America’s mayors know it’s not a matter of if, but when their city will be attacked by targeted violence. Their phone will ring and on the other end will be another mayor who has gone through a similar horror, offering condolences and support.
We have both received these phone calls. The first came in October 2018, after 11 people were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The second was in the summer of 2022, after a young man opened fire on the July 4th parade in Highland Park. The mayor on the other end of such calls is kind, empathetic. They, too, have grappled with the unimaginable. They offer advice and promise that you and your community “will get through this.” As we learned, they will be proven right. But we still must do more to prepare for such a tragedy.
In mid-March, a phone undoubtedly rang in the office of Mo Baydoun, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, after a man from his city drove a truck laden with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. Only the attacker was killed, but it left the town shaken to its core. Press reports indicate that the attacker was inspired by the ongoing violence in the Middle East and his brother, a Hezbollah commander, was killed in an Israeli airstrike just days beforehand.
“The tensions we see across the world too often find their way into our own neighborhoods, reminding us how deeply connected our shared safety is,” Baydoun wrote in a statement following the attack.
Baydoun is correct. From Tehran to Tempe, global tensions are now, more than ever, impacting local communities.
Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have documented how the muddied information environment created by global conflicts exacerbates local polarization and amplifies extremism at home. Mayors are uniquely positioned to counter these threats, but their role begins long before an attack occurs, lives are lost and the trauma has been inflicted.
After such attacks, attention typically focuses on how we can improve the security of public spaces so people can go on with their daily lives. While this is an important piece to the puzzle, the conversation needs to go further than that. While security can protect a community, a strong, resilient social fabric is what holds a city together in its darkest moments. There are simple, straightforward steps that can be taken. While these steps are relatively inexpensive, they take time, effort, and buy-in. We recommend every mayor start building today, before their city is in the news as the site of the next tragic act of violence.
First, mayors need to look holistically at the resources they already have—faith communities, hospitals, cultural centers, libraries, schools, and community-based organizations—and leverage them. Mayors can develop relationships with the leaders of their neighborhood communities and sister governments through regular meetings.
Second, mayors should issue a clear values statement that rejects hate, well before a crisis ever happens, and defines what the community stands for and what it will not tolerate.
Third, local agencies should be included in public safety tabletop exercises, which establish clear protocols to deal with any emergency.
Fourth, mayors can work with schools and libraries to promote media literacy, explaining how to identify reliable as well as questionable sources of information.
We know from experience that such steps can work.
The Welcoming Pittsburgh Initiative engaged 40 community leaders and more than 3,000 concerned citizens to create a roadmap for a more connected city. After a white nationalist walked into the Tree of Life synagogue and took 11 of our fellow citizens from us, we leaned into the connections developed through the initiative to help create a city-wide approach for dealing with the fallout from the shooting. We countered hate with a strong response from the interfaith community, including a Muslim-led fundraiser that raised $150,000 for the funerals of the victims.
In Highland Park, our long-standing partnerships with sister governments and local agencies created the space and personnel to quickly serve thousands across a traumatized community. Having locations immediately available to provide trauma-informed therapy to over 1,200 people at day, access to free legal counsel and medical care for undocumented victims of a mass crime, and ongoing, long-term services for a traumatized community, helped us rebuild, reconnect and strengthen our relationships. Additionally, the provision of mutual aid, not only via public safety personnel but also in the form of municipal administration, gave much needed support and respite to the first responders and city management who had been in the hot zone and needed time for their own recoveries.
These are just some of the benefits of widescale efforts from stakeholders across our cities working to strengthen the social fabric of our communities. The help we received on our worst days as mayors was the result of bonds built beforehand. The relationships we fostered, the communities we invested in, and the values we made clear were the vital foundations of resiliency.
Through our work as mayoral advisers for Strong Cities, an independent global network of 290+ cities dedicated to addressing all forms of hate, extremism and polarization, we have heard from local leaders around the globe who, like us, have led their cities in the aftermath of targeted violence. Each has shared how the partnerships they invested in before the attack proved invaluable in helping them maintain social cohesion in the days that followed. Like us, their advice to their fellow mayors is to take preventative action now—alongside enhanced security measures—and not wait for tragedy to strike.
As polarization intensifies, and cities across our country continue to deal with the unpredictable ripple effects of global crises, more mayors will likely be forced to deal with sudden violence. We urge mayors to do the resiliency-building work now, so when their phone rings during one of their city’s darkest moments, they’ll be ready for what’s next.
– William Peduto and Nancy Rodkin Rotering, Published courtesy of Just Security.
