‘We can get rid of the violence in our community,’ former Macon mayor says

Former Macon Mayor C. Jack Ellis held a news conference Monday afternoon at Rosa Parks Park in Macon to denounce gun violence and to call for the community to try to solve the problem.

Ellis said he was speaking out about gun violence that has happened in Macon this year, but “especially for what happened this weekend.”

One of six people who were shot late Saturday and early Sunday died later at the hospital. The victim’s father also died of a gunshot wound three months ago.

“We have been to too many vigils at their homes. We have been to too many funerals. ... One person being killed due to gun violence is too many, but we already have had 20 ... homicides in our community.”

Ellis was joined by Macon-Bibb County Commissioner Virgil Watkins Jr., who serves on the public safety committee, and Robert Curry Jr., president of the Golden Group senior citizen organization. Curry didn’t speak during Monday’s event.

“So we come together today to call for the entire community, not just the black community, especially the faith-based community ... to help us move on the hearts and minds of the young people in our community that’s committing a lot of the crime and the mayhem that we see going on,” Ellis said.

Earlier in the day, Ellis said he met with Bibb County Sheriff David Davis so the sheriff knew that “we stand with him because what we do know is that the police cannot do it all. We know that the county commissioners can’t do it all.”

But if they joined the education community and the business community “we can get rid of the violence in our community,” he said. “We want to say enough is enough.”

The leaders in the community should get together and “come up with a long-term strategy to deal with the problems in our community as well as reduce, if not eliminate, crime in our community,” he said.

Watkins said a lot of the kids committing gun violence “don’t have good jobs” and that there were kids “off for a long time last week (due to power outages) without adequate resources of diversionary programs for them. It was a very stressful week for a lot of folks ... and I think we saw a lot of that culminate into this weekend.”

People should find a way to deal with such issues “without resorting to guns,” he said.

He agreed it takes all facets of a community to work on the gun violence problem.

“It requires sustained viability of any program,” Watkins said. “It’s not a six-month fix. It’s not a one-year fix. ... It requires a whole mind-set change.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2017 at 5:18 PM with the headline "‘We can get rid of the violence in our community,’ former Macon mayor says."