Operation: Safe Community, a crime reduction initiative, is hosting a Community Town Hall to collect feedback on their work and, hopefully, build additional support.
The meeting with be held on April 9 from 10am to noon at the LeMoyne Owen College campus. Topics the organization hopes to discuss range from policing strategies and gun violence to property blight and offender re-entry. The community is encouraged to participate in breakout sessions that will emerge on the topics.
The town hall meeting will be facilitated by Harold Collins, Leader of the Operation: Safe Community initiative. Memphis Mayor Jim Stickland and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell are also expected to attend. The format will include opening remarks from elected leaders and concurrent break-out sessions for attendees to discuss individual crime issues, such as domestic violence, gangs, youth violence, reentry, alternatives to detention, and blighted properties.
“This is the first community town hall meeting to ask our citizens to help in the development and implementation of crime reduction strategies for Operation: Safe Community III,” said Collins. “We need your collective voices and ideas to meet our challenges head on and to make Memphis a safe place to live, work and play.”
The event is free and open to the public but all are requested to R.S.V.P. to
[email protected].
Launching in 2007, Operation: Safe Community (OSC), spearheaded by the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, is an organized network of more than 100 partner organizations. Since then there have been two five-year plans that have met with considerable success. From its baseline year ended December 2006 to December 2015, Operation: Safe Community has seen major violent crime fall by 16.5 percent and major property crime fall by 34.8 percent county wide.
Former Memphis City Councilman Harold Collins is now a consultant with Operation Safe Community and is drafting the third version of the crime fighting plan. A primary focus of his plan will be reducing violence within certain apartment complexes and housing communities, and communicating with the owners of such concerning apartment complexes to make them part of the solution.
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