Clergy plan to address street crime

By G. Michael Dobbs

Managing Editor

SPRINGFIELD Before the summer is over, the executive director of the Council of Churches of Greater Springfield expects work will begin on a new effort to address the root issues of much of the street crime in the city.

The Rev. David Hunter of the Victory Church was one of approximately 30 people who attended a City Council sub-committee meeting on June 13 in which the Rev. Jeff Brown of Boston spoke about strategies that worked in Boston neighborhoods that reduced crime.

Brown was part of a movement in which members of the clergy walked the streets of their urban neighborhoods at night speaking to at-risk youth. The result was getting youth off the street and establishing a better working relationship with police officers assigned to the areas.

Brown spoke at the Public Health and Safety Subcommittee chaired by City Councilor Kateri Walsh. Police Commissioner Edward Flynn also attended the meeting.

Hunter explained to Reminder Publications a day after the meeting that "there is going to be call to religious community from the Council of Churches to other faith-based organizations to talk about issues presented that day."

Hunter said there are already churches and organizations that are "doing good work" in pockets of the city and that these efforts need to be brought together.

At the meeting Flynn said that in 2005, Springfield had 18 homicides and nine of which gang related and involved handguns. So far this year there have been nine homicides and six of those are gang related and involved handguns.

Flynn said his Department was hampered by the "pseudo-code of the street" in which witnesses believe it's wrong to supply information about a killing even if the victim was a relative or close friend.

Flynn said the Police Department has prepared a summer crime fighting strategy that will be a short-term solution, but that Brown was offering a long-term plan to address certain kinds of street crime.

Brown helped develop a group of clergy who walked the streets of their urban neighborhoods in Boston in 1992. He and his fellow pastors would be out from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. talking to the young people who were on the street at that time.

He said it took two months before a youth approached them and asked what the ministers were doing.

Brown emphasized that only through consistent action that the group was able to build a trust with the youth.

"This was not a flash in the pan," he said. "There were no speeches just listening."

What he and the other ministers discovered was that many of the youth were "just as scared to be on the street as we were."

The results included developing programs, such a midnight basketball leagues, which helped some youth as well building bridges between people who lived in the neighborhoods and the police officers who patrolled them.

Brown said the ministers tried to be "honest brokers as we tried to negotiate the violence."

Some youth incorporate violence into their daily lives, Brown explained, and inflict violence on others.

"Some youth need a prison ministry," he said.

What he saw was a small group of violent youth has a disproportionate effect on the young people of a city.

Brown cautioned that the approach was not easy and took time to have effects. He noted that not everyone at his church believed the street ministry was the best use of his time.

Sheila Shepard of Springfield, who lost two sons to street violence, was one of the people who attended the meeting. She spoke of the intimidation tactics that gangs use to keep witnesses quiet and spoke of the aftermath of violence.

She described it as "a pain that lasts forever."