‘Old ways of fixing that issue no longer work:’ Community members meet on how to deter crime

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - There’s something to be said about the word community and the people in it.

In one part of Baton Rouge, one man believes his community is headed down a dark and unstable path.

“I think it’s going to be a bad future in 10 years if something doesn’t happen.”

Tyrone Torrance lives in the 70805 area, a part of town that police have called a hot spot for crime.

Torrance says the old ways of fixing that issue no longer work.

“The old solutions I’ve been hearing since the 70′s, 80′s, and 90′s are church and education, but I don’t think this works with this generation of kids. I just don’t,” Torrance said.

The motivation to fix their community and curb crime is what brought people to Istrouma High School Tuesday night where a group of neighbors came together trying to come up with something new.

“Prison isn’t a deterrent, dying is not a deterrent, and I don’t know what the solution will be, but maybe I thought there would be some new solutions that might escape me,” said Torrance.

The meeting was led by Pearl Porter a community advocate that’s lived in this area for more than 50 years.

She admitted that she does not have the answer to stop all this crime from happening, but she does believe that one can come by having conversations like they did tonight.

“The main thing is us coming together. That’s the main thing. If we can just come together, we can make it,” says Porter. “We will make it, and we’re not stopping this time.”

She says they have to be consistent and they need your help to pull it off.

“But it’s going to take the adults, the community, the people, us coming together and we’re going to see a better 70805,” Porter said.

The people here have faith that they can do it but they need others to care just as much as them.

“We need to start on a street level, on a house level, with parents, grandparents, and we need to start there,” Torrance said. “The saying I’ve been hearing is people saying they can’t do anything with them. Well, we need to figure something out to do with them, because it’s affecting everybody else.”

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