Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White is requesting that the District declare a state of emergency to combat gun violence.

“Our Black and Brown boys and girls are going far too quick in our community,” White said in a press conference on Friday. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.”

White’s push comes as the District reckons with the fatal shootings of three teenagers so far this year, including two in the past two weeks. On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Jamarid Robinson was shot and killed in Southeast D.C. near his grandmother’s home in Ward 8. Last week, Dayvon Lewis, another 15-year-old Black boy, was fatally shot in Congress Heights. Police found him alone in a car, having sustained a gunshot wound to his back.

There have been 14 homicides in D.C. so far this year, already outpacing 2020, when there were 11 by this date. It’s a bad start for city officials who said they’d hoped to curb the gun violence that has been spiraling out of control in the city for several years now.

Last year was the most violent year in D.C. in 15 years. One hundred ninety eight people were killed, the overwhelming majority Black men who lived east of the Anacostia river. Eighty percent of those killed were shot with a firearm.

White said Robinson and Lewis’s deaths didn’t spur nearly the amount of soul searching — or action — from District officials they would have if the boys had been white.

“If a white kid had got shot in Washington, D.C., the narrative would have been changed. We would have had meetings. We would have had [the Department of Human Services] out there. We would have had the police department. We would have had mental health services,” White said.

The councilmember railed against what he says is a lack of adequate funding for violence prevention programs like Cure the Streets and Credible Messengers. In both of these models, trained facilitators (often ones who come from the communities where they work, and have experience with violence or incarceration themselves) are tasked with directly deescalating conflicts and preventing violence through personal relationships.

“We’re doing you an injustice because we’re not doing enough,” White said to the staff of those programs.

The councilmember also said that community members themselves should be doing more to prevent violence in their neighborhoods. “This is a community problem,” he said. “We all have a role to play. And I do agree that we have not done enough.”

White put the losses in the Ward 8 community and other predominantly Black neighborhoods in the District in the context of many other structural injustices and inequities facing them — even as the same communities are displaced by rampant gentrification.

“The population for African-Americans, Blacks in his community is shrinking each and every day. This used to be Chocolate City,” White said. “The census just went out, and that number is going to get lower and lower because we suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, COVID-19, cancer. You name it, we have it. So we can’t afford to have violence.”

White announced a community Zoom call next Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. for individuals and nonprofits interested in contributing to anti-gun violence work in the District.