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Jillian Johnson
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Lesbian
DOB: N/A
Ethnicity: African American
Occupation: Politician (Democrat)
Note: Upon her election to office, she became the first openly LGBTQ person elected to the city council and, at the time of her swearing in, was the youngest member of the council.
Jillian Johnson: the first openly LGBTQ person to be elected to the Durham City Council.
Jill Johnson nowadays
/actually 2013 :) /
*in case you are wondering, I've put the watermark because this collage is a post on my instagram account. I hope you don't mind it*
Here's a plus from "Queen in Cornwall" the book
The city’s prosperity has garnered national recognition, often overshadowing the challenges faced by those who find it increasingly difficult to live here.
Last Thursday [2019-12-05], nearly two-dozen Durham service workers, some dressed in their work uniforms, descended on the Community Family Life & Recreation Center in Lyon Park to share stories of employers that make billions while paying them pennies, and yet steal the skin of that coin from them, sexually harass them, and create unsafe work environments.
They stood resolute at the podium, relaying their struggles to feed their children, keep a roof over their heads, and — though some are seriously ill — afford health care.
Their testimonies offered evidence of the Bull City’s ugly underbelly. The city’s prosperity has garnered national recognition, often overshadowing the challenges faced by service workers and community artists who were attracted to the inclusiveness in Durham’s DNA but who are now finding it increasingly difficult to live here.
“We are here tonight because workers’ stories are powerful,” said Cierra Brown, a McDonald’s worker and a moderator of “Working in Durham: A People’s Hearing,” which was organized by NC Raise Up/Fight for $15.
One of those stories came from Devin Evans, who showed up in a gray T-shirt and cap, both bearing a McDonald’s logo.
Evans said that, despite his long hours as a cashier, he enjoys his job. Prior to working at McDonald’s, he said, he worked at a fast-casual chain, where, at age seventeen, he had to contend with a “touchy boss” who rubbed his leg, pressed up against his body, and showed him inappropriate pictures during and after work. Evans left that job, but not before learning that at least fifteen other teenagers were subjected to sexual harassment by the manager, who threatened to fire them if they complained.
Wanda Coker says she’s worked at Burger King, where she’s now an assistant manager, for two decades.
“It took me twenty years to get to fifteen dollars an hour,” Coker said. She struggles with diabetes and kidney failure that requires her to be on dialysis three days a week because she needs a kidney transplant that she can’t afford. As a consequence of “a low paycheck to live on, [no] health benefits or paid sick days, my reward is a pile of bills I can’t afford to pay,” she said.
Nigel Williams now works at Chick-fil-A, but he used to work at McDonald’s, where he says he was regularly burned by “old, faulty equipment.”
“But we still came in and put in the work, [despite] the burns, and we need more money,” Williams said. “It’s really hard to save when you’re paid low wages every day, and you’re [living] check to check.”
Allan Freyer, the director of workers’ rights at the NC Justice Center, told the group that it’s important to see the big picture when discussing poverty wages, wage theft, sexual harassment, and unsafe workplace conditions.
“All of these problems are tools used by big, highly profitable corporations to squeeze workers’ paychecks, to break workers’ power, so that they can make more money for themselves and their investors,” Freyer said. “One way we see it happening is that workers today make sixteen billion dollars less in their paychecks than they did in 2004.”
He continued: “For poverty wages, two-thirds of the folks working at minimum wage are women. In North Carolina, women make about eighty-two cents for every dollar that white men make. For women of color, it’s sixty-two cents. It will take women of color more than a hundred years to catch up to white folks with the wages that they earn.”
And while minimum-wage workers are supposed to be protected from wage theft by state law, one out of ten workers actually makes less than minimum wage — and for those who rely on tips, three of ten do.
In addition, Freyer said, over the past seven years, there has been a 900 percent increase in working-conditions complaints that have not been investigated by the N.C. Department of Labor.
The workers say they want at least $15 an hour, but they also want to form a union to collectively bargain with area businesses.
A union, they say, would give them the means to push back against employers who brush aside their grievances and retaliate against them for complaining.
The city council members at the hearing — Javiera Caballero, Jillian Johnson, and Mark-Anthony Middleton — voiced support for the workers. While the city is prohibited by state law from raising the city’s minimum wage, the council recently approved a living wage for city employees and established a workers’ rights commission.
