The News-Gazette had a recent series on local gun violence, including a great deal of community input and commentary. Part 1 of the series is available here with links to the full five part series, additional commentaries and articles. The links at the top of each part also include some data comparing C-U to other similar municipalities (individually and together).
At the County level there were also discussions for raising rewards for tips through the Champaign County Crime Stoppers program to build off of the ongoing "gun bounty" work. The Champaign Coroner weighed in with another area coroner on dealing with so many young victims of gun violence and their families in the aftermath. WCCU had a review of gun violence more generally over the Central Illinois region here.
The Champaign County Community Coalition meeting in December didn't have quite as much bad news from the Chiefs' Reports. Excerpts from the News-Gazette coverage:
Tom Petrilli — who will be sworn in as interim Champaign police chief on Dec. 16 — shared the department’s “thankfully short” update: There have been 13 confirmed shooting incidents since Nov. 10, with only one involving a victim...
The city of Urbana is up to 104 confirmed shootings in 2021, with eight homicides. Eleven shots-fired incidents occurred in the last month, police Chief Bryant Seraphin said.
“That’s quite a few for us,” he said, adding that the city is now averaging 3.2 days between shootings. “We are continuing at a record pace.”
Most of the 11 incidents in the past month did not have injuries involved, Seraphin said, though three resulted in graze wounds. In one, more than 40 casings from rifle and pistol rounds were found at the scene, he said.
That full article here. The full Community Coalition meeting video is available here (agenda here).
Part 2 of the "News, Brews & Beatz" panel discussion on gun violence and youth programs is available here from WILL Radio. WILL had a preview of the discussion here. Part 1's panel discussion video is available here with previous Cheat Sheet links and additional information here.
The City of Champaign approved a "Community Gun Violence Reduction Blueprint" that includes a variety of measures to deal with gun violence and its underlying causes. From Illinois Newsroom:
The city’s new Community Gun Violence Reduction Blueprint infuses $3.2 million in the first year into existing efforts from the housing authority, school district, reentry groups and more.
It also aims to fill gaps in Champaign services compared to other cities. For example, the city would hire two street outreach workers, who would mentor and mediate conflicts between people at risk of becoming shooters or shooting victims.
This money comes from the American Rescue Plan. Mayor Deborah Feinen said that the pandemic relief dollars give the city a chance to find more.
Full article here. An overview of the blueprint is available in the Study Session report on the City of Champaign's website here. The News-Gazette also had a Q&A article on the City's new Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) plan that will go into operation this year. For more updates on Champaign and Urbana's work to address gun violence, see this month's City of Urbana and City of Champaign Cheat Sheet posts.
There was coverage on the University's collaboration with Champaign-Urbana on gun violence from the News-Gazette here. A couple excerpts:
From a developing app to increased police technology, the University of Illinois has some crime prevention strategies it’s ready to share...
The planning stages for [working to adapt an app-based tool to help reduce crime and violence in the C-U community] extend into July 2022 — researchers have conducted more than 25 interviews with community stakeholders, including city staff of Champaign and Urbana, the CU Trauma and Resilience Initiative, the Don Moyer Boys & Girls Club, the United Way of Champaign County and many more, according to documents shared with the News-Gazette...
As part of the university’s Call to Action proposals, born out of the George Floyd protest movement of 2020, the UI established the “Campus-Community Compact to Accelerate Social Justice,” which will try to address the origins of violence, which are “often interconnected with inequity,” the email noted.
More projects and information at the full article here.
Illinois Newsroom highlighted the C-U Citizen Access analysis of gun violence trends a couple weeks ago. They included maps and other data, with even more at the original C-U Citizens Access link:
Gun violence in Champaign has steadily marched westward over the past three years as shootings have increased in neighborhoods north and south of West Springfield Avenue, especially in or near several apartment complexes, according to a review of police data over the past seven years by CU-CitizenAccess.org...
CU-CitizenAccess analyzed police data on shooting reports dating back to 2015. This included one self-inflicted gunshot wound because it was during an incident in which another person was wounded and later died. The outlet also filed a public records request for detailed shooting reports between 2019 and the fall of 2021.
The analysis shows that over the past several years, reported shootings in Champaign have pushed into other areas that hadn’t seen gun violence, such as Holiday Park and areas further west and north past Prospect Avenue, such as the 1300 block of Fairfax near Salt and Light Champaign.
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