Aurora City Council this week passed a resolution directing staff to reconstitute the city’s efforts around gang reduction and intervention as well as youth violence prevention in a 7-3 vote.

The resolution redirects funding from the Aurora Youth Violence Prevention Program established in 2020 to the Aurora Gang Reduction Impact Program, with 80% of funding dedicated to intervention efforts and 20% dedicated to prevention efforts. Council members who supported the resolution said it is a way to merge many efforts around reducing youth violence.

Council member Angela Lawson, the resolution’s sponsor, said the only reason the program stopped was that voters decided to end the photo red light enforcement program that funded it in 2018. She said the program and its funding aren’t changing; rather this resolution refocuses the resources it has on the youth violence the city is dealing with.

“We need to be more aggressive on intervention, and prevention is important, but this is what this establishes,” Lawson said. “This is just to address and refocus where we’re at now in our community. Youth are getting shot every single day. … It’s basically just reallocating the resources to where we need to be for intervention and dealing with our youth.”

Joel Northam, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Denver, spoke against the resolution, particularly bringing back the program. He said the program is designed to create a network of snitches, fosters distrust and ruins cohesion in the community. He added that so-called community policing programs like this only give more power to police forces, which he said should not be the case in Aurora.

“AGRIP specifically is just a massive surveillance dragnet for Black and brown youth; that’s it,” Northam said. “AGRIP will undoubtedly come with military grade surveillance software and a gang database, which will include not just suspected gang members but their families and anyone else who is loosely connected with them.”

Mayor Pro Tem Francoise Bergan said this program is made to prevent crime against people of color because they are the ones being shot and killed in the city. She said nonprofits will still be able to apply for funding for prevention programs and that the city cannot wait any longer to address this problem.

Council member Dustin Zvonek said in conversations he’s had with Omar Montgomery, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Aurora, Montgomery told him losing AGRIP was a loss to youth violence prevention in the city.

Council member Juan Marcano said the program doesn’t address the root causes of youth violence. While the Youth Violence Prevention Program was not perfect, it was a more robust and overarching approach that did more than just gang intervention, he said.

“The information that we got when we were discussing AGRIP a few weeks back at study session was that it wasn’t particularly effective, and the one audit that was done came back inconclusive because it was just really not well run,” Marcano said. “So I understand that you can potentially improve some of that, but at the end of the day my concern is that we’re still being reactive as opposed to being proactive. We’re not addressing those underlying conditions in our community that lead to this behavior.”

Marcano said he thinks everyone has good intentions, but he would not support the resolution because the city needs to do a better job of addressing root causes by investing in the community and making up for inequities.

Council member Crystal Murillo said she would support the resolution only so she can call it up for further discussion at a future meeting. She said she was in support of the robust youth violence prevention program the city developed with community meetings over the last year and that this was too narrowly focused on gang violence.

“I refuse to say that youth violence prevention is gang reduction,” Murillo said. “They are not synonymous, and that rhetoric really frustrates me about the direction of this conversation. Our youth are not just in gangs. That is one part of a larger conversation around violent crimes and our youth, and our youth were very explicit about some of the other areas that they needed support with and this shift fundamentally changes that.”

Christina Amparan, Aurora’s youth violence prevention manager, said AGRIP is designed to serve the high risk, identified gang members, which is a smaller population compared to who the Youth Violence Prevention Program has been working with.

“AGRIP only focused on high risk gang members, whereas we’re focusing on at risk and high risk, which is really especially important considering that most of our violent crimes are not being committed by identified gang members,” Amparan said.

Lawson said she was disappointed hearing this from staff and that the resolution explicitly includes language around both gang and youth violence.