The wage increase for city employees, Caballero said, “sets the tone and expectation of what we expect for other employers in Durham. I think the bare minimum should be fifteen dollars.”
Freyer pointed out that there are actions local governments can take to help workers.
For instance, if a private business receives public funds but gets even one complaint about wage theft, sexual harassment, or unsafe working conditions, it shouldn’t “get a dime of public money.”
City officials can also target wage thieves for criminal prosecution by referring cases to the district attorney.
Freyer suggested that Durham service workers might draw more blood by filing complaints with the city’s new workers’ rights commission than with the N.C. Department of Labor, which has had an adversarial relationship with workers.
Instead, the commission can file those complaints on their behalf. The NCDOL might be more apt to respond quickly, he said, especially if faced with the prospect of unwanted media attention.
Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at [email protected].
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An in-depth look at the vicious smear campaign initiated by anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace and promoted by City Council members, that made Durham, NC, the first city in the U.S. to boycott police training in Israel.
How Did Durham Come to Single Out Israel?
How did the Durham City Council come to single out Israel and the Jewish people? How did we get here? This column seeks to answer these questions by highlighting the anti-Israel activism and fringe political positions of Durham City Council members that needlessly led to Durham’s boycott of police trainings with Israel.
I will also discuss the challenges of accessing the public record in Durham, the lack of transparency and accountability of the Durham City Council, and the bias and conflict of interest of high ranking members of the Durham Human Relations Commission (HRC).
Much of the information reported in this column is the result of my year long investigation which has included dozens of public records requests, meetings with Durham City officials, and attending a number of Durham City Council and Human Relations Commission meetings.
Mayor Steve Schewel
According to City Council member Mark-Anthony Middleton, “Our mayor [Steve Schewel] exclusively penned the statement we voted on.”
Mayor Schewel was a member of Jews for a Just Peace-North Carolina (JFAJP-NC) which was known for noxious anti-Israel activism such as protesting Israel on Yom Kippur – the holiest day of Judaism – and protesting an Israeli dance company visiting Durham. JFAJP-NC later morphed into the local chapter of the anti-Zionist JVP. Mayor Schewel has admitted donating to JVP.
Beth Bruch of JFAJP-NC and JVP, and campaign donor to Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson, protesting Israel on Yom Kippur.
When speaking at the largest Jewish congregation in Durham in October of 2018, Schewel was greeted with widespread anger and frustration and was repeatedly interrupted with pleas from the congregation to remove the specific targeting of Israel from the Council statement. Strikingly, this was Schewel’s very own congregation and it overwhelmingly rejected his anti-Israel foreign policy.
The mainstream Jewish community, including the Jewish Federation of Durham-Chapel Hill, the local synagogues (including Schewel’s own synagogue), many prominent community members, local rabbis, and even several holocaust survivors wrote strong letters opposing Schewel’s targeting of the Jewish state. An 87 year-old Holocaust survivor wrote that Schewel contributes to “hate and intolerance.”
A 2015 campaign report by “Steve Schewel for City Council” indicates that one of Schewel’s campaign donors is Thomas Stern, who was a JFAJP-NC leader and is now a local JVP leader. Stern, representing JVP and other local groups, lobbied Schewel and City Council members to boycott police trainings with Israel.
Members of The North Carolina Coalition for Israel, who filed the third lawsuit against Durham and city officials, have been recently speaking at City Council meetings on anti-Semitism. In a move that has hurt the Jewish community, Mayor Schewel limited some public commenters to just one minute to speak on this important topic, not the customary three minutes. A fellow member of Schewel’s synagogue decried this as “Jew time.”
Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson
Durham’s Mayor Pro Tempore, Jillian Johnson, has been an anti-Israel activist since at least 2002 while a student at Duke. There she signed DukeDivest which called on the university to “end military ties to Israel.” In 2002 she wrote a editorial in the Duke Chronicle in which she called for “military divestment from Israel,” yet admitted that her “argument can be used to promote divestment from dozens of countries.” Johnson explained, “but change must begin somewhere.” In other words, Johnson believes that targeting Israel – the only Jewish majority country on the planet – is where to begin foreign policy. Johnson clearly took this Israel first worldview into her role as a member of the Durham City Council.
“I don’t think the police department needs any additional officers to meet our goals. They already have them.”
