Graves: 27 kids shot this year. That’s 27 too many

Imagine for a moment a classroom filled with 27 children.

Close your eyes. See them?

That’s the number of children shot and rushed to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to date just this year.

Bullets in babies, toddlers and teens. A little girl left partially blind, a teenage football player with dreams of the pros who lost his leg and a young girl left paralyzed.

Dr. Victor Garcia, a pediatric surgeon and founding director of the hospital’s trauma services, knows that number without even being asked. He and his colleagues are those called on to put the little bodies back together again.

“When I came here, the number of children shot was in the single digits and I was disturbed by that,” he said.

“It just hurts me. It angers me,” said Garcia, who has witnessed the city’s violence from inside the operating room at one of the nation’s most advanced children’s hospitals for more than two decades. “This is happening in the most affluent country ... we are letting this happen.”

But we don’t have to.

Stepping out of the OR to save kids

Garcia contends that Cincinnati, where more than half the children live in poverty and where the child poverty rate is the second highest in the nation, can be a model for change.

It’s a sermon he has preached over and over for years: Change doesn’t come in the form of handcuffs, shackles and scared straight programs. He’s written letters to city leaders, quoting nationally recognized social researchers to say the The Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) program does not work.

Such programs show dramatic short-term gains but don’t address the deeper ills that lead to violence, said Garcia, who was one of CIRV’s founding members.

“It’s our addiction to the quick fixes that has left us in the situation we are in today,” Garcia said in a 2011 TedX Cincinnati talk on the same topic.

He now maintains a longer-term untangling and untwisting of socio-economic forces has to occur for those shootings and violence to come down and stay down.

Untangling socio-economics

The fancy phrase for that is systems thinking or systems dynamics.

In one case, the World Bank, Boeing, Cornell University working with others employed system dynamics to reduce malnutrition in Peru by 5 percent in five years.

Impressed by that work, Toyota asked Garcia if he could bring one of the players in that group, a consulting firm Pontifex, to Cincinnati to target “worsening child and intergenerational poverty” and correlated youth violence, gaps in educational achievement, obesity and pre-mature deaths.

This Wednesday, that meeting will happen in his office, which is within walking distance of two separate shootings that left an 18-year-old dead and another other man wounded last week in Avondale.

The teen’s body was found in a ball field behind Hirsch Recreation Center just after 7 a.m. as children waited to board a school bus.

For many of these kids, this is what daily life looks like. They don’t even flinch.

And that too haunts Garcia.

It ought to haunt us all.

You can reach Chris at 513-768-8502 or at cgraves@enquirer.com

An earlier version of this column reported the wrong date. It has since been corrected.