Sacramento community dreams

Tries to stop violence before it happens

SACRAMENTO – The sun was setting over the Mack Road Valley Hi Community Center as Marcus Mcghee, 43, leaned heavily against the building's front handrail, listening intently to the excited young voice on the other end of the phone.

The teenager told Mcghee that he had just had a gun pulled on him at the train station. The teen knew these guys; he'd gotten into a fight with them once before. This time, they threatened to shoot him and then walked away.

“So how you want to handle it?” Mcgee calmly responded, waiting as the young man thought things through.

“I just want to be cool,” the teen finally replied.

Mcghee exhaled as he hung up. Another potential shooting avoided, at least for now.

In many American cities, police believe that most homicide and other violent crime is committed by just a handful of people already known to law enforcement: young men, frequently black and Hispanic, who, like the teen Mcghee was speaking with, are involved in street gangs.

In Sacramento, gang– related violence accounts for more than a quarter of the city's 30 to 40 annual homicides, according to police. Because the violence is typically retaliatory and witnesses refuse to cooperate, police often struggle to solve such killings, leading to the next round of retaliation.

So, city officials are flipping the script: intervening directly with young men who are closest to the violence – including known shooters – before they either pull the trigger or become a victim themselves.

The strategy is part of a program called Advance Peace, which offers financial incentives to the young men it targets if they stay out of trouble, a relatively radical approach to reducing gang violence. Police consider such violence a major factor in homicides nationwide and say those killings can be among the most difficult to solve.

Since 2007, more than Advance Peace team members Marcus Mcghee, Jr., Freddie Dearborn, Jr., and Dedrick Suggs Sr. gather for a meeting in Sacramento on Oct. 26.

half of the 52,000 homicides in 55 large cities have led to no arrest, according to an ongoing examination by The Washington Post. At least 38 cities have lower homicide arrest rates now than a decade ago. The failure to close cases leaves killers on the streets and fuels a cycle of retaliatory violence.

Police in Sacramento have done a better job at solving murder than many of their major city counterparts – making arrests in nearly 65 percent of homicides since 2007, including 53 percent of killings that were considered gang–related, The Washington Post found.

But even as the city's arrest rates have remained high, Sacramento saw a rise in gun violence over the past few years, which officials attribute in large part to street gangs.

In Sacramento, the normal enforcement and outreach strategies to

fight the gang violence did not work: Arresting one shooter seemed to just clear way for the next one.

So Sacramento contracted with Advance Peace, a program in which mentors like Mcghee – themselves previously imprisoned – identify vulnerable young men and help them develop a “life map” of short – and long–term goals while wrapping them in social services. Mentors help the young men, or “fellows,” secure driver's licenses and jobs, guide them to stable housing or drug treatment as needed, and mediate arguments and conflicts that could otherwise turn deadly.

After six months, if a participant has made sufficient progress toward his goals, he becomes eligible for a stipend of up to $1,000 a month. Officials have enrolled 39 young men in Sacramento so far.