A grassroots coalition working on behalf of young African Americans, the homeless, members of the LGBTQ community, and working-class residents played an integral role in the Durham City Council’s decision last Thursday [2019 June 6] to reject a $1.2 million police department request for eighteen more patrol officers, despite a sharp uptick in homicides so far this year.
Instead, the city will bring its roughly two hundred part-time workers up to $15.46 an hour, at the cost of about $650,000.
While deeply rooted community groups like the People’s Alliance supported and lobbied for the council’s decision, the Durham chapter of Beyond Policing — a coalition of ten local organizations comprising mostly eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds that want to divest from police and prisons and reinvest local resources in black and brown communities — was front and center.
Its members had spent months preparing for the vote: poring through city budgets, analyzing data, researching past council meetings, and lobbying council members one on one. They made their case during a public hearing the previous Monday. They also sent the council a fifty-page budget report, which included analysis of calls-for-service data and other police metrics. The report recommended that, instead of hiring additional police, the city fund a community-based wellness and safety task force “empowered to research and propose viable, cost-effective, long-term solutions to violence and harm.”
“We crafted a strong proposal for why we need Durham to invest in life-affirming services, not an unjustified expansion of the police force,” says Durham Beyond Policing spokeswoman Manju Rajendran.
The council voted 5–2 against adding eighteen additional officers, with Charlie Reece, Jillian Johnson, Vernetta Alston, Javiera Caballero, and Mayor Steve Schewel opposing the DPD’s request. Schewel then proposed a compromise of nine new officers, which the council turned down 4–3.
The council’s majority echoed some of the coalition’s findings. Reece says he appreciated that the recommendations highlighted “possibilities for bringing our community together to talk about what other types of initiatives might increase community safety and reduce harm in our neighborhoods outside the context of law enforcement.”
Reece adds that the department’s clearance rates and response times are better than the national average. Even though there’s been a 17 percent increase in crime this year, he says, “making police staffing decisions based on three months or even five months of crime statistics doesn’t really make a lot of sense, even if you believe that more cops means less crime.”
Johnson says the DPD doesn’t need more officers, as its clearance rates and response times “indicate that they already have the resources they need to respond to the increase in violent crimes this year . I don’t think the police department needs any additional officers to meet our goals. They already have them.”
Johnson points to a recent audit that found that, of all city departments, the DPD had the most employees who receive at least $10,000 in overtime pay.
“We could significantly reduce the number of overtime hours by filling the vacancies in the department,” she says. “We paid thirty-five thousand hours of overtime, but we had forty vacancies.”
The DPD has 547 budgeted positions for sworn officers, an increase of 47 — or nearly 10 percent — since 2006, most of which have been added since 2016. Since 2006, Durham’s population has grown by 27 percent and calls for service to the department have increased to 25 percent, although high-priority calls have fallen. The police department loses and has to replace about fifty officers each year.
According to an analysis Johnson sent to the rest of the council in late May, Durham’s police force currently has 19.9 officers per 10,000 residents, and the additional officers would have bumped that number to 20.2. The national average for midsize cities with between 100,000 and 500,000 residents is 16.9 officers.
“This means we already have eighty-three more officers than the national average for a U.S. city in our population range,” Johnson told her colleagues in an email.
In March, police chief C.J. Davis said she wanted to add seventy-two new officers over the next three years. After pushback from the council, last week’s request was scaled back to eighteen officers for a pilot program in East Durham.
Council member Mark-Anthony Middleton — who voted with Mayor Steve Schewel and DeDreana Freeman for the additional cops — says he’s frustrated by the perception that the extra officers are only needed because of rising crime or the increasing population.
“There are reasons to hire more officers that are not crime-related,” he says. “How long it takes someone to get a police report after a fender-bender, how long it takes police to secure a perimeter after an explosion like the one we had in downtown so that firefighters can get in there and save lives, or when there’s an Amber Alert and how quickly our officers can go out and look for our children.”
Middleton argues that calls for service and response times are down and clearance rates are up because the city has more boots on the ground.
“The idea is to not be reactionary,” he says. “Our residents should not notice a drop in service in order to spur us to increase staff. I want to be a proactive government, not a reactionary government, because we know the city is growing.”
Schewel says he understands the concerns about over-policing, but he trusts Davis.
