By Patricia Bradford | December 18, 2023
Every year thousands of people are stricken by gun violence in America. In 2021, the number reached an all-time high with 48,830 lives reportedly lost, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The national trend was also reflected in the City of Champaign as the community saw a 37% increase in shooting incidents in 2021 from the previous year.
“Champaign is getting a lot worse,” said Autumn Powell, a local Champaign resident. “I’m not sure if it’s just because I’m an adult now, and I occupy different spaces, but it didn’t seem like the violence was this frequent years ago.”
The City of Champaign reported 259 incidents of gunfire in 2021 which resulted in 16 homicides, 77 wounded people, and 142 instances of property damage, according to the Champaign Police Department.
In a written statement, the Champaign Police Department said in the face of this rise in violence, the city and the community took specific steps to not allow this violence to be normalized or to allow it to go unaddressed.
As a result, the number of gunfire instances significantly decreased as there have been 66 cases reported, as of October 2023.
The Champaign Police Department says this reduction has not been the result of any single agency or action, but a concerted effort on behalf of the City of Champaign, elected officials, law enforcement, and our community service organizations to see that the previously unmet needs of our community members are being met.
Although, as a second-year international graduate student, Hemant Mahendru said he didn’t expect safety to be such a problem when he moved here.
“I’ve definitely had to become more mindful of my surroundings since moving here,” he said. “If I hear a pop and I’m outside my house or if I’m in my house, my first thought would not be that it is a gunshot, and that’s probably because gun violence is not that big of a thing in a country like India, but here things are different.”
Mahendru lives just a few blocks away from two of the shooting incidents that took place on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus just earlier this year.
“I definitely do not think that the city is doing well enough to provide safety for the students, especially on campus,” says Mahendru. “I am surrounded by frats and sororities, so if a place like that is not safe I don’t know how people who are living in Urbana or people living a little bit towards the outside of campus are doing.”
However, the City of Champaign committed an annual $3.2 million dollars to address the gun and interpersonal violence that affects the community.
On February 15, 2022, The Champaign City Council approved the Community Gun Violence Reduction Blueprint as a strategy to effectively address the root cause of gun violence in Champaign.
The blueprint outlines three goals for the city of Champaign: 1. to prevent and reduce gun violence and promote community safety 2. enhance community engagement and support and 3. to ensure the most effective use of available and potential resources.
“As a department, it is our duty to ensure that every resident of Champaign doesn’t just feel safe, they are,” said the Champaign police department in a written statement. “Officers and leadership within the Champaign Police Department stands as a supportive partner of the community Gun Violence Reduction Blueprint and look forward to working collaboratively with our community to ensure that
these violent and disruptive acts continue to decline.”
A long-time resident and healthcare provider of the community says that some 45-page document will not fix the problem.
I’ve watched it [gun violence] honestly affect a lot of the people I grew up with,” says Marieme Ndoye. “There are several people I’ve grown up with that have passed on and lost their lives at such a young age for no reason honestly, but then also it’s a problem because there are others that I grew up with who are going to jail, facing big trials and different issues like that.”
Both Mahendru and Ndoye believe more efforts should be taken to make sure these incidents don’t happen in the first place. They both believe in better gun control laws that require extensive processing to obtain a firearm.
“As a Black woman it’s especially scary because it affects the community I’m in,” said Ndoye.
Gun Violence is the leading cause of premature death for black and latino men, according to statistics outlined by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In Champaign, the areas heavily affected by gun violence are predominantly Black and Latino.
Although the blueprint does not strategically outline how the community will effectively target those areas, there have been different outreach approaches from the Champaign Police Department and the City of Champaign.
It is widely known that America struggles with gun violence. However, the Champaign Police Department says through community policing, strong partnerships with the community and area organizations, and a new approach to addressing the root causes of the violence under the Community Gun Violence Reduction Blueprint, Champaign will continue to see a marked reduction in gun violence.