Joliet mayor says he wants community plan for nonviolence

Mayor Terry D’Arcy this week said he wants an action plan aimed at addressing youth violence in Joliet.

D’Arcy made his comments at the City Council meeting Tuesday as he and the council heard from advocates for a city pledge to nonviolence and more police presence in certain areas.

We need to come together as a community. I’d like to put together an action plan.”

—  Joliet Mayor Terry D'Arcy

The mayor said he has begun meeting with the police chief, fire chief, local school officials and the Joliet Park District to discuss measures that could be taken.

“We need to come together as a community,” he said. “I’d like to put together an action plan.”

What that would look like is unclear.

D’Arcy said Friday that there is no agenda to develop a program this summer, but he would like to see representatives get together in the next two or three weeks to begin putting together a plan.

His remarks at the council meeting were in response to those made during the public comments portion of the meeting.

Trista Graves Brown – whose organization Speak Up organized a vigil for 16-year-old Antoine Shropshire, who was shot and killed May 30 – talked about a teen boy standing on a busy street just hours before the council meeting with what appeared to be a gun in his hands.

“He had that gun pointed at different people,” Brown said. “There was no police presence.”

The Nonviolent Cities Project-Joliet also was at the meeting, calling on the city to sign a proclamation declaring Joliet a nonviolent city and pledging certain actions to combat violence.

“You’re speaking our language,” Doug Kasper of the Nonviolent Cities Project said to D’Arcy after the mayor called for a community task force.

But Kasper clashed with the mayor over the city’s resistance to signing onto the group’s proclamation. Nonviolent Cities Project has been trying to get the city to join the proclamation since at least October, which precedes D’Arcy’s time as mayor.

“Let’s get this proclamation signed,” Kasper said.

“We want Joliet’s plan,” D’Arcy said. “What I’m proposing is an action plan to make things happen.”

D’Arcy repeated a point that he made often during his campaign run before election in April: There are 43,000 people younger than 19 in Joliet saying that the city needs to pay more attention to them.

The mayor said that he attended the vigil for Shropshire.

“And it hurts to know that our community isn’t really working together,” he said. “We need to come together as a community. We’ve got these kids out of school. They’re probably not eating during the day. They’re probably not hydrating. They don’t have a lot of things to do.

“We need to create recreation for them. We need to have food for them and water. I think it’s going to take all of us working together.”