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Cleveland City Councilman Jeffrey Johnson is canceling Glenville's longstanding parade and festival on account of a surge of gun violence on the city's East Side.

(Cory Shaffer, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cleveland City Councilman Jeffrey Johnson announced Monday that he is canceling the long-running Glenville Festival and Parade next month, out of concern for the safety of residents and police officers after a surge of gun violence here and nationwide.

The cancellation will mark only the second time in the festival's 39-year history that the event did not take place. (It was rained out once in the mid-1990s.) Johnson said he is returning money to sponsors and vendors.

In a letter to Ward 10 residents, Johnson wrote that the risk to public safety is too great, given the recent rash of shootings on the city's East Side and the deadly ambushes of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

"For the first time in the seven years I have been Councilman, [I] have doubts about our ability to prevent the violence from coming into the two events this year," Johnson wrote. "I feel that the boldness and randomness of gun violence occurring weekly in Cleveland, including our area, creates too much uncertainty for the safety of citizens and for law enforcement officers and others working to protect us."

The city has seen 57 homicides so far this year. Thirteen people were shot, one killed, in Cleveland neighborhoods over the weekend. The youngest of the victims, 2-year-old Alaya Brown, was shot in the head and arm during a drive-by Friday on the East Side.

On July 7, in the deadliest incident for law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001, a dozen Dallas officers were shot, five fatally, by a sniper, who opened fire during a police brutality protest. And on Sunday, in Baton Rouge, three officers were killed and three others were wounded during an ambush in a commercial district.

Johnson said that he planned on hiring 22 off-duty law enforcement officers to work security for the festival, and that the vast majority of them would have been Cleveland cops.

"I am very concerned also with their safety as they watch over ours," he wrote in his letter to residents.