“She’s done an incredible job of reforming the police department. She’s built trust in our communities of color,” Schewel says. The nine extra officers would let current officers “have a better work-life balance,” Schewel continues. “The long shifts are not good for the officer and not good for the community. But the council did not go for that.”
Rajendran calls that decision — and the council’s vote to spend $350,000 on eviction diversion — an enormous victory.
She says bringing the stories of Durham residents’ lives to City Hall “made enough of a difference to tip the vote toward justice” and away from “expanding the policing that harasses and harms our communities.”
Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at [email protected]. This story has been updated to correct the amount the city spent on the eviction diversion program, clarify that Schewel voted against the original request for eighteen officers, and add additional information about police staffing.
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“I think we need to determine whether these incidents are the result of a few bad actors or if there’s a culture within the company that encourages or enables harmful behavior.”
After the INDY brought to light allegations of harassment and discrimination against Allied Universal Security Services, Durham wants answers from the company it just awarded a $2.7 million contract to provide security for five downtown parking garages.
City staffers and elected officials say they were unaware of the lawsuits and criminal cases involving Allied when the council unanimously approved the contract in a work session on Thursday. The INDY first reported on the company’s troubling history of litigation on Thursday evening. On Friday, city officials sent the company a letter asking for specifics on how each case was resolved.
Thomas Leathers, the city’s chief parking administrator, sent the letter, which says the complaints are of “great concern.”
“The City of Durham values the fair and equitable treatment of all people, including employees, contractors, residents, visitors, stakeholders, etc.,” Leathers wrote. “… The City takes all complaints of this nature very seriously and will investigate fully and fairly.”
Typically, the council doesn’t take action during work sessions. But the Allied deal carried a sense of urgency because the previous contract for parking-deck security expired December 31. In the past, the city had contracted with a parking management company, which, in turn, hired guards. But it’s now bringing management of the five garages in-house.
During the lapse, city spokeswoman Beverly Thompson confirms, the decks were not staffed by security guards, though they were monitored more frequently by police.
In its search for a contractor, the city’s transportation department released a request for proposals, and six companies responded. Allied offered the cheapest price. Thompson says that, throughout the process, the transportation department worked with the company’s local division and was unaware of complaints brought in other cities.
“Now that we know, it’s all of our responsibility to look at it,” Mayor Steve Schewel told the INDY after Thursday’s vote. “It’s our expectation that our administration will bring us contracts we want to approve, and usually they do a good job. We'll have to take a look at whether this one is an exception.”
This contract was approved the same week that the council created a Workers’ Rights Commission, which will advise the city on how to improve working conditions. Labor organizers hope the commission will help protect workers from low wages, discrimination, and abusive work environments — in other words, the kinds of abuses that Allied is accused of.
One incident involves a 2018 religious-discrimination case, since settled, in which a Muslim security guard was fired after seeking a religious exemption to the company’s grooming policies. Another suit was brought by Allied employees in a New York City airport, who said they were harassed and pressured by supervisors for sex. The alleged abuse — detailed in an episode of This American Life — included supervisors denying female guards bathroom breaks for ten or twelve hours at a time. Last month, two Allied employees pleaded guilty to beating a black man at a Denver transit station, which employees had tried to cover up. Separately, Allied employees described to The Boston Globe a culture of harassing homeless people after video surfaced in December 2016 of a guard beating a homeless man in Boston.
Steve Maritas, organizing director with the Law Enforcement Officers Security Unions, which represents police and security professionals in the Northeast, says Allied is notoriously bad for labor.
“They’ve been buying up companies left and right to suppress wages,” Maritas says. “If the city wasn’t paying guards fifteen dollars an hour, Allied never would. They’ll pay their guys whatever they can get away with.”
Allied is now the largest security provider in the nation, with more than two hundred thousand employees at forty-two thousand client sites, including Duke University. (An Allied supervisor at Duke did not respond to a request for comment.)
“While we are unable to comment on pending litigation, Allied Universal is committed to equal and fair employment and maintains strict policies against discrimination and harassment,” the company said in an email to the INDY.
The city wants to know how serious Allied is about these values. In its letter, the city asked the company for examples of actions aimed at mitigating harassment and discrimination. The city specifically took interest in supervisor training programs and changes in grooming policies.
