New initiative aims to reduce violence in Chattanooga, create more opportunities for minorities

Dennis Clark is still healing after his brother was shot and killed in 2016.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jeremy Clark died on Glass Street at about 1:20 a.m. on July 29, 2016. Prosecutors said he was a known member of the Gangster Disciples, and gang retaliation played a role in the killing that stemmed from a gang dispute that is still brewing today.

Adrian Nixon, 32, was charged with first-degree murder and reckless endangerment. The case is still winding its way through the court system.

At the time of the killing, Dennis Clark was running for the Tennessee House District 28 seat. His brother's death came less than a week before the primary election.

One of the ways Clark has chosen to deal with his grief is to try to save lives, especially those of young black men, he said.

"So that other families and other mothers don't have to bury their loved ones, their sons or daughters," he said Tuesday.

Today, Clark is spearheading a new effort to reduce violence and create opportunities for minorities in Chattanooga.

"It is a public health crisis what's happening in Chattanooga," he said. "Unfortunately, in Chattanooga, what's happening is that we've become numb to the fact that we still have high death rates of African American males in concentrated areas."

Parts of the city, such as East Chattanooga, see a higher number of shootings each year, records show.

In an effort to understand why that is, Clark gathered a team of people to talk about the underlying issues - mental illness, economic struggles, family unit problems, gang involvement - and how to address them. The discussions have been ongoing for about a year, he said.

"Our city is really good at doing homework, but not research," he said. "We're really good at discovering other cities' best practices, but not what's necessarily a best fit for Chattanooga."

So he created the Chattanooga Urban Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization aimed at addressing those problems by leveraging data, research and mental health best practices.

For the past few months, Dennis Clark and his team have been collaborating with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's political science and public service department to analyze the city's crime data and brainstorm ways to address the problem - why people engage in violent, risky behaviours.

"Where we started, really, was we took the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies report that was done in 2012 that looked at Chattanooga's gang problem once it emerged during the recession and post recession," said Christopher Acuff, assistant professor of public administration. "We took that as baseline data and looked at the issues [students] identified, whether it's inequities in terms of income or opportunities or education - a lot of the things that lead to people seeking gang membership."

Students then would come up with policy proposals to address those issues, and Acuff told his students to "be as creative as possible."

Those proposals will be pitched to a community panel of judges on Dec. 9 at 6 p.m. in the Chattanooga City Council chambers. The winning proposal will be introduced as legislation before the city council or submitted as a proposal in the city's budgeting-for-outcomes process.

But it won't be the first effort to try to curb violence in Chattanooga.

Mayor Andy Berke launched the Violence Reduction Initiative, or VRI, in 2014 in an effort to combat gang violence. The premise was that police call in gang members and offer them a choice: renounce violence and get access to job training and a variety of social services, or stay in the gang life and become a target of law enforcement. Results have been mixed, but in 2018 the city saw a significant decrease in shootings.

However, access to social services has been spotty.

The city declined to renew its contract with nonprofit Father to the Fatherless, or F2F, in 2018 because council members said they didn't have enough data to show how the organization had helped with providing services for the VRI. The nonprofit's director has said the organization did provide city officials with information, though.

Berke previously told the Times Free Press that social services have great downstream effects, and said he believes providing consistent social services is not crucial to the VRI's success. In the mayor's view, providing gang members with an option to walk away from that lifestyle gives law enforcement officials credibility when they implement harsher-than-usual consequences.

"The idea behind the social services component is that it establishes trust with the community," Berke has said, adding that the lack of social services has not had a direct effect on gun violence in the city.

For Clark, though, he said he and his team "believe to reduce violence, you've got to increase opportunities."

But he doesn't want officials to think he's being critical of the city's efforts. He was involved in Hope for the Inner City - another social service provider for the VRI - and early on with Father to the Fatherless, and he actually commends Berke for trying to address the violence, he said.

"The mayor has a vested interest in seeing people do well and seeing crime reduced. I believe in that," he said. "I think they will be eager to look at our proposal."

Berke's office said the city "absolutely welcomes ideas from the community," but declined more specific comment because the city "generally refrains from commenting on potential offers from nonprofit agency partners this early in the [budgeting-for-outcomes] process."

As it stands now, Clark said the initiative needs about $250,000 to get started. But not all of that money would have to come from the city, he said. It would be funded, in part, through community donations, grants and hopefully by the city. It would cover the salaries for administrative staff, as well as something he calls the "opportunity investment fund."

"These are direct dollars that go to people on our program for different social services," he said.

For example, if someone needed help getting their driver's license reinstated - possibly for not paying a traffic ticket - that money would be there for that, which would help them avoid possible arrest and "getting into the cycle of criminal justice."

"We discovered that if we can give you [money] to get your license reinstated, we're making a big difference," Clark said. "We're removing some of the social barriers."

During Tuesday night's council meeting, Dennis Clark spoke to council members to attend the institute's pitch night.

"This initiative is near and dear to our heart," he said. "I'd love to invite all of you to come and hear these political science students who have been researching this problem and the solutions and how we plan to implement them."

Contact Rosana Hughes at rhughes@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327 with tips or story ideas. Follow her on Twitter @HughesRosana.