 Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here, you know, as they say in the movie draft day, we're having a great day here in Columbia, South Carolina. I'm so excited as we continue to move forward in investing in our community, investing in our city, and today we're proud to announce the director of our Office of Violence Prevention. As you know, we went through a process so that we could find the right candidate to join us in this effort to reduce violence in our community. We're so thrilled to introduce our new director of Office of Violence Prevention, Trevon Forum. He is right behind me right here, right beside me. Trevon brings a wealth of experience in his background in juvenile justice, public safety, program management, grant administration, training and development, but he's specialized in training and trauma leadership development, SC Dare, and as a certified peer mentor, mediator, excuse me. His rich expertise and unique perspective, he's equipped to use the tools like evidence-based initiatives, community-based strategies, program development aimed at effectively reducing violent crime here in Columbia. He's dedicated his career to addressing violence in South Carolina, and he'll be dedicated to work with everyone and anyone who has an interest to make Columbia a safer place to live, work, and raise a family. As you know, the function of this office is to take advantage of the many violent reduction resources in Columbia. The grassroots organizations, some of them represented here today and others out in our community working hard today to curb violence in our community. Trevon can coordinate with these pre-existing resources, law enforcement, government officials, to effectively and efficiently combat violence. This office will function as a one-stop shop for violence reduction resources and will remove duplicacy in efforts by identifying our current resources and creating an overall strategy to eliminate violence as a whole in our community. We've started collecting data. Thank you, Lieutenant. Cannon is here who has been working along with our ceasefire folks and gathering the information to provide transparency and reporting, recognizing how we should focus our efforts to reach our desired outcome. Today is just the beginning. With our director, we can be in coordinating and creating processes to choose, fund, implement, track efforts to identify the people, the places, and behaviors associated with violence in our community. Once we've completed that, we'll take that information and implement the prevention, intervention, and obviously law enforcement measures as we've talked about, address drug abuse, CPT services, assisting, housing assistance, addressing mental health concerns, working with our pathway units, and our other organizations to get into the deep root of the cause of violence in our community. But we cannot do that alone, and that's why we needed a quarterback because the team we can accomplish that, and that team is community. That is our schools, that's our churches, that's our business community, that's our neighborhood leaders, but that's also our state, local, and federal officials, along with law enforcement, our sheriff's department, our police department, public service, public works in all the city from parks and recs and on. This is a team effort, and as we plan to combat and do everything we can to reduce violence in general, we started this off, it was gun violence, and gun violence was the projector that got us focused on this and the need for this office. But violence as a whole has risen, domestic violence as well, unfortunately. So we'll be focused very hard and dear using our resources, our expertise, our city departments, and our friends, partners, and community partnerships to address this issue once and for all. And with that, I'd like for everybody to give a hand and welcome Trevon for our new director. Well, good morning, everybody. God, I'm truly thankful for this opportunity. As Mr. Mayor said, it truly is a great day. I'm only here in South Carolina, but in the city of Columbia, I'd like to say thank you as well to city manager Wilson, to Mr. Mayor, oh, you were over there earlier, to all of the council members that are here today, the city administration, to first responders, law enforcement partners, to everybody that's here today, thank you for being here today. It's truly an honor to be tabbed as far as with this office and kind of starting it from the ground. I want each of you to know that I'm a man of few words, but more about action. So we are ready to hit the ground running. I understand and realize that there's a lot of work to be done. And over time, we're looking forward to making our impacts to make our city the best it can be. I'm a Charleston native, but Columbia's been home for me for the past 14, 15 years. So Columbia's home to me. This is a place that I love, a place that I live. You know, so I'm very passionate about the city, which drew me to this position based on my prior experiences in law enforcement, program management, and so many other different fields. Throughout all of my various roles that I've had over the last years, all of them have been a shared experience of helping others, working with community partners, working with law enforcement partners, working with government agencies to make sure that we are getting the best out of our communities. And that's what I strive to continue to do here in this role, in this position for