D. A. unveils anti- gun campaign

CHESTER » Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer is trying a new “carrot- and- stick” approach to gun violence in the city, using a statistical datamodel that he said has shown gains elsewhere across the country.

“The goal is, in the broader sense, to reduce gun violence in the city of Chester, the shootings and homicides, while simultaneously providing resources for those most likely to shoot someone else or be shot themselves,” said Assistant District Attorney Matt Krouse, who is heading up the program with Assistant District Attorney Jason Harmon.

Called “Chester Partners for Safe Neighborhoods,” the program is based off a model developed by Swarthmore College alum David Kennedy. Krouse referred to Kennedy as the “gun violence initiative guru,” whose statistical approach to quelling inner- city violence has been employed in places like Boston, Cincinnati, North Carolina and in Philadelphia a few years ago under the moniker “Focused Deterrence.”

“It is essentially the onlymodel that is data driven and has shown to have statistically significant reductions in violent crime,” said Krouse. “It works, and the fact that it’s numbers- based and what the actual ultimate goal is, is something that’s a littlemore pro

active. It’s definitely something that has never been done in the county before.”

The carrot

Krouse said the first step is identifying what he called “high- risk individuals” – those who have been shot in the past, have been convicted of shootings in the past, or who are reasonably believed through police intelligence to be associated with gun violence currently.

He said there is a very, very small number of these people in any given locality and that statistics show about 0.5 percent of people nationally may be responsible for up to 75 percent of all violent crime. In most settings, these violent actsmight be attributed to gang violence, but Krouse said Chester is a little different.

“There are no gangs in Chester,” he said. “It’s all neighborhoods. It’s where you live, where you grew up. But accurately – and consistent with the data – the violence is very much group driven, neighborhood driven. So we are very intentional when we call them‘ groups’ because that’s what they are, and one of the perks of this model and the perks of essentially creating this programfromthe ground up with a lot of help fromthe programs in other cities that have come before us is that we have to make it Chester- centric.”

Normally, once the information on these “highrisk” individuals has been gathered, law enforcement would bring them into a courtroom where the local DA, president judge and a victim of gun violence or their loved one could speak candidly about how the program will operate.

Unfortunately, that approach had to be scrapped due to the COVID- 19 pandemic, along with some other initiatives like a record expungement clinic, a “wipe- out warrants” event and a gun turn- in event.

Instead, Krouse said he and Harmon will go to addresses they are collecting for known members of these groups in an effort to speak to them individually.

“We want to talk to them andwewant themto spread the message to everyone else, and the message is going to be the same for everybody: We knowwho you are, we know who you hang out with andwe knowwhat your group is responsible for in the ongoing violence in Chester,” said Krouse. “The idea is we want these guys to succeed. We want these guys and girls to make better decisions and to get off the streets, stop carrying the gun, stop resorting to violence and to shooting each other and essentially holding the rest of the Chester community hostage.”

And that is where Community Resource Consultant Jean- Pierre Brice comes in.

“They need someone that’s there, someone they can lean on, and that’swhat I’m here for,” said Brice, or “J. P.,” the founder of the Cultivating Mature Positivity online radio station.

Brice, who has spent nearly his entire 40 years living in Chester, saidmany city residents targeted by this program have normalized gun violence and seeing dead bodies, probably without understanding the strain that places on their mental health.

Brice has been involved in other initiatives in the past, but said those had limited success because they either did not understand the make- up of the city or failed to provide one crucial thing that this partnership is offering: Resources.

“Chester has always been on the back burner when it comes to resources,” he said. “The resources that were available to you weren’t necessarily available tome, so I made the best choices that I had at my ready.”

But Brice will now be able to offer the identified individuals more resources in an effort to entice them away from crime. This could be something as small as buying food or baby formula, paying for a GED program, or even therapy to deal with post- traumatic stress disorder. If they lost their Social Security card or birth certificate that they need to get a job, there’s a cost to pay for getting that reprinted. This program will cover those fees and Brice will be there to walk them through the governmental red tape.

He is also working with organizations like Laborer’s Local 413 and business owners to line up honest, well- paying jobs for those who want them. One Chester businessman has already said he has six positions ready to be filled.

“I really feel like this programhas the opportunity to change and to give opportunities to kids that didn’t necessarily have one,” said Brice. “They don’t want to be a detriment to their lives and their family’s lives. You have to give options, but there’s no real options in Chester. For the last 50, 60 years, the city has gotten progressively worse.”

Brice said he would not be dealing with the shooters. The cops and D. A.’ s office can handle that, he said. He wants to get to the generation behind the shooters, those who might follow in their footsteps, and show them a different way. Brice wants to be the guy those kids call to hang out with if and when one of those shooters asks themto take a ride, he said.

“The whole idea is if you let us help you, we want to build you up and we want to help you. Almost the entirety of our budget is going to go to providing resources or otherwise helping build up the Chester community,” said Krouse. “J. P., his entire role as a consultant is to serve as that liaison, to make these networks with these young men and women, andmake those networks with the resources that already exist in the community.”

The stick

Krouse said that once the high risk individuals have been identified, they will be given something of an ultimatum: Get on board by a certain date, or get ready for the hammer to come down hard on everyone in the group.

This “group enforcement action” could take several forms, he said. If someone from a group is involved in a shooting, for instance, anyone in the group on probation might have to meet with their probation officer once a week instead of once a month, with increased drug screenings. If there is a particular block that the group hangs out on, there might be spotlights and noisemachines set up there. Anyone in that group with an outstanding warrant or who is behind on child support paymentswill go to the top of the list.

