The city of Asheville, North Carolina, has published a 60-day initiative to address crime following calls to defund the police.
The city stated that starting May 1, there will be an influx of police in city parks, as well as an increased focus on cleaning up public areas filled with needles and human waste, according to ABC News. Police officers started leaving in droves in 2021 after a push to defund the police overwhelmed the department and caused many officers to be assaulted, according to The New York Times.
In 2020, there were five days of unrest in Asheville following the death of George Floyd, followed by a public outcry to defund the police. Some residents also acted harshly toward the police, The New York Times reported.
“They said that we have become the bad guys, and we did not get into this to become the bad guys,” Asheville Police Chief David Zack told The New York Times.
“We are really facing a complex problem, and it takes time to figure out how to best address it,” said Asheville’s mayor, Esther Manheimer. Violent crime in Asheville increased by 17% from 2021 to 2022.
Asheville has seen their police force shrink by 140 officers since June of 2020, ABC News reported. They have since paid “hundreds of thousands” more in compensation in an attempt to attract new recruits, but they were only able to recruit 18 officers last year.
“Unfortunately, I’m getting more and more people that come by and say, ‘We just don’t want to go downtown anymore,’ and it scares me to death that we have that air about it,” said business owner Jan Davis at a community public safety meeting.
“The message was not about police reform, but, ‘We endorse violence against police,’” said Police Chief David Zack. “A lot of our experience is walking out the door,” Zack told The New York Times.
Now, the city is desperate to retain its officers and increase their presence amid crime increases in the city. “The approach that we’re taking is data-driven, and driven primarily with what we’ve seen with rising violent crime downtown but also rising property crime,” Chief Zack said to ABC News.
Along with increasing police presence, the initiative seeks to implement a community responder pilot program led by the fire department to respond to individuals suffering through a mental health crisis. They also plan to partner with community leaders to identify areas of public safety concern, and a focused effort to identify and remedy streetlight outages and remove graffiti, according to ABC News.
The Asheville Police Department did not immediately respond to Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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