Baltimore activists are imploring people not to shoot each other this weekend as the city crossed 300 homicides for the year.
Organizers for the Baltimore Ceasefire weekend are calling on fellow residents not to shoot each other from Friday morning to Sunday in an effort to combat the city’s rising homicide count, the Baltimore Sun reported Tuesday.
“We’re doing ceasefires quarterly because we saw what the first one did, how much hope it gave the city,” Erricka Bridgeford, an event founder, told the outlet.
The organizers hosted a similar event in August, calling on the community to put down their guns for the weekend and refrain from killing each other. Despite their best efforts, the weekend was still racked with gun violence, and two people died.
As part of the effort to deter homicides, organizers planned yoga sessions, potlucks, movies and marches.
“If we each keep turning on our lights one by one into this darkness, that’s what I want Sunday to feel like,” Bridgeford said. “By the end of it, there are so many people who recognize not just their individual light, but the light all around them that the city really is.”
The city passed 300 homicides in 2017 Thursday, marking the third year in the row that the city has done so. City Councilman Brandon Scott, searching for ways to hamper the violence, hosted an “emergency hearing” earlier this week to ask the police department and other departments what steps they’re taking to crack down on the murders.
“I hope that everyone that loves Baltimore realizes that everyone has to do soul-searching for us to be better and not have this conversation again next year, so less families are suffering this trauma,” Scott said about the city passing 300 murders. “No one and no neighborhood is exempt.”
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