this office. Our city, this city is the capital city of South Carolina, right? So we want to make sure that our city continues to advance and continue that we're putting in the work, working together between our government agencies, our community-based organizations, our residents, to all work together to make this and continue to make our city safe and better for everyone to live, work, and play. I'm a public servant to my core. It's who I am. It's what I do. Helping others, working with others to make situations better. It's what I do. It's who I am through mentoring, through working with different guy right initiatives. That's who I am. So that's what I'm going to strive to continue to be and do in this role. In working with community partners, we plan to, as the mayor laid out, take a very comprehensive and holistic approach. It's not going to be one that's going to be heavily based on any one factor because we know that crime is not caused or started by any one factor. It's going to take a very comprehensive approach, looking at different services from transitional housing to mental health, working with law enforcement partners, and really seeing how we can identify gaps, streamline those efforts, and really, as the mayor said, be a quarterback to really get the team together and keep the team rolling. So, again, that's kind of all that I have. Not going to go through all of the notes. I'm ready to get to work. I understand there are going to be challenges. I realize that we got some work ahead of us, but I know in order for us to combat violent crime in the city of Columbia, it's going to take a collaborative approach of us all working together. Today, we're here introducing me as an individual for the director of the position, but I can assure you that not one person individually by himself will be able to tackle violent crime. It's going to take all of us working together at the local government level. We're going to list the help of our partners at the state level and federal level. Again, all of our community partners that are willing to engage in work, we are going to bring everybody to the table to make this city the safest and the best can be for all of our citizens. And that's our goal, and that's my pledge to you as the director of the Office of Violent Crime Prevention. Thank you. I'd like to ask the chief to come out and say a few words, please. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Fordham, welcome. We've got got some work to do. I had the privilege of participating in the interview process for this position, and I can say with certainty that Mr. Fordham has a very accomplished career. We're very excited to see him take this new role. It is something new. We, you know, we've put so much emphasis on our law enforcement approach and our strategies, and we're very grounded with evidence-based practices. I foresee him working very closely with our analysts and our ceasefire coordinator as we again as we work collaboratively to address our gun violence and overall violent issues in our city, but I think this really creates an incredible opportunity that we just have not had at our disposal. This is a best practice that we're seeing in a lot of major cities and larger municipalities. I think it is an opportunity to coordinate with our many stakeholders and groups that have interest in being part of this solution. We've had some, recently we've had some very promising conversations with the NAACP. I think with our faith community, with many of our service providers, and, you know, I think for us to be successful, we've got to continue to break silos down and get people pulling in the exact same direction, very similar to what we've done with our homeless strategies, and I think he is the perfect selection for that. And we are very excited to work very closely with him and the mayor's office to bring solutions to this problem. Thank you. Thank you, Chief City Manager Wilson. You know, all that needs to be said has been said. I really wasn't planning to speak, but Trevon knows that when he interviewed and subsequently got the position, one thing I said to him because I think I can definitely say this. When I came to the city 16 years ago, I came into a position that was newly created, and when that happens, he bring a different perspective. I wasn't a product of local government, but I have learned so much and grown in my role so there's any indication of what you can do and what you can accomplish and what you can impact when you bring the heart for service, which he certainly has, and the intentionality of this council, this mayor and this council to begin to put creative solutions in place and allow us to bring experts in the field to really focus and quarterback issues on a daily basis is tremendous. You know, as practitioners, you don't always find that the policymakers understand that and this council certainly does from homeless services to now violent crime prevention efforts. It takes sometimes others bring that perspective to bear on a daily basis so that the police chief can continue to do what he does best or I can continue to do what I do best, give a little guidance and direction, but know that we've got people on the team who are going to be working on these efforts every single day. So we're so appreciative to City Council. We're very fortunate and grateful for Trevon's expertise and you will do a great job. Your spirit is there, so that's all that really ultimately matters, so welcome.