The increase in gun violence plaguing the country is something that Henderson Police Chief Marcus Barrow thinks a lot about, but he said he and his officers often are frustrated by the process to get offenders off the streets and successfully processed through the judicial system.
It’s illegal to discharge a firearm within the city limits, but that hasn’t done much to curtail the use of guns and shootings.
On Tuesday, the City Council adopted a resolution declaring gun violence a public health issue. One of the upsides of having this resolution in place, he said during Thursday’s TownTalk, is increased access to grant funding to combat a wide-ranging list of underlying issues that contribute to gun violence.
“We have a crisis and it’s a health crisis,” Barrow said. A mental health crisis, to be precise. He cited as an example that in a 12-month period, his officers were involved in 538 involuntary commitments. And that’s just for the city of Henderson – it doesn’t include numbers from the sheriff’s department.
Other underlying societal issues feed the problem, he said, from socio-economic issues to substance abuse. According to CDC statistics, men account for 87 percent of firearm deaths in the U.S. Firearm deaths are the leading cause of premature death, he said.
Councilwomen Melissa Elliott, founder of Gang Free, Inc. and Sara Coffey initiated the resolution, and Barrow said the audience present in Council Chambers on Tuesday applauded when the resolution passed.
“She did a great job with it,” Barrow said of Elliott’s work crafting the resolution. “She sees a problem and tries to address it.
Now it’s time for the community to address the problem, he said. “We need to get motivated behind this thing,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of the mindset that we’re going to arrest our way out of this.”
His department has secured various grant funding to help tackle the problem, and Barrow discussed one program that was able to go live in January 2022. The process took almost two years, but now his officers can enter data about shell casings into the database and within 24 to 48 hours, get results on whether the gun has been used in other crimes.
This is a great improvement on the six months’ to a year that it could take to get results from the SBI, Barrow said.
“I think we do a really good job here at the police department,” Barrow said. Currently, there are more than 1,800 firearms in the police evidence room. Federal indictments are on the increase in the past five years, but the backlog of cases in the court system means sometimes lengthy waits for convictions.
“We’re trying to do our part,” Barrow said, “keeping our finger stuck in the dam.”
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