Mayor Pro Tem Bencomo‘s Statement on Mass Shooting at Young Park

Just like all of you, I am processing a lot of emotions – grief, anger, heartache, fear. As I continue to reflect, grieve, and pray for the victims who lost their lives and the many more who were injured, I also feel a responsibility to speak out on this issue that is plaguing our communities. 

It’s been clear for some time; the kids are not alright. How could they be? We live in a country that allows more guns per capita than any other place in the world. We let families go hungry and without shelter. We pump millions into enforcement and jails and little into alleviating poverty and trauma. And while I fully believe that people must be held accountable for committing acts of violence and harm, I also fully believe that we have a responsibility to ensure that when we seek justice, we do everything we can to stop these horrific incidents from happening again. 

I reject the notion that the only two choices we have for our at-risk young people are jail or death. That is a sinister and false vision that I will not be part of cultivating.  If we want to live in a safer world, we must  begin to co-create a bolder and more holistic approach to the ongoing challenge of gun violence – especially amongst our youth. We must partner with law enforcement AND community-based organizations to prevent gun crimes before they happen and implement upstream, evidence-based and proactive efforts to prevent tragedies like this one. These efforts must include working closer with our legislators at the state level to advance enhanced gun safety legislation and bolstering our behavioral health infrastructure that can help make our neighborhoods, parks, schools, and homes safe again.

We will all have our own ideas about  how this happened, and we should talk about all of it recognizing that we are not each others’ enemies in this, the enemy is the problem: violence in our community. We must also make room in that conversation for the gun violence epidemic that has gone ignored in this country for decades. The Gifford Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence states that the Latino/Hispanic community “bears a disproportionate toll of this epidemic compared to other demographic groups in this country, and understanding this burden is essential to creating and implementing responsive solutions.” This isn’t just a “juvenile crime problem” and only focusing on that grossly disregards this alarming trend and the ripple effects it has on families and communities like ours.

Lastly, I am deeply concerned for the state of young Latino men and boys in our community who have found harmful empowerment in a toxic culture of violence, anger and disregard – only to be compounded by gun culture that normalizes flaunting assault rifles in public spaces. My heart breaks for our youth because this will inevitably lead to more children being hurt, more “tough on crime” calls, and more reasons why we need to incarcerate even more young brown men. The harmful and uninformed ‘tough on crime is the only way’ cycle is destructive and only serves to incarcerate and not alleviate. We demand jails and police bring us peace while ignoring solutions that live outside of the carceral system, especially when we are talking about our youth.

I look at the faces of the kids at Young Park and can’t help but see people who could be part of my family. I see so many Las Crucens that same way and I want better for our kids and for all of us. In this moment, justice must mean more than the critical and necessary work of catching the people who did this and holding them accountable. Equally, justice must mean that we fight like hell, together, to do better by all of our young people so this doesn’t happen again. I simply cannot advocate for discarding more young people into prisons as the solution to our problems because this isn’t a solution at all. We must resist working in ideological silos and sit down at the table to fix this now.   

Please visit the website of the Community Foundation of Southern NM for information on how you can support the Together Las Cruces Crisis Action Fund.

The City alongside the Office of Emergency Management have set up a Victim’s Resource for all impacted by this tragedy, please follow the city social media pages for more details on this. There will be bilingual services and while there will be law enforcement there, none are federal immigration agents and absolutely no one will be inquiring about legal status. ALL who need support are encouraged to stop by.