Community leaders, Fort Worth organizers and law enforcement gathered Tuesday at a Beyond the Badge community meeting, urging residents and local groups to act now on a surge of youth gun violence before further lives are lost.<\/p>\n
Fort Worth Police Officer and Spokesperson Tracy Carter addressed an auditorium of organizations and community leaders.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to have to do something,” Carter said. “If not, we’re going to be in trouble.”<\/p>\n
Carter stressed that gun violence has a way of becoming personal without warning.<\/p>\n
“It doesn’t affect us until it affects us,” he said.<\/p>\n
A family forever changed<\/p>\n
For Mercy Mungwa, a registered nurse and mother, that moment arrived without warning on Jan. 30. Her mother, 66-year-old Magdalene Mancho, was inside their South Fort Worth home when a stray bullet struck and killed her.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t know it was a bullet. We don’t own a gun. I don’t even know how to use one,” she said.<\/p>\n
Mungwa said her mother had been in the house playing with her daughter when the shot came from outside.<\/p>\n
“Ever since then, our lives have been so sad,” she said.<\/p>\n
Authorities later arrested a 14-year-old in connection with the shooting, according to Mungwa.<\/p>\n
The deaths are part of a broader pattern Carter says he is seeing across the city.<\/p>\n
“I’m seeing a lot of youth that are exposed to guns and don’t know how to handle guns and shouldn’t be handling guns,” he said.<\/p>\n
Last week, 15-year-old Prince Washington was killed in a drive-by shooting. On Easter Sunday, 16-year-old Jaydon Jones died in what investigators believe was an accidental shooting by his best friend.<\/p>\n
Community voices call for intervention<\/p>\n
Teena James of Safe in the Six said the signs have long been there.<\/p>\n
“The Bible says warning comes before destruction; our children are constantly warning us that these things are happening,” she said.<\/p>\n
Carter said he believes part of the problem is the lack of support system, and positive role models to show up for kids who need it.<\/p>\n
“Everyone is looking for family,” he said. “If you don’t find it at your house, you’re going to go somewhere else to find it.”<\/p>\n
Patrick Brown, head of the Southside Hornets Athletic Association, said the normalization of gun violence among young people is itself a problem. He described a moment during one of his football practices in the Morningside area when someone fired six or seven rounds into the air nearby.<\/p>\n
“The kids that are normally in that area, never moved, kept playing football. The ones not from that area completely stopped and some of them even ducked,” said Brown.<\/p>\n
Other organization leaders said the goal is to reshape what the community represents to its young people.<\/p>\n
“We don’t want to be known as the hood \u2014 we want to be known as a neighborhood where we’re caring, and we look out for each other and we’re community.”<\/p>\n
Beyond the Badge is a Fort Worth Police Department community policing initiative designed to build relationships between officers and residents through regular meetings and collaborative problem-solving. Tuesday’s session drew organizations from across the city.<\/p>\n
The meetings are the first Tuesday of every month and they focus of different topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Community leaders, Fort Worth organizers and law enforcement gathered Tuesday at a Beyond the Badge community meeting, urging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[447,74376,11477,116,118,117,5603,91124],"class_list":{"0":"post-239533","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-community","9":"tag-community-leaders","10":"tag-community-meeting","11":"tag-fort-worth","12":"tag-fort-worth-headlines","13":"tag-fort-worth-news","14":"tag-gun-violence","15":"tag-tracy-carter"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}