Philadelphia gun violence victims find support through residents and nonprofits

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

America is exceptional in many ways. Unfortunately, gun violence has become one of them. There are more guns than people in the U.S., and gun violence has become the leading cause of death for America's children and teens, something that is not the case in any other affluent nation. Suicides by gun kill more than 20,000 people a year - in fact, every 11 minutes. By the time you finish hearing this story, someone in the U.S. has been killed or killed themselves with a gun. But Americans are fighting back. Across the country, addressing gun violence has become a personal mission and a political priority.

NPR's MORNING EDITION went to Pennsylvania to hear how people across that state are addressing this public health crisis. We started in Philadelphia, and here's where I have to let you know that in this piece, you will hear the sound of gunshots and sirens.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Cars, stand by. Cars, stand by. 3700 North 15th street. Shots fired at police.

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MARTIN: It's become almost a soundtrack to daily life in some parts of the city - gunfire, sirens, tears.

TANYA HORTON: You know, when somebody lose they son or daughter, I mean, trust me, you feel for them, you know? But you don't understand they pain until you in they shoes. And let me tell you, these are shoes that you do not want to fill.

MARTIN: That's Tanya Horton. She lost her son, Tyron Alexander, in October of 2020, one of 499 people killed in Philadelphia that year, most of them with a firearm. And he was one of more than 45,000 people who died via guns that year in the U.S. He was 29, a father of two, and he had just stopped by his old neighborhood to see friends when he was robbed and shot. Tanya got a call at work that he'd been in an accident, but when she rushed to the hospital to see him, something felt off.

HORTON: Was a lot of my family out there, and I was like, you know - for this to be a little accident, there's too many family members here, you know? And as I approached closer - and that's when they told me what happened. And when they first told me, it didn't register, you know? And I proceeded to go over to the emergency room door, and a police officer stopped me and told me I couldn't go inside. That's when it hit me that my son was gone - the worst day of my life.

MARTIN: Tanya told us what keeps her going is a network that she never wanted to join but now can't live without, especially a support group called Mothers in Charge and, of course, two smiles that remind her of her son.

HORTON: My grandchildren depend on me, so when I see them, and I give them a hug, it's like I'm still hugging my son.

MARTIN: In 2020, murders in Philadelphia were up 40% over the year before, and even that number would be surpassed just a year later in 2021, when the city set an all-time record of 562 homicides. Between 2020 and 2023, close to 2,000 people were killed in Philadelphia, and the overwhelming majority of those deaths were from guns.

KEVIN BETHEL: The reality is we are one of the poorest cities in the nation, you know, as the - urban cities.

MARTIN: That's Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel. He's been in law enforcement in one capacity or another for some three decades now, so he's seen a lot. And when we asked him why he thought his city has been plagued with gun violence, he offered a lot of reasons, some specific to Philly, some more universal.

BETHEL: When you had COVID come into play where everything shut down, and the whole system shut down, and then we shouldn't be surprised 'cause we knew those efforts - keeping kids in school, making sure you're making connection, you having a trusted adult in your life - all those elements kind of start to peel away.

MARTIN: But Bethel thinks there's more to it than COVID lockdowns. He also thinks that access to guns has just gotten easier in recent years because of ghost guns, guns made from kits, and even bought with some of the money the government poured into communities to cushion the blow of the pandemic. However people get them, it's clear there are more weapons around than ever. He says the Philadelphia police have confiscated an average of 6,000 firearms every year over the past three years.

Bethel says by some measures, things are moving in the right direction. Homicides last year were down 20% from the prior year, and he credits the city's significant investments in conflict prevention and resolution, along with the ongoing work of community groups.

BETHEL: We have partnerships with the community to help us build those bridges but really, really being very intentional. I think part of the work in policing now is to own that space, make sure that we're really, really embedded in the community.

MARTIN: The city faces headwinds. Like many other police departments around the country, Philadelphia is struggling to recruit and retain police officers, which is another reason Bethel believes community engagement is so critical. Gun violence in the city has given rise to something of a cottage industry of nonprofits and community organizations. Rickey Duncan is leading one of them.

RICKEY DUNCAN: I'm a actionist, not a activist. Activists do a lot of talking. We try to do a lot of working.

MARTIN: Duncan is the executive director of New Options, More Opportunities, known as NOMO, an organization that does a little bit of everything - job training, mental health counseling, mentorship, violence prevention and intervention work. Like so many others, Duncan has a personal story that led him to that work.

DUNCAN: I wanted to repent for the people that I hurt, whether it was physical, mentally, emotionally, because, you know, I took a lot of losses when I was in prison. I lost my grandmother to cancer, so she was a co-victim of my crime. She got sentenced when I got sentenced, but hers was a death sentence that I didn't - you know, I didn't know.

