INDIANAPOLIS — The Office of Public Health and Safety (OPHS) has plans to create a new position to combat youth violence.
Tony Lopez, the deputy director of Community Violence Reduction for OPHS said bringing in a chief violence prevention officer has been in the works for months.
Lopez said the new position will be key in reducing youth violence in the city.
“The main focus for them is going to be getting out in the city and partnering with organizations that do youth work, youth prevention work mainly,” said Lopez.
He explained the chief violence prevention officer will also come up with new youth programming and work with local groups to figure out what’s already being done so it’s not repeated.
Lopez said the new addition will hopefully reduce the 11 percent of homicides in 2023 that involved youth.
“A lot of the stuff we do is data-driven, and when we look at the data, the data doesn’t really show that youth violence is a big part of our homicides,” explained Lopez. “But when we look the youth violence strictly, we do see that youth violence is up. Youth violence was higher than it has been in a while. So when we see that, that’s when we’re like ‘Hey, something needs to happen.’ And we hear the community. The community is all about youth violence and wanting to prevent it and wanting to help the youth out. Hearing the community, looking at the stats, bringing somebody in to do that kind of work and be able to work alongside others in the community that are doing the work. It’s going to be key.”
Officials with OPHS said this new position will not only focus on preventing criminal homicides but accidental youth killings too.
“We had a lot of juveniles be shot and killed by accidental shootings,” said Lopez. “The prevention work is going to hopefully add in a piece with gun education and gun safety education. Different things like that. And when we look at those stats, we see yes, we had x number of individuals shot and killed, but how do we prevent that even happening? How do we prevent accidental shootings from happening? Providing gun locks, safe storage education and things like that for parents. But then also gun education for youth and having them understand what that is and the dangers of that.”
OPHS said the chief violence prevention officer will also oversee the department’s safe summer program and will help to expand that outside the summer months.
OPHS hopes to have the position filled by April 1st.
