photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

From left to right, Jomella Watson-Thompson, Bill DeWitt, Undersheriff Stacy Simmons and Dee Kinard.

There’s an epidemic that many people don’t think about when they think of public health problems.

Douglas County health officials say it’s the second or third leading cause of death for young people here. And even when it doesn’t kill, it can lead to other health problems that follow people throughout their lives.

But it’s not an infectious disease, or some kind of poison or pollutant. It’s violence.

And it was were the subject of Douglas County’s “Public Health After Dark” panel discussion on Thursday night at the Lawrence Public Library. A few dozen community members gathered to hear an overview of statistics on homicides, gun violence, suicide and other violent crimes in the county.

Douglas County residents heard from four panelists — Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health Informatics Manager Dee Kinard, Douglas County Undersheriff Stacy Simmons, Eudora High School Principal Bill DeWitt and KU researcher Jomella Watson-Thompson — who shared their perspectives and data on violence in the county, along with ways to prevent it.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Community members listen at the Public Health After Dark event on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

LDCPH Executive Director Jonathan Smith told the attendees that when you talk about violence in the county, it’s also talking about the health of the community.

“15% of Douglas County adults have experienced physical abuse before the age of 18,” Smith said. “… Those things you’re learning about are things that impact the health of our community.”

In some ways, Douglas County is doing better at managing this epidemic than other places. Homicides are a leading health indicator for a community, Kinard said, and Douglas County’s age-adjusted homicide rate of 6.3 per 100,000 population is relatively low compared to the United States, the state of Kansas and neighboring counties like Shawnee and Wyandotte — though it is a little higher than the Healthy People 2030 objective aiming to reduce homicides to a rate of 5.5 deaths per 100,000 population.

And the number of people in Douglas County who are seen by emergency department staff after a violent assault has been trending down over the years. The health department’s data shows that this number has gone from 313 in 2018 to 193 in 2024, with most of the patients being male and about half of them being between ages 20 and 34.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Undersheriff Stacy Simmons speaks at the Public Health After Dark event on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

On the other hand, though, Douglas County is still seeing an average of 3.6 murders a year, as Simmons shared in her presentation. And all of the county’s violent crimes together still touch hundreds of lives. Simmons said the most common violent crimes in Douglas County are aggravated assault or battery, with an average of 318.4 incidents each year. Rape cases average 57.6 per year.

And a majority of violent crimes involve a person the victim knew, Simmons said.

Violence has an outsized impact on the young. Kinard said one way to see the impact of violence is looking at what are known as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs – which are traumatic events that occur during childhood, typically before the age of 18. ACEs include not just physical, emotional and sexual abuse, but also things like witnessing domestic violence, living in a household with someone who abuses drugs or alcohol, or having a parent who is incarcerated.

In comparison to Douglas County adults who did not experience any ACEs, adults with high ACE scores were 7.6 times more likely to experience depression, she said.

As someone who oversees a school, DeWitt has a unique perspective on how young people deal with violence. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, he said, schools have spent more and more for security guards and school resource officers. America now invests $2.5 billion in SROs and an additional $12 billion in security guards, he said — teachers are the only other group of employees that schools spend more money on nationwide.

Although school shootings in the U.S. are statistically rare, he said, they’ve gone up significantly from fewer than 20 per year in the early 2000s to doubling in each of the last four years, and they’re many times more common than other countries.

DeWitt said there has been an increase in adolescents struggling with their mental health and experiencing trauma in and out of their homes, and the mental health providers along with the juvenile justice system are struggling to hire higher staff to meet the demand. He said there needs to be coordination with all the people who work with students to address the root of youth crime and boost mental health services.

Watson-Thompson shared several youth violence prevention strategies, including parenting skill and family relationship programs; providing quality education early in life; connecting youth to mentoring and after school programs and more.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Executive Director of Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health Jonathan Smith speaks at the Public Health After Dark event on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

There’s one such program that Watson-Thompson is particularly involved with. She is the principal investigator for ThrYve, a collaborative effort between the University Kansas Health System and at least 40 community organizations to prevent violence among youth in Kansas City, Kansas. The organization partners with youth and community members to offer programs, training, and outreach that reduce youth violence and promote equity, especially for youth from minority racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Programs like these could be implemented in any community, she said.

“There are a lot of challenges that we address,” Watson-Thompson said. “But there’s also a lot we can come together (on) to support the collaborative policy.”