The figures place Jacksonville at the center of a statewide crisis: More than 4,000 Florida children were hospitalized for firearm injuries during the same six-year period, about 1.5 a day. Three of the 10 Florida ZIP codes with the highest rates of child firearm injuries are in Jacksonville, the analysis found.

Public health researchers and local advocates point to a long history of disinvestment and environmental exposure in predominantly Black neighborhoods as part of the broader context for violence. Research has found an association between lead exposure early in life and a higher risk of firearm violence later on. The findings do not establish that lead causes a particular person to commit or experience violence.

Brown’s Dump operated from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s on a 250-acre site. A school named for educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune was later built there, along with homes and apartment complexes. The school closed in 2001. Federal and state officials said in 1999 that soil at the site posed a potential public health hazard; cleanup work targeting lead, arsenic and other contaminants began in 2008.

The site was first assessed as a potential Superfund site in 1985. In a 2024 report, the Environmental Protection Agency said much of Brown’s Dump had been cleaned or covered with new soil to reduce exposure and protect groundwater. The EPA also said contamination at a separate north Jacksonville site, the Jacksonville Ash Site, no longer threatened people living or working nearby.

Those findings address current exposure risks, but public health experts say they do not undo past harm or the effects of other neighborhood conditions. Jeffrey Goldhagen, a University of Florida Health Jacksonville professor emeritus who previously led the Duval County health department, said lead can impair children’s brain development, attention and behavior. He argues that reducing environmental lead should be part of efforts to prevent violence.

A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee research team studied more than 89,000 people in Milwaukee who had been tested for lead by age 6. After accounting for factors including race, sex and neighborhood socioeconomic conditions, the researchers found that childhood lead exposure was associated with greater risk of being a victim or perpetrator of firearm violence in early adulthood.

The study’s lead author, Lindsay Emer, described the pattern as part of the legacy of segregation and redlining, calling it an environmental injustice for Black residents. Redlining maps produced in the 1930s marked many Black neighborhoods as risky for mortgage lending, discouraging investment. Jacksonville’s north and northwest neighborhoods continue to face poverty, pollution and elevated lead-poisoning rates, alongside high numbers of shootings involving children.

Community organizer A.J. Jordan, who has worked with families of shooting victims, said keeping children safe requires sustained attention. “We have to work hard to make sure our kids get home safe,” Jordan said.

Residents and advocates also question how public money is spent in communities with longstanding unmet needs. In 2024, the Jacksonville City Council unanimously passed a resolution to address the continuing effects of redlining. Community activist Anthony Brown said he has not seen the kind of dedicated investment needed to improve conditions in those neighborhoods. He cited the city’s more than $60 million medical examiner’s office and morgue, which opened in predominantly Black Brentwood, as a contrast to residents’ calls for services such as an urgent care center or pharmacy.

Council member Ju’Coby Pittman, whose district includes Brown’s Dump, said cleanup work has made progress but is not enough to repair generations of disinvestment. She said lasting change will require sustained investment in housing, public health, education and economic development.

The city’s health department has also lost capacity over time. A review of state data found that the department had the equivalent of 852 full-time employees and spent about $91 per resident in 2008; by 2019, it had 422 employees and spending of about $34 per person. Goldhagen said reductions in public health staffing and budgets have weakened the ability to respond to community health problems.

For Goldhagen, addressing gun violence means treating it as a public health issue as well as a matter of immediate safety. “This is a disease,” he said, “and we need to use rigorous public health approaches to address it.”