As Topeka sees its deadliest year, community advocates say don’t expect change — demand it

Things were supposed to change in the wake of what had been Topeka’s deadliest year on record.

After the city saw an all-time-high 30 homicides in 2017, community members, advocates and leaders came together and for two years studied the issue, looking at several data points and trends.

They looked at research at the national level and evidence-based initiatives that seemed like they could and would work as well in Kansas’ capital city.

That’s why for many of them, the frustration and heartbreak are that much more palpable after Topeka again surged past 2017’s homicide count with 32 homicides as of Friday, with almost a fifth of 2023 still left on the calendar.

The Capital-Journal held a roundtable last week with several of those anti-violence advocates to discuss the rash of homicides in Topeka over the past 10 months.

They pointed to officials’ failures to enact and properly fund many of the recommendations made in the aftermath of 2017 — including one model of violence prevention that has found success in various other cities around the country, including Wichita.

‘There are a lot of Zoeys’ because of disinvestment in Topeka social services

The violent murders of this past year are directly attributable to many of those failures, specifically local officials’ deprioritization of such social supports as affordable housing, transportation and homelessness outreach, said Daniellé Twemlow, a local community advocate who has been involved with several anti-violence organizations and initiatives.

To be sure, lax and relaxed gun control measures have led to a proliferation of violent crime, Twemlow said, especially when legislators have focused on gun availability rather than responsible ownership.

But Topeka’s violence is much more multifaceted, she said, and crime prevention isn’t so much a policing issue but one of social needs not being met.

“There’s not one piece that is going to change all of it,” Twemlow said. “(Gun legislation) is a piece, but we also know this is a public health crisis, and it’s coming from people not having needs met in our community, not having resources dispersed in our community and not being able to thrive in healthy ways in the community.”

In the wake of 2017’s deadly year, a coalition of Topeka government and organizational leaders had identified increased and enhanced social services for the city's most in-need residents as one way to curb violence. Poverty breeds desperation, which leads to trouble, said Daniel Martin.

Martin, a local social worker, said desperate people often turn to crime to make ends meet, and guns to accomplish those crimes.

“Since mom can’t put food on the table, I’ve got to be man of the house and put food on the table, by any means necessary, because I’m desperate," Martin supposed as a hypothetical for himself and a reality for too many Topekans. “And desperate people are dangerous, and we now have a large population of dangerous people because of poverty and because of drug addiction.”

He pointed to the case of Zoey Felix, the 5-year-old Topeka girl who was raped and killed Oct. 2. Zoey and her father had been homeless for several weeks before her death.

“Once they got homeless, who was watching the kids?” Martin asked. “Zoey became a ‘community baby,’ and she was not the only baby out there like that. There are a lot of Zoeys in Topeka, and it only gets worse when they get older.”

Advocates: DA Mike Kagay has rejected proven group violence intervention strategy

One of the main initiatives the local anti-violence advocates had sought to implement in Topeka was a model called group violence intervention.

In group violence intervention, local leaders and organizations take a three-pronged approach — consisting of law enforcement, social services and a “moral street voice,” said Ray Berry, pastor at Gethsemane Worship Center.

That moral street voice would be people with “credibility in the street” who could more closely relate with members of those neighborhoods and face better odds at intervening, de-escalating and stopping any potential retaliatory violence during tense situations.

The group violence intervention approach is one that has found big success in other communities similar to Topeka, and the city of Wichita earlier this year announced it would implement a program in partnership with Cure Violence Global that uses similar strategies to group violence intervention.

However, despite the local enthusiasm for implementing group violence intervention as a strategy in the capital city, District Attorney Mike Kagay directed a $300,000 grant from the Topeka Community Foundation originally meant for group violence intervention instead be used in a way that focuses primarily on youths.

More: Shawnee County DA Mike Kagay and Topeka JUMP at odds over gang violence prevention program

Kagay has previously defended that decision to The Capital-Journal, saying that his preferred program, Strategies Against Violence Everywhere, prevents youths from falling into patterns of violence in the first place. He added that in his view, his office couldn't ethically support a program that works with people who are already actively engaged in violence.

The anti-violence community advocates, however, have been starkly critical of Kagay’s view, arguing that it ignores evidence and research that it would likely help curb violence in Topeka.

Further efforts to get other local officials to support funding group violence intervention efforts have been unsuccessful, Berry said.

“It’s time to put up or shut up,” the pastor said. “And this is just me, but I think our city officials give lip service to strategies like this. It’s almost like they’re not interested in social services, like housing or anti-violence. They talk about it, but they don’t want to put the funds forward in a way that would help us reduce violence. They’d rather spend $7 million on a hotel or $100,000 on a housing study that says the same things we’ve been telling them all along.

“It doesn’t seem like our city officials are really sincere about dealing with the social issues we deal with today. I think that our community as a whole needs to start putting more pressure on these city officials to get these things done.”

To address roots of violence, Topeka must first overcome ‘toxic positivity’

Part of the problem, the advocates said, is that Topeka officials hesitate to hold frank discussions about the city's problems.

Community advocate Twemlow said she has struggled to reconcile city and county officials’ boasts of decreased poverty with the reality she sees among communities, including a surge in the number of people using local food pantries.

“When you push that message out, it’s actually harming our community,” she said. "It’s great and we need to celebrate successes — there’s no need to always be glum, and we need to be proud of when we do a good job. But not to the point where we have to search long and hard to find the numbers to reflect that.”

“Topeka is a thriving and good city,” Martin said. “We have more businesses popping up, and downtown is being revitalized. I’m proud of my city. But the flip side of that is we’re ignoring the most vulnerable in our community. If one of us is suffering, the whole city is suffering.”

Carl Frazier, pastor at New Hope and Love Community Church and executive director of the Topeka Center for Peace and Justice, said it was unrealistic to expect immediate and drastic change, even if all of the groups’ anti-violence initiatives were fully supported by the city.

But something has to be done, and too often, he said, city and organizational leaders seem to be working in separate silos.

“There is always going to be trouble, and there is always going to be something,” Frazier said. “Some people are always going to be poor. But it doesn’t have to be at the level we have in it right now. All of these things we’re asking to be implemented won’t necessarily mean zero killings next year.

More: Topeka has seen extreme spike this year of youths becoming victims of homicide

“We have to realize that as a city, we have more homelessness on all sides of town. You look at baby Zoey — it doesn’t make sense that child had to live outside. We have to first deal with those services and make sure the city recognizes those issues.”

Berry, the Gethsemane Worship Center pastor, said the bottom line is that everyone should want and strive to work together to reduce and end violence in Topeka.

But if local leaders are unwilling to consider new ways to invest valuable resources to fight violence, there’s also another way to hold them to account.

“The thing they have to remember is they work for us," Berry said, "and if they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, then the people of this community need to make their voices heard at the polls and vote them out of office, and vote someone in who has a mind to address the issues going on in this city.”

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at [email protected] or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Topekans must not accept record homicides as new normal, advocates say