“I wasn’t aware of the allegations prior to the vote, and I’m glad they’ve been brought to our attention,” says city council member Jillian Johnson. “We’ve asked staff to look into the issue more. I’m most interested in how these issues were handled by the company once they came to light.”
Schewel says the contract didn’t initially raise red flags. Typical council conversations about prospective contracts focus on workforce diversity and pay, and Allied met or exceeded the city’s goals on both fronts.
“We have certain mechanisms to make it really easy to test for things we care about,” Schewel says. “The other stuff you have to hear about.”
Council member Charlie Reece suspects the company’s potential issues weren’t flagged because the contract and its related materials mostly refer to University Protection Services, a division of Universal Services of America, the company that AlliedBarton Security Services merged with in 2016 to form Allied Universal.
Leathers has asked Allied to respond to the city’s questions no later than January 30, and Schewel asked staff to update the council at its February 4 meeting.
“Of course, we don’t want anything like what happened at those other sites to happen here,” Johnson says. “I think we need to determine whether these incidents are the result of a few bad actors or if there’s a culture within the company that encourages or enables harmful behavior by staff.”
Contact staff writer Sarah Willets by email at [email protected], by phone at 919-286-1972, or on Twitter @sarah_willets.
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According to a report released days after nine-year-old Z’yon Person was killed, 662 people were shot in the Bull City between 2016 and 2018.
The Bull City had a gun problem long before nine-year-old Z’yon Person was shot to death on August 17, when someone in a burgundy Honda Accord fired into his aunt’s Ford Escape in North Durham. He was in the backseat, on his way to get a snow cone.
According to a Durham County report released last month, 662 people were shot in Durham between 2016 and 2018. The city saw thirty-two homicides last year, twenty-one in 2017, and forty-two in 2016. This year looks likely to eclipse them all. Most victims are black men. Most of those arrested for the killings are also black men.
In addition, according to the report, the suspects in most violent crimes are felons in possession of a firearm — itself a felony. These individuals are frequently the victims of violent crime, as well. And 46 percent of the people the Durham Police Department arrested on charges of possession of a firearm by a felon between 2016 and 2018 were known gang members, the report says.
“These are not random shootings,” Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry, who took office earlier this year, said at a press conference on August 22. “Neither Z’yon [nor] many of the victims this year were random in a violent city. We know that a small number of people are responsible for most of the violence in Durham County.”
The report recommends a “surgical and focused” approach to combating violent crime, “[fishing] with a spear instead of a net” to “target impact players and groups that are driving the violence” — including significantly increasing the frequency of warrantless searches of repeat weapons offenders who are on probation.
Local officials often point to the considerable resources deployed to keep young people out of gangs and give them a better chance for success. Wendy Jacobs, who chairs the Durham County Board of Commissioners, has pushed to treat gun violence and the trauma it causes children as a public health crisis. The city and county have crafted programs to offer former offenders, including former violent offenders, employment, housing, and mentorship opportunities. And they’ve promised that what they can’t accomplish by the carrot they will by the stick, via lengthy sentences for repeat violent criminals.
But watching that press conference, there was an inescapable sense that while the leaders present — Deberry, Jacobs, Sheriff Clarence Birkhead, Mayor Steve Schewel, Police Chief C.J. Davis, and U.S. Attorney Matt Martin — were dismayed by Z’yon’s murder and a recent uptick in violent crime, they knew there wasn’t a quick or easy answer.
Schewel lamented that the General Assembly has refused to pass gun reforms. Deberry said she had reoriented her office to focus on violent crime. The law enforcement officials talked about how closely they were working together. Davis said the DPD had boosted its homicide unit and tasked it with looking at “known offenders possibly involved in recent incidents.” (She also pointed out that Durham experienced record crime lows in 2018.)
In July, when the INDY reported that Durham had twice as many homicides in the first six months of 2019 as it had in the same period of 2018, Davis said the cases were neither related nor random: Most perpetrators and victims knew each other, but the incidents weren’t connected. Much of the violence over the last two months, however, appears to be gang-related, officials suggested at the press conference.
Four days later, six Durham men were injured in four separate drive-by shootings during a seven-hour period.
Many of the initiatives proposed by Jacobs and other officials are meant to help young people become more resilient amid trauma — a worthy goal, to be sure. Longer-term, city officials want to address the systemic causes of violence: unemployment, a lack of affordable housing, educational resources, and opportunities for residents who grew up surrounded by poverty and violence — also a worthy goal.
