By Riley Phillips, First Coast News
he Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment held its annual assembly in Jacksonville Monday to meet face to face with elected leaders and address the needs of the community. This year marked ICARE’s 27th annual Nehemiah Action Assembly.
This year, ICARE celebrated Sheriff T.K. Waters and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for the work they did to reduce the number of murders by about half. According to JSO’s Transparency Portal, there were 121 murders in 2023 and 61 in 2024.
“It was down 50% in 2024 over the 2023 numbers, which was about 52 less people dying from criminal homicide. So we are celebrating saving those 50, 54, lives, people who are alive today who wouldn’t be otherwise,” Rev. Adam Gray explained.
Gray is the pastor at the Riverside Church at Park and King and a member of ICARE. He said these numbers are encouraging, and he attributed part of the success to group violence intervention.
“That focus, together with some other things that the sheriff did in rebalancing patrol routes and some other things that he talked to us about, some active policing, had a real impact in Jacksonville,” Gray said.
Waters attended the event Monday evening. He said he appreciated the praise from ICARE leadership, but he acknowledged the community effort that helped bring down the number of murders.
“This is a religious event. So I’m going to say, this is the Lord that’s helping us do this stuff. No doubt about it. Second, is to the community that are all involved in a lot of the things that we’re doing. We hear from them a lot more often, and when you hear from the community and they get results after they talk to you, that produces more community involvement,” Waters explained.
Waters also credited the work of group violence intervention as part of the reason for the success.
“We’ve been doing that since 2016, over a thousand visits. I don’t know of any other organization, I mean, people can talk, it doesn’t matter who they are, I don’t know of any other organization that’s going out knocking on doors and trying to prevent and intervene in the lives of young men that are finding themselves in difficult situations,” Waters said.
Members of ICARE also discussed affordable housing during this year’s assembly. They are pushing for the creation of an affordable housing trust fund that would help lower-income families. They want to work with Mayor Donna Deegan to develop this fund.
“We are asking the mayor to begin the political process. We know she can’t do it by decree, but to begin the process of working with us to do something called an affordable housing trust fund, which is a city grant that is then partnered with developer funds and also with nonprofit funds to create incentives to build housing for folks who are a little bit lower on the income strata, but these are still people with full-time jobs,” Gray explained.
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