New Haven Independent

Minister Donald Morris (pictured below) of the Christian Community Commission’s Brotherhood Leadership Program, which was created in the aftermath of the shootings of Jajauna Cole and other young Elm City teens a year ago, brought together a panel of some dozen men at the Community Outreach Center, men no longer talking about the crisis but doing real work to intervene with young people.

“While homicides are down, shootings are way up, at an all time high of 141,” Morris said. “Of those, 11were homicides — four Hispanics and seven African-American. And of the 11, only one has been solved, and there have been,” he said, very few arrests in shootings. “Why have there been so many shootings? And where are the guns coming from into the black community?”

The other question he did not ask, but which was nevertheless on people’s minds, was whether the spike in shootings represented an infusion of outside organized gangs into the community.

The sense of the black family in crisis in New Haven was as pervasive as the sense that the moment for rhetoric had passed, and only actions speak, thus the celebration of the panelists’ outreach work on the streets. Perhaps closest to what is going on on those streets — and therefore as close as the gathering got to the answers to Reverend Morris’s questions — were the thoughts of Street Outreach Workers (below, right to left) Doug Bethea and Tyrone Weston, and the founder of CTRibat, New Haven police officer Shafiq Abdussabur.

Weston and Bethea described several recent incidents in which they and other workers interceded in disputes and headed off violence. In one incident someone had brought a paintball gun to a party and there was a misunderstanding and then threatened retaliation, fortunately averted. In a second incident, Weston said he saw four women climbing out of an apartment window to get away from a shooting. “Someone called me, and we got in there and headed off something that could have escalated.

“Where we are now,” added Weston, who is supervisor of the Street Outreach Workers, “is a kind of phase two with some of the kids we’ve already interceded with. It’s the jobs phase. We get these kids to change their ways, and after they show us something, we show them we can get them good jobs. We need more of those. Someone said that African-American men are incredibly entrepreneurial, or in street language, always with a hustle. The challenge now is to make what people are selling legal. Jobs, jobs. Jobs. That’s critical.”

The most trenchant and comprehensive analysis came from Abdussabur. His CTRibat organization is going to release its formal report in a few weeks of their view of the spike in violence; he previewed some of the findings for the Independent:

“The thing we see over and over again is that violence is gender, relationship based. Yes, there’s an issue about access to guns, and yes, we’re not yet sure about outside gangs; let me address that in a minute. But at the heart of what we’re seeing lately and what I can verify is young African-American males who are exposed to all the images on TV and the rappers and this sense of their thinking comes out when they express an interest in a woman and that’s a kind of ownership. It can happen at club, for example, and then the woman they’re talking to had a baby with someone else five years ago, and this guy shows up, and the two males exchange words and soon they’re facing off outside the club. It’s all crazy. It comes from images the kids get from TV and from rappers, and it’s corrosive.

“And why does it happen? The population we’re dealing with that’s getting in trouble, it’s 85 percent single parents, the mother. And 50 percent of those are in poverty. The mothers are beleaguered themselves, often young, and they don’t give structure. They don’t give an alternate way for young men to interact with young women. So there’s this sexual thing, this power thing, and since the young men have so little of anything, so little money, so little real power, it expresses itself through sex. You see it all the time at clubs. Yes, and then, if there’s an insult and a challenge, one side goes and gets their boys from the Tre, and another from Dixwell and they face off, but at heart it’s not a gang problem, it’s girls, women. And a play for power, and shooting and even being the victim of shooting is a kind of power.

“That’s what you see all the time at the clubs, and then that gets carried over to the all-night corner stores. But at the heart of this is not knowing how to relate except through these images — did you see one recently where some rapper swipes a credit card through a woman’s butt! — and it’s corrosive. I mean that is creating a volcano out there. If young men can’t learn how to relate more positively at home, we’re going to have to teach this in the schools.”

