LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- To Candy Linear, it's hard to recall what day it is daily. All she knows is that her daughter, Nylah Linear, has not come home.
"It's been a nightmare," she said, while holding back tears.
Two 16-year-old girls were shot and killed in separate incidents on the same Shawnee Neighborhood street — just hours apart — in July. Linear's daughter was one of them.
Wednesday evening, under a gray sky, she gathered near the scene of the crime with LMPD officers, pastors and others to remember her daughter. Linear was also there to ask the community to reverse a violent spike.
"Parents have to change, the community has to change, kids have to want to change and need somebody to help them change," she said.
16-year-old Nylah Linear died after being shot in Louisville's Shawnee neighborhood on Wednesday, July 21, 2021. A 15-year-old boy was also injured. (Family photo)
Standing beside the grieving mother, Mayor Greg Fischer acknowledged the surge of shootings and also assured her and the others that change is in progress.
But just hours before, across town at City Hall, members of Metro Council's public safety committee met and questioned a key program that's part of the city's strategy to reverse the trend of violent crime.
Group Violence Intervention (GVI) is a structured, multi-step program that identifies the city's most violent offenders, many of whom are involved in gangs or street groups, and puts them on notice. It uses resources and the community's assistance to stage interventions. If the offenders fail to cooperate, they can face tougher sentences.
Experts say the program has produced astonishing results in other cities.
Last October, key Louisville leaders announced a partnership with John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City to bring GVI to Louisville.
However, almost 10 months after the announcement, the program has yet to be fully implemented in Louisville. Frustrated by a lack of clear answers of the program's progress, Councilwoman Jessica Green, D-1, called the Thursday meeting to ask program leaders for specifics on GVI's progress.
District 1 Metro Councilwoman Jessica Green.Â
"From my perspective, you know, we have a program that a lot of energy and a lot of hope went into, and (there does) not appear to have been much implementation and execution," said Green.
Keith Talley, Mayor Fischer's Strategic Operations officer, answered that the program's mission got underway in April. Since then, team members have completed "custom notifications," a form of street outreach, on about four dozen people who could be impacted by or commit gun violence in the future.
However, council members like Anthony Piagentini, R-19, questioned the order of Louisville's GVI implementation and why Talley and the team members have not yet implemented a crucial part of the program, known as call-ins, in which multiple offenders are publicly put on notice and presented intervention options in a group setting.
“We are going way out of order on the published way to implement this program," he said.
However, in a letter submitted to council Wednesday, the National Network For Safe Communities, which is working with the city on the program, wrote that it "is not concerned about the pace of the implementation in Louisville" and praised the "robust" steps the city has taken so far.
In a previous interview, Talley said the full scope of the program's work, including the call-ins, should officially begin in late August or in September after a few more weeks of planning and choreography. He blamed COVID-19 on the delay.
"For anyone to think that we are finished, that we've done our job, that we are patting ourselves on the back, that is absolutely not the case," he assured the committee Wednesday.
Councilwoman Green hopes that promise will hold and plans to keep close tabs on the program's progress.
"I am hoping that this program will be executed flawlessly, because we don't have really room for mistakes," she said. "It is literally matter of life and death."
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