“The goal is to make it as uncomfortable as possible to be affiliated with the group,” said Krouse. “It’s not to punish them, it’s not to do anything outside of what already exists. But it is to dissuade them from that group affiliation. The more we can make the opportunities that J. P. is going to connect themwith enticing and the less enticingwe can make that group affiliation, that’s ultimate the goal.”

This will all take place in the background of regular policing and detective work to identify and prosecute those who commit crimes, said Krouse. Some of the investigations and prosecutions will also be picked up by partners in the U. S. Attorney’s Office as an added disincentive, because federal prosecutions are often times viewed as more “serious” or “real” than those taking place in local courts.

There are also now weekly meetings with police to review shootings, follow up on investigations and keep tabs on the knowns and unknowns of gun violence in the city, Krouse said. Even units inside the police department are sharing more information with one another now, like the narcotics divisions and homicide division.

At the same time, there has to be a real disincentive to carrying a gun in the first place, said Stollsteimer. Right now there might be a mentality that people need to carry weapons because other people are carrying weapons. But if the group is viewed and treated by law enforcement in such a way that if any one person is carry, all people are carrying, that starts to introduce the idea that no one should carry, he said.

First Assistant District Attorney Tanner Rouse said the office is also changing the way it tracks gun crimes. Instead of assigning them out to any attorney, they will go to specific senior attorneys in the office who will take responsibility for those cases and come down hard on offenders, he said.

“I sat down with the defense bar in December and I told them, a lot of what we’re going to try to do with drug crime, small crime, is rehabilitative, we believe in that model – you guys are not going to like how we treat guns,” he said. “We are absolutely deadly serious about this because it’s the beginning of the problem. It’s something we are attacking aggressively in terms of bail, in terms of sentencing and in terms of how those cases get handled, soup to nuts. We take it very seriously and it’s a big part of not just what we’re trying to do with this program but office wide.”

Stollsteimer noted it is almost impossible to stop the supply side of firearms, but he hopes this program gets to the demand side. If you can change the calculation inside a young person’s head that picking up that gun carries real consequences for them, their family and their friends, maybe they’ll think twice.

“If we can stop them because we’re giving them a better alternative or we can stop them because we’re going to arrest his ass – doesn’t matter to me,” said Stollsteimer. “But at the end of the day we’ve got to get them to stop shooting each other.”

He pointed to a specific arrest made during the Boston cease fire, a similar program in that city, where a young man was picked up simply for flipping a bullet. Because of the way the law was written, said Stollsteimer, that bullet counted as a “firearm” and the man was sent up for seven years. Following that conviction, he said, police put out hundreds of fliers in his neighborhood about the case.

“We’re trying to say, ‘ If you’ve got a dispute with that guy, go settle it like a man. Don’t pick up a military grade weapon and shoot up a neighborhood,’” said Stollsteimer. “That’s what we’ve got going on in large parts of Philadelphia right now, we’ve got it going on in Chester, and it’s been going on for seemingly forever.”

Krouse said a large piece of this is returning to an age- old tradition of having community policing – cops out walking the beat, meeting people, getting to know business owners and providing a visible presence in neighborhoods rather than simply driving through them.

After reviewing data over the past nine months, Krouse said the District Attorney’s Office determined two or three of the worst hot spots in Chester and is paying for officers to be on foot patrols there.

Chester Deputy Police Commissioner Steven Gretsky said there are already four to six officers taking part in the community policing prong, but they don’t fill an enforcement role. Rather, he said, they are simply there to be visible, to make contacts and to talk with neighborhood residents.

“It’s more of a friendly approach than just seeing an officer sitting in his car, kind of going back to the original approach of a community policing aspect and just having officers on foot patrol,” said Gretsky. “It’s not always about getting locked up, it’s not always about enforcing the law. We’re here for you as a friend to reach out to.”

“It’s about exposing the community to these officers and showing them, number one, just a general police presence, which can serve as a deterrent for that small number of people that are driving this violence, but also look, these officers aren’t here to bother you, to accost you or your family – they’re here for your safety and they’re here to help,” said Krouse.

Gretsky said there is still some animosity among the youth with being seen talking to police. He and Krouse acknowledge that there is a lot of added tension surrounding police at themoment and that it will be no easy task to turn perceptions around.

“We recognize that that distrust exists and we recognize that it is not going to fix itself, nor is it going to be resolved in the next six months to a year,” said Krouse. “It’s a long- term goal of this office to help establish a better relationship between the community and the police department.”

“They feel like they can get away with it because the community is afraid of the cops and the cops are really afraid of the community,” said Brice. “So bringing them together and allowing the cops to get to know the neighborhood and the neighborhood to get to knowthe copswill stopthat on that side. Then you have the youngmen committing the crimes, they’re not really worried about anybody telling – now that’s changed. Miss Agnes has seen it, she’s going to testify against you now because she’s not scared of you anymore, because she has the cops on her side. So it’s a back and forth that, if we play it correctly, we can really win.”

Krouse said that eventually the office would like to have someone like Brice who can engage more middleschool aged children, then move on to an overall kindergarten through grade 12 program to provide even more opportunities and more distractions from street life.

The end goal would be to expand countywide, to place like Collingdale, East Lansdowne and Upper Darby, which have their own share of gun violence. For now, however, Krouse said the office is focusing its limited funds on providing the resources Chester needs.

“We want to do this slowly and meticulously to make sure it’s successful,” he said.

“Who knows, if we work together, there’s a lot of strength in unity,” said Brice. “If we come together andwe say, ‘ All right, we’re no longer going this way, we’re going that way,’ I think we’ll turn things around.”