Health and safety were the focus of the second annual “State of Black Arlington” event on Thursday.
The event, hosted by the Mayor’s Black Advisory Committee, discussed police-Black community relations and the nexus between physical and mental health. The event incorporated work by the city’s Unity Council, including reports for 2021 and 2023, that looked at building police-resident relationships and eliminating barriers to health care faced by underrepresented communities.
“We saw that health, public safety and many other issues were at the top of the agenda as inequitable issues for all communities,” said Xavier Egan, co-chair of the advisory committee. “We decided to take on the same challenge and make sure our community has access to those resources right where they are.”
Police Chief Al Jones, who took over the department’s helm in 2021, said the department is focused on relationship building, transparency and officer training.
Jones said that transparency applies both internally and externally. He said the department prioritizes releasing body camera footage after officer-involved shootings, of which there have been four reported this year.
“I don’t care if it’s a good shooting or a bad shooting or what it looks like, but we’re going to release the body cameras because I believe the community has an opportunity or should see the same things that I see,” Jones said.
Jones also spoke about Operation Connect, an initiative launched by police in 2021, in which police identified the seven areas with the highest crime and death tolls in the city and committed resources there, going door-to-door in those areas to distribute pamphlets.
“What we’ve typically done is go in there, throw a ton of resources at an area, create traffic stop after traffic stop, and then end up upsetting the community,” Jones said, “and we don’t build those positive relationships.”
Asked how police are responding to school shootings, Jones said they are reviewing policies, mandating officer training and working with schools, but that community members and parents need to support police by locking up their firearms.
“We need the community, and you know, they want guns, I don’t disagree with that,” Jones said. “What I’m asking the community to do is lock up their guns, make sure kids don’t have access to them.”
Black residents in North Texas have an average life expectancy of 75.3 years, the lowest of any racial or ethnic group, according to a study presented to the Unity Council in 2020. Tarrant County data included in the presentation showed Black residents are most likely to have poor to fair health.
Public health experts also discussed the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and the link between mental health and heart attacks and diabetes.
Tara Robinson co-founded the Black Heart Society after suffering a heart attack three days in a row.
“It was all mental,” she says. “I didn’t have cholesterol, diabetes, or anything like that.”
Robinson said people need to make time during the day for self-care.
“If I surveyed a room of people and asked them how much time they carved out for themselves today, they probably wouldn’t have even 30 minutes in a 24-hour period to stop and take a breather,” she says.
The Black Heart Society also provided health screenings during the panel discussion.
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