E Gray’s neighbourhood?
tinuously working to improve community relations.”)
A way out
Finally, the interrupters will be working in a neighbourhood where the need is so great that they’ll have to couple basic social services with their street mediation. But Safe Streets’ resources to do so are limited: Only about $300 a month is left after paying for salaries and benefits, and T-shirts, food and drinks for the twice-monthly neighbourhood events. With that, Corey Winfield, Sandtown’s violence prevention coordinator, will try to help residents obtain state IDs, sign up for GED classes, get into autotechnician and other courses, or find jobs.
“Once you step into that gun world, it’s the ultimate stakes,” says Winfield, 47 and a towering presence with meat hooks for hands. “But every man wants a way out.”
The Baltimore City Health Department modelled Safe Streets on a Chicago program called CeaseFire (now Cure Violence), documented in the 2011 film The Interrupters. The department funds Safe Streets’ five sites through grant money issued to neighbourhood organisations, which directly hire the workers and provide them office space.
Similar approaches have been tried elsewhere, with varying success. In 2005, the District’s Peaceoholics was credited with helping achieve a 34 per cent drop in violent crime but was disbanded after six years. In 2013, its cofounders were sued by the city for allegedly misusing city grant money. In Chicago, where the model got its start, studies have linked decreases in gun violence to corresponding increases in imple- mentation of the CeaseFire program. For example, there was a 25 per cent decrease in homicides in Chicago in 2004, the same year CeaseFire expanded from five to 10 sites. But it’s likely that a combination of factors, CeaseFire among them, led to the decrease, according to research by Northwestern University professor Wesley Skogan.
‘Everyone’s still a criminal’
Before the violence of 2015, Safe Streets’ efforts had seemed to pay off. McElderry Park, the first site, once went more than 300 days without a fatal shooting. The Park Heights and Cherry Hill neighbourhoods hadn’t seen gun homicides in 423 days and 440 days, respectively, before July 2015, the peak of the city’s homicide spike. Even after Gray’s death, “the historic upswing in homicides largely was not experienced at all in communities served by Safe Streets,” says Daniel Webster, a professor of health policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Yet adequate funding and sponsorship are continual issues. Safe Streets in Mondawmin, the neighbourhood where police and students squared off on the afternoon of Gray’s funeral, is shut down until the fall while the health department looks for a new neighbourhood organisation to support a site. And while community leaders in Sandtown had been asking for a Safe Streets site for a couple of years, funding didn’t come through until after last year’s unrest, when area organisations such as the Abell Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation committed money and Catholic Charities expressed interest in hosting a Safe Streets site.
And Safe Streets is not without controversy. It has stumbled in big ways, most recently in July 2015, when guns, heroin and cocaine were found in the Safe Streets East office. The health department shut down operations there for two months while new staff was hired; prosecutors later dropped all charges against the nine people arrested, including two violence interrupters.
“Cops hate it because they just assume that everyone’s still a criminal. What happened on the east side – that’s what every cop has been saying,” says former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos, now an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Now that doesn’t mean the whole concept is bad, but it sure as hell is a red flag.”
Another point of contention is that the information Safe Streets workers gather isn’t shared with the police, a practice Safe Streets contends is necessary to get people to talk.
“The rules they live by – it does not help the crime fight in Baltimore City. How do I know that the people they’re mediating with aren’t responsible for the homicide?” says Anthony Barksdale, the former acting police commissioner, who retired in 2014.
When asked how he knows Safe Streets is making a difference, Fatiu responds, “I don’t know of any Safe Streets situation where we’ve actually mediated, and then a shooting will occur with the same people.”
‘We’re shining’
In April, all the violence interrupters head for Gilmor Homes, the scene of last year’s tension, walking through courtyards where children play blacktop football. They stop to hand out T-shirts and shake hands of the residents who are sitting on stoops enjoying the warmer weather, drinking from red Solo cups and blasting rap music playing on 92Q radio.
“People who see us say, ‘Man, the new way can’t be that bad – look at them.’ We don’t make a lot of money, but we’re shining,” says outreach supervisor Greg Marshburn, a stocky 47-year-old with gray flecks in his beard.
On another canvass, Medley walks to where some of his relatives live, and speaks with Mark Lee, a 55-yearold who works at the Port of Baltimore and grew up in Sandtown, although he no longer lives there. Lee sits with three friends on folding chairs between the stoops of two rowhouses that have stickers in their windows that read: “Stop shooting. Start living.”
“Here’s the bull’s-eye – and I like what y’all doing,” Lee says to Medley. “Kids is watching us, even when we’re not watching them.” Medley grins widely enough to reveal the gap in his two front teeth.
Safe Streets workers are keenly aware of this dynamic. On days off, they still tend to wear their work T-shirts. They also avoid certain conversations. When he first got out of prison, it was hard for Medley to be on the streets again, he says, remembering the money he could make. But he has learned to handle it. If people start to tell him information “that I might not need, that might bring me some trouble,” he redirects the discussion, he says. “Today, people know what I stand for.”
The men don’t like to linger on their backgrounds, partly because, they say, the media seem more interested in how many times they’ve been shot than what they’re doing now. But they will briefly outline their pasts to illustrate their growth.
Medley says anger about being in prison was his catalyst for change. “I realised it was my own actions that put me in that situation.” He earned his GED during his sentence and, after his release in 2002, became a youth counselor and mentored juvenile delinquents at city high schools for more than a decade. When he heard Sandtown was starting up a Safe Streets site, he applied to be a violence interrupter.
Today, Medley has four children, including a daughter who turns seven in August and wants to be a nurse. He lives in Baltimore County, Maryland, with his wife but regularly stays in Sandtown to cut his commute time.
“At one point I had no regard for people or even human life,” he says. “Now I love people. One person told me that if I changed, anybody can change.”
And he believes he can help others change as well. In April, Medley came upon two teenagers, one a known gun carrier, arguing over who was allowed to sell drugs on a corner. Medley intervened immediately. “I took the person that I knew I could get through to first, grabbed that person away from the other person,” Medley recalls. Then he said something like, “Ho, ho, ho! We can’t do this! Y’all don’t want to send each oth-