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In Light Of Gun Violence, Soglin Proposes Community Leadership Initiative

Madison Mayor: Neighborhood Leadership Key To Ending Gun Violence

By
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin
Bridgit Bowden/WPR

In light of recent gun violence, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin sent a memo to city council members, and department and division heads asking them to consider a proposal that would provide training and assistance to neighborhood community leaders.

After a man was shot and killed in Madison’s southwest side early Tuesday morning, Soglin announced the plan earlier than he originally intended. The proposal would fund a so-called “placemaking” effort, which Soglin said involves community members coming together and determining how to use community spaces. This is key to ending gun violence, he said.

“When strong community leadership appears, the guns and the violence decline,” he said.

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Soglin said police and elected officials can’t end gun violence alone.

“We provide support, we can provide resources, but the leadership in an instance like this has to come from the neighborhood, there has to be zero tolerance for gangsters and murderers carrying guns,” he said.

In the memo, Soglin wrote he discussed placemaking and community organizing with Fred Kent, the president of the Project for Public Spaces and Marshall Ganz, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. As a result, he said he asked for a proposal to increase placemaking capacity in the city of Madison with the goal of establishing ongoing permanent neighborhood leadership.

Soglin’s placemaking proposal calls for a budget of about $40,500 dollars, and he said anything that comes of this initiative would be funded by $400,000 already approved in the 2017 budget.

The proposal follows an uptick in gun crime in Madison, including the man killed in the driver’s seat Tuesday. Authorities say the 29-year-old Madison area man is well known to police because he has an arrest record for a variety of crimes. The man was shot a number of times and was found in the car parked on the city’s southwest side.

Madison police believe the victim was targeted, but do not know whether more than one person targeted him.