CPS and Cincinnati City Council meet to discuss options

CINCINNATI (WXIX) – Thursday night, the Cincinnati Public Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods council committee discussed ways to prevent youth violence, especially in centers like Government Square.

The aim is to reduce the number of arrests in Transit Centers such as Government Square and to steer young people away from violence. Iris Roley is an advisor to the City Manager and says she volunteers her time at Government Square.

“You will see homelessness. You will see hunger. You will see the disappointment,” Roley said. “You’ll find that they can’t accept what they learned at school that day because getting home may be a bigger problem than going to school.”

Roley believes these are the underlying issues.

“From February until the end of the school year, 98 people were arrested,” Roley said. “80 percent of these arrests were for the first time. Why?”

Community partners helped provide food and support employment, and Roley says that helped reduce arrests, but the problem is deeper and underlying issues need to be addressed.

“What hasn’t happened is hunger has decreased. What is not happening is a reduction in housing,” Roley said. “There is no reduction in access to mental health, there are comforting ways to deal with problems, so we still have a long way to go.”

Emergency Communications Center Director Bill Vedra said his team is working to expand the Alternative Crisis Response model and said more help may be on the way. Vedra said they are in the process of hiring 12 new community responders to help connect youth and their families to services.

“To keep them out of the criminal justice system, we want them to reconnect to services or connect to services they’ve never been connected to before,” Vedra said. “We want to bring the same approach to areas like public transportation centers to get them to housing, to food.”

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