Columbia officers sought more public participation on violence recommendations at the Mayor’s Task Force on Community Violence meeting Friday evening.
The task force invited eight police officers from the Columbia Police Department’s Community Outreach Unit to discuss local violence.
Second Ward Councilman Michael Trapp said one thing the task force recommended is creating an organized dashboard system for the city website that includes a biannual, digestible report that’s based on the task force’s progress. He said the report would be based on four pillars of recommendations: prevention, intervention, enforcement and re-entry.
“We can have more manageable information chunks for the casual reader, and the ability for people to go deeper when they want,” Trapp said.
Lt. Geoff Jones said the police department needs a program to organize all the information and resources. He said the police officers are going to go door-to-door looking at some specific issues that impact crime and listen to what people need and want.
Fifth Ward Councilwoman Laura Nauser said the dashboard system would make it easier for citizens to interpret monthly data.
“What we have here is very information intensive, so we really need to simplify so it’s easier for people to be able to skip to the information they need rather than having to read the monthly data,” Nauser said.
Nauser also said that along with an integrated dashboard system, the task force is preparing to write a biannual report of the progress and outcomes of the goals being implemented. She said people can easily look at those recommendations on the city website and find out where the community is entertaining those goals.
“It’s important for the citizens to know that as a community, we’re working on these issues,” Nauser said. “The implementation and the recommendations were not for just the city to take care of; this is the community issue and so the community has to help participate in reaching the goals of the task board recommendations.”
Nauser said the biannual report will also coincide with their budget discussions, so that will give more publicity to the reports and will also inform the council as the task force makes those financial decisions for the next fiscal year.
Trapp said the task force also plans to host an annual Mayor’s Task Force on Community Violence event, which will focus on some race-specific conversations.
“We need to come together as one community in regards to Columbia,” Trapp said. “We are at risk of becoming two communities with very different outcomes and very different life experiences, and that is a recipe for crime and disharmony and dysfunction. But if we can come together as one community, then we can work together to solve our shared problem sets.”
