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At meeting on Winston-Salem shootings, local business owners cite lack of police presence. In response, sheriff offers assistance

Downtown Winston-Salem business owners and workers expressed fears and frustrations to city leaders Thursday about the lack of police in the area during a special meeting called to address violent crime including two deaths.

Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership President Jason Theil opened the meeting with a recognition of the two people who lost their lives in shootings on Burke Street this year, Quante Donnell Wilder, 35, and Kane Jacob Bowen, 30.

Speakers from the business community cited a lack of police presence downtown. Tiffany Howell owns Burke Street Pub. She wants to see more officers on streets where businesses are open late.

“And I hope and I pray, that we leave this meeting today with a solution and police presence that we pay for as well as these taxpayers pay for in these high-populated entertainment areas at night,” she says.

Vivian Joyner, a co-owner of Sweet Potatoes Restaurant on Trade Street, says downtown needs more community policing. She says 20 years ago she knew the names of most of the bike patrol officers. Today she knows two, and she doesn’t think many officers know who she is.

Joyner says officers need to engage more with people in the downtown area.

“That’s community policing so stop talking about it," she says. "Be about it.”

Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough said he and Winston-Salem Police Chief William Penn, Jr. are putting together a plan to have county personnel help the city officers. That would be a break from tradition. Typically, deputies serve areas outside of the city limits.

Arrests have been made in both Burke Street slayings. 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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