PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — Portsmouth Police Chief Stephen Jenkins hosted his quarterly forum Wednesday night, addressing recent gun violence and crime in the city.

“If you have the ability to be able to do something to help us with our problem, why don’t you step up and do something,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins addressed the city with numbers that show a recent jump in crime, but he said reducing it will take a community effort.

“Everybody, take a piece of this monster and let’s start working together to be able to fix some of these issues,” Jenkins said. “We’ve already identified some of our challenges. Now that we have them identified, now, let’s devise a plan on how we tackle it.”

Jenkins broke down some of the city’s recent statistics.

“We had some shootings, of course, that stuck out,” Jenkins said. “Aggravated assaults continue to be challenging. Stolen vehicles is down, but it’s something that we are constant about, our larcenies for motor vehicle parts, and shoplifting. All of those things are challenging for us.”

Darrell Redmond, founder of the organization, Give Back To The Block, said you have to speak up and look at crime in your neighborhood with a fresh perspective.

“I would ask the community going forward to reach out to people that’s inside your community, that’s investing inside your community,” Redmond said. “But, if you want to go do this civic engagement inside the community, … we can do prevention instead of doing intervention, or be proactive, instead of reactive.

With the gun crime taskforce underway, Councilman Bill Moody said this call to action is right on time.

“It is an emergency,” Moody said. “As a community, we got to deal with it. We got to defeat it. We need to revisit some of these things to make our communities safer. You know, if the people who want to do crime know that there’s eyes on the street, they’re more apt to go elsewhere. So we’ve got to get our arms around it.”

Police also want residents to use a popular website as a weapon against crime. Residents are encouraged to use P2C, the Police to Citizen resource to report any incidents.