Trapped in neighborhoods

with a good name, a good reputation,” Cannady said. “I dealt with the consequence of my actions. I never thought, never, to turn nobody into authorities.”

Broken relations

Baltimore’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, remembers the day vividly. It was cold, and Davis, then a newly hired deputy commissioner, was on the scene of a West Baltimore homicide. When he walked into a nearby corner store to use the bathroom, he spotted the owner hurriedly walking up to shoo him away.

“It quickly dawned on me based on her demeanor ... that she wanted me to get the hell out of her corner store,” recalled Davis, who was in uniform. He realized the owner was terrified that someone might spot him in her business and conclude that she had given him information.

In 25 years of police work, Davis had never experienced anything like it.

Since then, he has taken over the department and has had to weather scathing criticism about its practices in poor, black neighborhoods.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which conducted a civil rights investigation here, recently outlined at length how the department routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents by conducting unlawful stops and using excessive force. It was the culmination of years of practices, including “zero tolerance” policing that led to mass arrests, which alienated young black men — and the community.

The effects were also felt in the judicial system, said Cherry. City juries are more suspicious of police, and witnesses are less likely to cooperate.

“Old Miss Betty who sits out on the stoop” isn’t giving police tips anymore, said Safe Streets community liaison J.T. Timpson.

“She sees them doing all this unlawful stuff she feels shouldn’t be going on, so guess what? She is not going to say nothing because you’re just as bad as they are,” Timpson said. “Not every police officer is like that, and we know that. But you have too many boys working that have no business policing the city.”

Even the Rev. Andre H. Humphrey, commander of the Baltimore Trauma Response Team, is frustrated. He leads a group of chaplains that work with Baltimore police, responding to violent crime scenes to help victims and family members.

He said he has watched officers slam heads on car hoods and treat family members rudely. “Why should you have to get indignant?” he asked, referring to police.

Some say widely publicized incidents across the country in which black citizens died after altercations with police stoked last year’s surge in shootings and homicides in a number of the nation’s largest cities. That deadly trend continues this year in many highly segregated and impoverished urban areas, including Baltimore.

In Baltimore, police, union officials and the mayor have acknowledged one version of the “Ferguson effect,” or “Freddie Gray effect” — that officers shied away from doing their jobs for months after coming under increased

Neighborhood as a trap

Thomas Abt, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government researcher who has studied places like Baltimore and Watts in South Central Los Angeles, has seen that when homicides aren’t solved, neighborhood residents may look to street justice, perpetuating violence. He said the feelings in those urban areas can be bleak: “You’re on your own. Nobody cares about you. No one is helping you. No one is coming for you.”

Many families feel trapped in neighborhoods where homicide is a part of life. It can feel as if they are left to fend for themselves. Parents from a number of cities that have seen an uptick in violence, from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco, recount some universal rules they impart to their children to keep them safe.

Don’t linger around large crowds in neighborhoods prone to violence because the chances for disputes or gang shootings increase. Don’t ride in a car with people you don’t know well — they may be involved in criminal activity — or in a car with a large number of young black men, which could make you a target for a police stop.

Ursula Newell-Lewis, a longtime social worker in New Orleans, instructed her son, Charles Newell, 24, not to ride in cars with other people. Some of her friend’s sons had been killed.

When he was laid off from his job, Newell thought it was his chance to get out of New Orleans. She bought him a plane ticket to live with her sister in Waldorf, Md. Upon his arrival last November, a family friend invited Charles to go on a short trip to D.C. to show him how to get around safely.

The car was shot up, and Newell was killed.

Raichele Jackson’s niece, Ranisha Raven, was killed when at least one gunman fired into a crowd last year at the San Francisco public housing project where she had grown up. She was there to visit friends. “Don’t discount having a conversation with the wrong person because now you’re with them. It’s really that simple,” Jackson said.

Raven died about 15 feet from where her father, Burnett Raven Jr., was fatally shot in 2006.

Andrew Papachristos, a Yale researcher, said violence shows many of the markings of a communicable disease. The closer you are to people who are involved in violence, the more likely you are to get drawn in. Getting a ride or standing with the wrong people can get you killed, as can living next to the wrong person.

He tracked gun homicides in Chicago between 2006 and 2012 and found that, just like HIV, gun violence can be transmitted from person to person through “risky behaviors,” he said. In Chicago, more than 40 percent of all gun homicides he researched occurred within a network of about 3,100 people or about 4 percent of the community’s population.

Being a part of that network increased your chances of being killed by 900 percent.

Even a recompense for living in a blighted Baltimore neighborhood can put people in danger. Generations of Baltimore children have been poisoned by toxic lead paint that can cause health and