tell, but maybe community members have had enough and are willing to get behind this venture to help quell the violence that may be drawing closer to their particular streets.
Critically, though, while Berke is offering measures that will attempt to take a bite out of crime as it is being committed, he's also attempting to strengthen individuals at the beginning of their lives in the hope they may never want any part of a life of crime.
Study after study shows that a child's earliest years are also his or her most important years in terms of development. If a child is given a good start, before he or she begins school, the chances are greater for their success. For some children, strong, involved parents can offer all that's necessary to prepare a child for kindergarten. For others, where the home life is not as strong or hardly existent, preschool or day care can offer some of that early learning assistance.
To give more families that chance, Berke said the city - together with United Way of Greater Chattanooga - will offer Early Learning Scholarships at centers such as the Chambliss Center for Children, Siskin Children's Institute and Signal Centers to those who don't qualify for state vouchers but can't afford quality early learning themselves.
To help facilitate the effort and to give families the information they need about the importance of developmental opportunities, the city is establishing a new Office of Early Learning. Berke also announced the Family Friendly Workplace Challenge in which employers would commit to making their businesses more attractive to working parents. Chances are, if the businesses are conducive to parents, parents will be able to spend more time with their children through the likes of flex time, on-site child care and paid parental leave.
The city can't fund excellent preschool slots for every parent, nor should it. And it cannot incent the businesses to offer the perks to make more of them parent-friendly, nor should it. But Berke and the city are trying, with funds they can use and challenges they can issue to make a difference on the front end - before today's children find themselves at the wrong end of a bullet.
Will it all work? The mayor can make no guarantees, but he can guarantee one thing: Without some kind of action, nothing will change. And it must change. Because for Chattanooga to be all it can be, for it to truly deserve to be the Best Town Ever, it must be a city that tries to solve its most critical and pressing problems.