Mayor, community leaders working together in violent year

WILMINGTON (WPVI) -- Wilmington has seen a dozen shooting victims in the first two weeks of 2017.

This has prompted the city's newly elected mayor Mike Purzycki to loosen restrictions on overtime so the city can beef up patrol in the most crime plagued areas.

"We just have to spend what it takes to keep these numbers down, to keep the statistical violence down," Purzycki said.

Derrick Chambers with Cease Violence walks Action News through one of the city's hot spots.

"It will help while they're out here, but as soon as they leave it's back to the same old Vietnam," Chambers said.

Top brass say officers will also do community outreach with residents living in those high crime areas.

"But we need more of the community heroes as well on the street. How can we recruit more police officers from our hoods, instead of trying to recruit people that don't even know our community?" Vanity Constance of Westside Grows Together said.

Still, families touched by the violence are apprehensive.

Action News spoke with a woman who said she is a cousin of 66-year-old Charles Mays, one of the victims of the violence.

"It may help. It's a start," she said.

Officials say police can only do so much and that's why community activists are also asking residents to do their part, and say something if they have information to one of these crimes.