The goal of the Second Annual First Precinct Community Training Day was to get the community residents and local police officers to identify issues in their neighborhoods and to formulate a plan aimed at alleviating the issues. Towards really making this happen, representatives of various city agencies were present, to offer assistance and infomation on code violations, safety issues, truancy, etc, and probably 50 police officers, including all of the folks in charge. The city council representatives for the 6th and 7th districts, Reva Trammell and Delores McQuinn, also stopped by.

I was with a group assigned an area that included lower Fairmount, and the lil’&big Mosby areas. This worked, but it seemed like the issues up the hill on Mosby were a bit different that the issues that most of Fairmount has to deal with. We were tasked with identifying one issue and putting together a plan. Having to choose but one issue led us to focus on problems in Mosby, while if given a smaller area there are still enough fragile areas in Fairmount that residents of that area would have liked to have addressed.

As it were, an issue that we could all get behind ended up being that of truancy, with a large number of truant students being highly visible in the upper Mosby area during the day. The representatives from the Mosby Tenants Council reported that a significant numbers of young people wearing the CCP uniform are usually hanging around the street and the basketball court. Beyond the mere benefit of having these teends getting an education, there is also a connection seen between these truant teens and area vandalism, violence, and drug activity.

Each sector of the First Precinct was broken into 3 sections for this, so there should’ve been 6 groups for the East End. I saw other folks from around the area present, in other groups, hopefully they will chime in with some feedback on how it went.