KANSAS CITY, MO — Memorial Day weekend was a violent one in Kansas City, Missouri, as the city recorded seven homicides.
It makes Ossco Bolton, a former gang member's work all that more important. Bolton works to prevent violence among youth.
“If the people in this country and the city want to make change, they have to listen to those gun shots,” Bolton said. “The issue with violence is that adults are not listening, and when they start listening — that's when you see change.”
Bolton says the problem with violence isn’t easy to solve, but there is a solution, and it starts with listening to kids in our city.
“When we talk about violence and gangs and young people, we go and get people who don't even have any experience with youth violence,” Bolton said. “Those become experts and people we listen to because they have a degree, but they don’t have the physical and mental experience.”
Bolton was once affiliated in a gang in the Kansas City area, and is all-too-familiar with the violence.
“Where I come from, yeah we were shot — we were in shootouts,” Bolton said. “ I lost my 11-month-old nephew back in 1993, he was murdered two weeks before his first birthday,”
Bolton is now on the outside, and has made it his mission to help kids with leadership development, character building and more.
His mission is to give kids the resources they need to be successful through his organization Peers Organized to Support Student Excellence (P.O.S.S.E).
“You have to create another gang for them to be apart of,” Bolton said. “Mothers are burying their sons, and grandmothers are watching their grandchildren be buried — that’s not the way it should be.”
Bolton says putting money and resources into kids experiencing violence can eliminate the crime scene tape seen all too often across the KCMO community.
“If we just did that, you could cut violence in half in the first year guaranteed. It’s enough good men and women in Kansas City on both sides of Troost,” Bolton said. “We don’t have to have 100 homicides a year, we can get down to 20, but we gotta want it though.”
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