How to address Black gun violence after shootings in East Preston

Two homicides and a string of shootings over the last month are causing concern for residents of a rural Black Nova Scotian community.

Halifax District RCMP is investigating several shootings and two separate homicides in East Preston, N.S.

The latest was reported on Tuesday, when the body of a man was found inside a vehicle in the area. Two weeks earlier, police found the body of a man on the side of a road in the community.

Police are still investigating the circumstances of the latest cases and there haven't been any arrests, but it's believed the victims of the violence have been young Black men.

Halifax sociologist and social worker Robert Wright says these shootings represent a Black gun violence problem that needs a Black gun violence solution.

Wright spoke with Information Morning Nova Scotia host Portia Clark about Black gun violence and how it can be addressed.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you describe this as a Black gun violence problem?

Well, over the last number of years, Halifax has been identified as a city where we have a serious gun violence problem and it's not lost on anyone that a dramatic, disproportionate number of people who have been on both sides of these guns have been members of the Black community.

That tells us that this is not just a generalized gun violence problem, it is a Black gun violence problem. 

How do you put that in context? Where do you see that coming from? 

Well, I think that if we look at the history of people of African descent in this province, there's a history of enslavement, discrimination and marginalization and up until the 1960s or '70s, places like our Black communities were almost completely economically self-sufficient. People had subsistence agriculture, they took their goods to market and in the last 40 or 50 years, we've been rooted out of the economy.

These communities that were completely self-sufficient are now challenged to find spaces for their young people to be engaged economically and with marginalization and racism in education, we haven't been able to participate in education in that way. So there have been very real reasons why these communities have kind of been left behind and has caused people to get into a life of crime and with crime comes violence.

So when you talk about a Black gun violence solution, the antidote is addressing some of those issues with employment opportunities and educational challenges? 

Absolutely, absolutely. I think the thing that I've been thinking about in my mind, and it's been modelled in other parts of the world, is that we need to actually address the socioeconomic conditions that exist in the communities if we want to stop the consequences that come from those conditions. 

What does the government do when it needs to shut down a noxious industry like Northern Pulp, for example? They don't give notice and walk away. They create an entire tiger team of federal and provincial government employees who work around the clock, developing individualized plans for the people who work in that industry so that they can be transitioned to other parts of the economy or retired with dignity and even the owners of such an industry are given tens of millions of dollars and provincial assistance to sell off their industrial equipment and so forth. So these kinds of problems need solutions at that level.

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They're framed quite differently though, the Northern Pulp industrial transition and this issue of gun violence?

They're framed differently, but they're very similar, right, in terms of, there is a group of people who are involved in an industry, an economy, that is harmful to the community. Those individuals are not there by choice, they're there by circumstance and if we want them to get out of it, policing the heck out of that community is not going to address the fundamental problems.

There need to be real solutions, individualized solutions for individuals who find themselves trapped in those circumstances and pathways, dignified and well-resourced pathways, out. It's a very similar model.

The problem is the people at Northern Pulp are seen as citizens who need help. The people who are engaged in criminal activity are seen as criminals who need to be policed. 

You were a part of the Ceasefire Program, which was focused on eliminating violent behaviour among African Nova Scotian young people. What did you learn that could be built upon in a future or present program?

I wrote a paper about the nature of gun violence in Halifax in anticipation of the development of the Ceasefire Program and saw that there would be some challenges with the implementation here, scale and staffing. We didn't staff the program properly. We deployed very few people in very sparse areas. We didn't have the kind of supervisory support that was mobile and present to support the people in the field. 

We also didn't develop the kind of services that are needed to help a person transition from an entrenched life of crime to the regular economy and citizenship, so I think we learned a lot from Ceasefire even though it failed and it's kind of sad that when it fizzled nothing followed it.

Now, in the situation that we're in, what would you say to someone who wants to be part of the solution but perhaps the infrastructure isn't there?

I think it's time for us, and I know that there are organizations, Black and other organizations in the community, who have been thinking about this. Organizations like 902 Man Up, the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute, the [African Nova Scotian Decade for People of African Descent Coalition], John Howard Society. 

There are other organizations that are working in the field and it's really time for us to be motivated to get our heads together and for government to come to us, both federal and provincial to say, design us a better solution, a better intervention.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.