The grandfather of an 11-year-old boy who was killed by a stray bullet in Washington, D.C. over the weekend told “The Story” Monday that calls to defund the police are “not going to work” as gun-related crimes continue to surge in major U.S. cities.
“You can’t take money from the police department,” John Ayala, the founder of D.C.’s Guardian Angels chapter, explained.
“We need the police. You take the police from there and we wind up having less police officers in the street and less detectives. It’s not going to work. Crime is going to get worse…if you start having less police officers, who’s going to come when there is a need for police services?”
Ayala made the comment two days after his young grandson, Davon McNeal, was gunned down while grabbing a phone charger on the way to a community cookout.
Washington D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham told reporters late Saturday that about five adult men shot up the area, striking McNeal, who later died at a hospital. The cause of the shooting is not immediately clear, but D.C. police are asking for the public’s help in gathering information, including any sightings of a black car they say fled a nearby alley.
“I think in the cities, you have a lot of people that just do not value life at this time,” Ayala said. “They don’t realize that when you take a life, that life is not coming back.”
Ayala joins five other American families and communities in mourning following shooting incidents over the Fourth of July weekend that resulted in the deaths of six children, with the youngest just 6 years old.
Activists calling to defund the police blamed law enforcement for their failure to “protect” the streets amid the troubling crime wave, but Ayala said a lighter police presence on the streets and in schools would be a “big mistake.”
“Before going to go after the police officers when they hurt someone that looks like me, they need to go after the people that look like me that hurt people that look like me,” he said.
However, Ayala did express support for the funding of alternative agencies to handle non-violent calls, some of which, he says, require mental health specialists.
