Before his life was tragically cut short last Saturday, 12-year-old Cameron Coney was a kid with a big personality who loved to play football, according to his family members who spoke to reporters at a vigil earlier this week.
The Long Middle School student was shot and killed inside his bedroom at his family’s home in Thomasville Heights by a friend that he and his siblings had invited over. The next day, Atlanta police arrested a 14-year-old boy in connection with the shooting and charged him with murder.
Coney’s mother, Qualesha Coney, described him as “a silly, playful young boy who was known for making people laugh with his jokes” in a GoFundMe she organized to help pay for funeral expenses.
Homicides and aggravated assaults are down overall compared to this time last year. This shooting, however, has underscored the need for more violence prevention work that centers youth. It has amplified the calls for change that ignited following a violent Easter weekend when five teens were wounded in two separate shootings and 16-year-old Tianah Robinson was killed.
In an effort to advance violence prevention work in Atlanta and across the metro, Morehouse School of Medicine on Thursday hosted over a dozen advocates, experts, policy makers and law enforcement. The program, co-sponsored by the King Center and 100 Black Men of Atlanta, focused on addressing the causes and identifying collaborative solutions to persistent community violence.
“Oftentimes you will hear — especially [from] politicians — that we just need more police on the streets. And what it turns out is that when you look at some of the root causes of violence, it’s not just a matter of having a police officer on every corner,” said Dr. Alexander Crosby, professor and vice chair of community health and preventive medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine.
Crosby said that a solution will require collaboration between the education, criminal justice, medical, and social service systems.
Black males between 20 and 29 years old had the highest rate of violent deaths, which include homicides and suicides, according to data presented by Rana Bayakly, chief epidemiologist of the chronic disease, health behaviors and injury epidemiology section at the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Bayakly’s dataset was collected from the 11 counties in the Atlanta region. She and Crosby contextualized the numbers by explaining that homicides and suicides can have some overlapping root causes, like financial and mental health stressors.
“So if we can have people that are comfortable and feel like ‘I’ve got enough to pay the rent, I’ve got enough to buy food, I’ve got enough to get back and forth from my house to work,’ that actually helps decrease violence,” Crosby said.
Violence intervention was also central to the group’s solution building conversations, which were led by advocates like Bonita Hampton-Smith, chief operating officer of the King Center, and Kelli Stewart, CEO of the LEAD Center for Youth. Other leaders included Marcus Walker, director of the Mayor’s Office of Violence Reduction, and Atlanta Public Schools Police Chief Ron Applin.
Walker described the large number of shootings that took place over the past two weekends, many perpetrated by and against young people as a warning sign of what could happen over the summer.
Across the country, shootings and violent incidents tend to increase as the weather gets warmer, often peaking around the Fourth of July.
“We need everybody to consider themselves interrupters and disruptors of violence,” Walker said.
Their plan includes expanding beyond their existing program at Washington High School to other high schools and middle schools in Atlanta with conflict resolution training and putting more volunteers in place.
“What we’re trying to do out of our office is really look at how do you reach the person that’s identified as unreachable? We’ve played this merry go round for far too long,” Walker said.
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