MARTIN: Co-victim was a term we heard over and over again, meaning someone who wasn't physically hurt themselves in a gun incident but has had to live with the fallout, a fallout that can be lifelong and send ripples through multiple generations. The first place we heard the word was in a cozy basement office about 20 minutes north of downtown Philadelphia in Germantown, an historic area that's become the scene of a number of shootings. The office, filled with comfortable chairs, colorful drawings, and inspirational messages, belongs to EMIR. It stands for Every Murder Is Real.

CHANTAY LOVE: I was researching what happens after a war. What happens to a country after a war? - the devastation, the despair, the hopelessness, the poverty, the pain. And it resembled my neighborhood. It resembled Germantown.

MARTIN: That's Chantay Love. EMIR is also named after her brother, who was shot to death in March 1997. EMIR is part of that cottage industry we told you about, to support people with a family member who has been killed or injured by guns. Chantay and her mother both trained as counselors so they could do this work, and the group offers other supports like help with funeral expenses.

LOVE: Someone gets harmed, someone is bleeding, you don't just put a Band-Aid on it. You fix the root cause of why are they bleeding, and you invest in that.

MARTIN: EMIR, NOMO, Mothers in Charge - most of which are run with a combination of grants and volunteers - are trying to invest in solutions. But that invites the question, why are solutions so hard to come by? Why is this problem so intractable to begin with? And why are volunteers driving solutions and not, say, the government? The nonprofit Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia is trying to bridge that gap.

NATASHA DANIELA DE LIMA MCGLYNN: Our agency is part of the response between federal government, state government, city government and then local. In the aftermath of any mass violence, they set up community resiliency centers. So our organization's the holding agency to kind of set that up.

MARTIN: That's Natasha Daniela de Lima McGlynn. She's the executive director of AVP. It's contracted by the district attorney's office to provide services to victims.

DE LIMA MCGLYNN: It's representative of what is going on here. There's a lot of violence and a lot of grief. But you - more often than not, you'll see a lot of folks form a nonprofit in the aftermath of losing their loved one.

MARTIN: Dorothy Johnson-Speight founded Mothers in Charge after her son was shot to death in a dispute over a parking space. She's become a leading voice in the conversation around gun violence in Philadelphia and even the country, as evidenced by a recent invitation to the White House. And while she agrees that elected officials could do more, she is unwilling to wait for the government to act.

DOROTHY JOHNSON-SPEIGHT: Well, our goal is to be out of business. You know, we don't ever want to forever do this work. But there are lots of things, and I wish there was just one thing that I could say, OK, if we did this, the violence would end. But it's such a complicated issue and so many causes, and it's so many things that contribute to the violence that we see.

MARTIN: Some elected officials are making gun violence a priority. Last week, the Biden administration issued a new measure to close the so-called gun show loophole. Bills passed by the Pennsylvania State House call for the ban of automatic weapons and ghost guns. But as elsewhere, the state's legislature is divided. While Democrats have a slim majority in the House, the Pennsylvania Senate is controlled by Republicans, and they have declined to move any of the gun safety legislation passed by the House. For Pennsylvania's Democratic Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, that's not good enough.

AUSTIN DAVIS: I think the question is how many people are going to have to die until we get Republican legislators to pass common sense gun reform legislation?

MARTIN: Common sense to you means what?

DAVIS: Universal...

MARTIN: Background checks?

DAVIS: Universal background...

MARTIN: OK.

DAVIS: ...Checks. It means red flag laws. Lost and stolen law is another example, a piece of legislation that could make our community safer.

MARTIN: Polls show that the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, want stricter gun laws. But in the current political environment, that's not happening.

We asked the leader of Pennsylvania's Senate Republicans, Majority Leader Joe Pittman, for his take on all this. He declined to make himself or any other Republican senators available but sent a statement saying, quote, "we remain steadfast in our ongoing support of law enforcement, leadership of school safety initiatives, and examination of ways to provide greater mental and behavioral health support to help protect our communities," unquote. And he added that Pennsylvania currently has robust laws in place pertaining to guns.

With only slim hopes that politics will change the situation, some people are taking their futures into their own hands. Rashana Greer is one of them. She said she's lost too many people in her life.

RASHANA GREER: We've lost a cousin a few years back in South Philadelphia to gun violence. But just violence, period, has impacted our family. My grandfather was murdered, my father was murdered, and not all at the hands of gun violence but just violence, period.

MARTIN: Greer did the only thing she could think of. She moved not just out of the city, but out of the state. She did it to ease her mind and protect her children. But the worry remains. And as she sat in her mother's dining room in North Philadelphia, a dining room where she had done her homework and had holiday meals, there was one more thing on her mind - getting the rest of her family out, too.

GREER: We're working on it. That's the plan - my siblings, everybody.

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MARTIN: This look at Philadelphia and the epidemic of gun violence in the United States was the first segment in our series, We, The Voters. Tomorrow, we'll shed light on an issue that often remains in the shadows - suicides by gun. While homicides and mass shootings often create the headlines, suicide actually accounts for the majority of gun-related deaths each year. Tune back in tomorrow for an in-depth look at this often overlooked problem.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.