Confronting Gun Violence: Rico King & Devon Jones of Documentary Nekai Walks

The current approach to tackling gun violence in our community, specifically Jane Finch, but we can talk about Toronto generally.

It seems like the current policies and approaches are limited.

And I'm going to stick with you, Rico, for now.

We'll go back to Devon.

Do you have an opinion as to why that is? Like, what are the systemic issues at the root, perhaps? What is going on?

You know, in my opinion, there's a lot of neglect.

A lot of policymakers don't know what happens in the community.

Right.

And it's crazy because you watch a movie like John Singleton, Boys in the Hood in 1991, where he says either they don't show or know what happens in the ghetto.

You know what I mean? And I was like back then.

And then in the documentary, we actually cover a gentleman who talks about I don't want to raise my kid in this community because it's going to be the same thing.

This is from 1982.

Right.

You know, so that's a big question for me, too.

Right.

And as a filmmaker, you know, sort of take a journalistic approach sometimes, you know, with asking people from different cities, different things, cities of different catalysts of gun violence.

But in my opinion, with all these resources in a first world country.

not being able to solve this or look at our communities and say, we have to make this the number one priority because children are dying.

Children can't walk home.

It's getting it's getting so bad that they're targeting random people.

Right.

And what kind of system allows this? What kind of system allows the knowledge of losing its citizens for 40 years without drastically making the change and drastically attacking it? You know, lack of understanding.

And I mean, sometimes I just want to say it's maybe racism.

Hmm.

You know, why haven't we taken the mental health approach? Why haven't we approached gun violence how we approached COVID-19? Because it's like a virus, it spreads, right? So I think it's institutional neglect because I want to say they don't care, but Devon, please correct me because that's how I feel.