It's going to take "extraordinary measures" to combat Indianapolis' rising violence problem, according to Rev. Charles Harrison.
Harrison and the Ten Point Coalition have spent more than a decade combating violence at the street level by working to diffuse situations at crime scenes and to encourage ex-offenders to take a different path once they're released from prison.
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"I believe we're going to have to use some extraordinary measures in order to deal with this violence," Harrison said Thursday, just one day after Indianapolis broke 100 murders for the year. "We have a proliferation of handguns on the streets in the hands of individuals who have no regard for the sanctity of human life. And then we have a subculture out here that glorifies the gangster lifestyle. So, we have to, in my mind, address the possession of illegal guns in the hands of these individuals. I just think police have to be more aggressive and creative trying to get a handle on all the guns out here on the streets."
BELOW: Listen to the full interview with Rev. Harrison.
While the police do their part, Harrison says citizens have to take on the culture of violence in their communities. Echoing sentiments expressed by President Barack Obama following a mass shooting at an Oregon college Thursday, Harrison says neighborhoods have become "numb" to violence around them.
"We have buried our head in the sand and have not addressed this whole issue about not snitching, and we've become numb to the violence," he said. "We have to say to our community that that is unacceptable. That we're not going to allow young people and those who are involved in criminal activity to hold our neighborhoods hostage to domestic terrorism. And we have to be more vocal, there has to be more Rev. Harrison's across the city, and community leaders, that are echoing this so that we change the norms on the streets so that it becomes acceptable again for individuals who have information about violent crimes to bring that forth to the police so that we can get these killers and dangerous people off the streets."
See more from Harrison in the video player above.
