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Activist Erica Ford: Feds Running Guns into Inner Cities to Help Facilitate Soaring Murder Rate

‘They didn’t have money to buy these fireworks’

EXCERPT:

FORD: “What we do in our community is we go out and meet, we work with those who have the highest potential to be shot or shoot someone. And we work with them and we give them the resources and we put more people on the street. We go and we meet with the police and tell them what we don’t want to happen in the community. What we need to see happen together. And we, to the point where we have disband — not disband but there was a situation where the young people were shooting fireworks at the police. And the police called my chief of streets and was like, 'What should we do?' He was like move the police out of here. Once you get the police out of there, who are they going to shoot the fireworks at? We’ll take care of the young people. Remove your police from our community. And they did. And there was no incidents of shootings or police incidents in our community that night. And -- and there was in different parts of the city. And so if you believe — our stuff works. We’ve made New York the safest big city in America. We’ve reduced violence over 63 percent and it is something that works when you put those who are closest to the problem, resources into them, resources into the community, because as Maya Wiley said earlier, it’s poverty that we’re talking about. It’s poverty. And so, you can’t address poverty with violence.”
 

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