COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Columbus mayor’s seat is up for grabs in the November election. Mayor Andrew Ginther is running for a third term. He’s being challenged by Joe Motil and several write-in candidates.
A topic of this year’s race is the crime rate in the city of Columbus. Columbus saw a record number of homicides in 2021, besting the records set in 2020 and in 2017. For 2021, as of Monday, October 2, Columbus has recorded 120 homicide investigations. 103 of them were the result of gun shots.
Both Ginther and Motil are trying to appeal to voters that they will be the one to make Columbus a safer city.
"We know there are fewer than 500 people in a city of a million who are responsible for 50 percent of the violence,” said Mayor Andrew Ginther.
Candidate Joe Motil said the city needs to change course and needs a change.
"We have to make sure the parents of our youth know what kind of services are available to them so we can help get them into these programs. Nobody is advocating that we lock our youth up and throwing away the key,” Motil said.
Motil’s ideas involve more investment from the city into programs through Columbus Public Health and other resources. He said cracking down on guns is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
“Red flag laws and such. I am in favor of those, but again, that is not the complete answer to that. It always falls back to the underlying issues of social and economic issues of people, our neighborhoods and our families,” Motil said.
Over the weekend, Ginther held a gun buyback event. That buy-back collected 344 guns in return for more than $136,000 in gift cards.
“We just had our most successful gun buyback over the weekend. Hundreds and hundreds of firearms taken off the street. Assault weapons, sawed-off shot guns and things like that,” said Ginther.
The guns collected, Ginther said, are now being looked at by Columbus Police through the NIBIN system to determine if any had been used in crimes around Columbus.
Motil claims buybacks don’t work, saying they aren’t effective at getting the guns of criminals off the street. He added that the city’s $20 million buyout of Columbus police officers to leave the department in 2022 certainly didn’t help with the city’s crime.
Ginther said the city is investing in more training and recruiting for the city’s police force.
"By the end of next year we'll have more police officers on the street than we've ever had in our city in our city's history which is important because we're growing,” said Ginther.
Motil said the city must start going after the non-violent offenders before they become violent.
"We have to start issuing citations or doing something about non-violent offenses that occur in the city because if our youth and others continue to get away with non-violent offenses, that's going to escalate to more criminal offenses,” Motil said.
Both men do agree that part of the solution falls on parents and community members to step up and direct youth away from a life of crime