Abdussabur said that CTRibat had already shifted its programming to sex education. It was going, therefore, to be making as a chief recommendation of its report, that sex education, particularly for boys, be part of the middle and high school curriculum. “And it should be done not as just another class, but as an emergency health intervention,” he added. “With the urgency of, you know, an anti-smoking, this-can-kill-you-if-you-don’t-stop campaign.”

As to the gangs, he said, that it is possible indeed that some of the spike in shootings is gang related, but they wouldn’t be the “posses,” or the local gangs. What’s alarming he said was that neither CTRibat nor the police have yet broken the “code.” When asked what he meant by code, Abdussabur said that when violence occurs, the police eventually learn where it comes from. A perpetrator might not be apprehended, but they get an understanding of the source. In this case, with the spike in shootings, people who should be talking are not, he said, which makes them wonder if there is some outside structure entered into New Haven.

It is still an unknown they are working on, Abdussabur said. In the meantime, organizers of the Brotherhood Leadership Program, such as Apostle Eugene Brunson (on the left) Pastor William Thompson (in the back), and Deacon Stacy Spell, seated) are working on addressing what they already know, and already following his lead.

Next month’s gathering is going to have as its theme, said Reverend Morris, “What women want and need spiritually, emotionally, and physically.” That would be part one. Part two, in November, is going to be for women: what men want and need. November also happens to be the one-year anniversary of the violent summer that resulted in the founding of the Brotherhood Leadership Program. To participate or to contact them, the number is: 624-9228

“We are at an absolutely critical moment,” suggested Kenneth R. Jackson (in the foreground), who works on conflict resolution with the Bridgeport school system. “And what’s happening in New Haven is happening throughout the state.” He could not address, he said, the intrusion of specific gangs into the city, but the posse mentality in his view is not only at the core of the problem, but might also begin to be viewed as a germ of a solution.

“What we need to do are find the good kids in the schools, the leaders, and utilize them and support them to form, in effect, positive gangs. We are OGs,” he said. OG means “Old Guys.” “These young guns, the best of them, need to become vested in helping out their brothers, and we are in there, already, in the schools to support them. Sure the police are important, but we’ve been there, we can go out to the nooks and crannies of the community where the cops can’t go, and find the kids who will be leaders and then we give them the positive skills to talk to their peers.”

Brother Remedi, a Muslim, sounded a cautionary note at the gathering about “coming on hard and preaching the good book to the young brothers.” You shouldn’t do that, he suggested, because they’ll turn away.

“Give people love, show them love, and don’t worry them about which book it comes from. We need to slip the messages to them, seduce them, not scream at them. They’ll discover that later.” He called for an ecumenical approach from church, mosque, and synagogue. And he said he was fairly certain where the guns were coming from. “Mark my word,” he said, “the guns and the drugs are not there by accident. Someone is letting it happen. Corporate American is trying to shut us down.”

Oddly, however, he was far from despairing. He called it incumbent on everyone to make a “creative use of our destruction.”

Maurice “Blest” Peters, co-chair of the Third Ward Democratic committee, dramatically read aloud parts of the 13th amendment of the Constitution, the prohibition of slavery, to the assembled panelists and audience. “This was written for you, young people,” he declared. There were some dozen young people among the older men. Peters sounded a note, shared by the other speakers, that African-Americans in too great numbers are still being kept in economic and spiritual servitude, with not enough entrepreneurs among them (“you are the most broke consumers in America,” Peters said), and there are not enough voters. “In my ward, only 200 people came out to vote. If you’ve got a better plan to change America, tell me about it. I don’t think you do, so you have got both to work with young people, and also to work to be politically organized.”

Peters has a new organization called Uniting Our Youth that works with kids on the most kid-dense block in the city, he said. “Stevens Street. We have over 200 kids on that block, and many of them from single-parent homes, many with not a whole lot to do. We’re trying to turn a vacant lot into a kind of creative space for hanging out, watching movies, and we’ve gotten two city grants. But, honestly, the parents are not getting involved as they should. That’s a big part of the problem. So we’re also saying, Women, make time for your children. And, boys, don’t make any more babies if you can’t take care of them!”