But these proposals will take years to bear fruit, and people are dying now. The city’s immediate response is to try to lock up the gang members responsible for the bloodshed — and then, presumably, the gang members who take their place.
In 2017, activist Solomon Burnette proposed a different solution, one noticeably absent from the conversation: a gang truce. In 2017, he applied for the Durham City Council seat left vacant when Schewel became mayor, pointing to his experience bailing young people out of jail, guiding them out of a gang mentality, and connecting them with educational resources.
“I would negotiate a gang truce to address violent crime in concert with necessary programming to address the employment, educational, and economic development issues that cultivate crime,” he wrote in his application. He told council members Charlie Reece and Jillian Johnson that he could “end the gang war with fifty jobs.”
Reece didn’t find Burnette credible, and the council ultimately selected Javiera Caballero for the seat. In an email, Reece says Burnette pitched the ceasefire as a “quid pro quo” for the position and says he never “presented any evidence, then or now, that he had the wherewithal to create such a gang truce.”
But someone else might. Diana Powell, the director of NC Justice Served, a Raleigh nonprofit that mentors young men in jail, says that two Durham gang leaders contacted her after Z’yon’s death.
“They said it’s not the OGs who are doing the shooting,” she says. “It’s the younger guys that are out there, and they want to do something to at least slow it down.”
Powell says she reached out to two Durham activists and suggested the gang leaders speak with them about forming a truce. The gang leaders, however, said they didn’t trust the activists. So Powell’s next step is to try to organize a ceasefire herself.
Ceasefires have been successful before. The most famous one began in Los Angeles in 1992. Fashioned after the 1949 truce between Israel and Egypt, it led to declining violent crime rates for a decade. Eventually, a new generation of gang members entered the scene, and the ceasefire eroded. Perhaps, observers have suggested, the city could have avoided its demise by addressing systemic issues such as jobs and poverty.
In Raleigh, gang leaders declared a truce in the summer of 2016. The ceasefire followed the death of gang member James Elvin Alston a year earlier, hours before he was set to speak at an anti-gang summit in Southeast Raleigh. But gang leaders had also listened to students at the predominantly black Torchlight Academy in North Raleigh, who told them that gangs were responsible for killing black people in their neighborhoods. Torchlight offered jobs to the gang leaders who agreed to the truce.
The year it went into effect, Raleigh police investigated twenty-three homicides. By 2018, that number dropped to seventeen.
Larry Walton, a former Blood leader in Raleigh, says the truce is still in effect.
“It’s still holding,” he says. “But you got people who don’t want to accept it.”
Torchlight director Donnie McQueen says that after the Raleigh truce, he wanted to expand the movement, including to Durham, but he was unable to put together the resources he needed.
“We might have been moving too fast,” he says.
Still, he wouldn’t hesitate to try again.
“If we can save just one life,” he says, “or reduce the number of guns on the streets, that would be important. A gun that shows up in Act One leads to a shooting in Act Four.”
Durham released its report on felons and firearms days after Z’yon’s murder. Much of the media focused on the fact that prosecutors had dismissed more than half of all cases of possession of a firearm by a felon between 2016 and 2018.
There’s a straightforward explanation for at least some of those prosecutorial decisions, according to a 2016 Durham County report on gun crimes: The DA’s Office doesn’t have the evidence.
“Consider the example of a gun thrown from a car containing four occupants,” the report says. “When the vehicle is stopped, all occupants deny that the weapon belonged to them. Without reliable fingerprints on the gun or a record of registration, it can be very difficult to successfully prosecute any of the occupants.”
The report released last month shows that little has changed: “Based on [the] number of felons in Durham who have firearms in their possession, it is apparent that [the] chances of not being caught far outweigh the chances of being caught with a firearm and facing prosecution for that offense.”
Guns are everywhere. They’re bought legally and on the black market. They’re purchased from straw buyers. They’re stolen — more than two hundred guns have been reported stolen this year, Davis said at the August 22 press conference, and her cops had confiscated thirty guns in the previous month alone.
This proliferation of guns turns domestic squabbles and drug-deals-gone-bad deadly — and gang turf disputes into rising body counts that inevitably culminate in collateral damage.
Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at [email protected].
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