Cops, Kids Talk Guns

“Last night, I had to watch a boy die of four gunshot wounds to the stomach. I suppose he thought he was tough, but it was terrible. He was screaming for his mother in agony while he died. I don’t want to have to have to stand over any of you guys.” So went an evening of blunt talk between cops like Jason Jackson (at right in photo) and Dixwell teens at the Stetson Library.

The New Haven Police Department, including officers Carl Myers, Russell Blackwell, and Jackson (left to right in photo), were out in force at Stetson Thursday, but not because anything was wrong. In fact everything was right: They were brought there for a second powerful workshop on prevention of youth violence, part of a series created for kids and their parents by city cop Shafiq Abdusabbur and CTRIBAT, his three-year-old New Haven youth development program designed to provide coping skills for at-risk young males in danger of being seduced by the world of guns that often surrounds.
What the 30 boys, aged 9 to 16, heard was riveting personal testimony about the face of violence, and its consequences, like Officer Jackson’s tale of watching the boy die. Picking up the irony of this violence aversion-therapy session being offered in a quiet, beautifully appointed library, he added, ​“Civilization is really built on books and learning, not guns. Choose books.”
Harvey Strode spoke next. From the mild manner of this 24-year old New Havener, the boys in the audience might never have guessed that he has spent nine months in Iraq as a member of the Second Marine Infantry Division, and that he is a demolitions expert, and a sniper.
​“I have been shot,” he said quietly, ​“I have been stabbed, I have so much shrapnel in my feet I can no longer bend my toes. I have seen little kids, your age, maybe 14, wearing an explosive belt run up to one of my buddies, ignite, and the both of them turn into a pink mist. Nothing left but boots.
​“I have nightmares about the warm blood on my face of the people I have killed. One was a boy no more than 14 or 15. Yes, I shot him. I had to because he was shooting at me.
​“The point is I had to pull the trigger. I am ordered to do so. Here, you don’t. Here no one gives you orders to do that. So I say to you, don’t do it. Also read these books. Stay in school. Don’t drop out like I did from Career High because I smoked weed and lost out on a full football scholarship to Syracuse, and I have ended up in the army killing people. I hate guns. I truly do. Read these books. You don’t have to go into the army to change. Take another path.”
​“This man knows what stress is,” said Abdusabbur, referring to Strode. ​“In Iraq at least three GIs are dying on the streets every night. In Dixwell it’s not that bad, so don’t act as if it is with guns. We’re here to tell you, yes, you are at risk. Yes, the number one cause of homicide for African American boys, age 10 to 19, is firearms. But we are saying, we love you, we are showing you another way.”
Perhaps the most astonishing speaker of the evening was Edward Booker, age 31
(in the left in the photograph).
​“My name in the hood was Sharkey,” he began telling his life story of drugs, crime, arrest, jail, and parole, ​“and my first ​‘combat’ was at age 13. I went around the corner not far from here, smoked some weed, and said to my boys, ​‘Let’s go to the ville and go shoot some people.’
​“So I took my dust, my drugs, and harassed some people, and we were feeling good, very good. And the cops came by at 2 in the morning, and I took off. I crashed 12 police cars and even bit the police dog, I was so high.”
Booker did seven years in jail, where he learned to read and to write, and to change his life, the hard way. On parole, and now the father of two boys, whose care and upbringing is the new focus of his life, he hopes to work with these kids in CTRIBAT. ​“Life is real,” he told them. ​“Your mother who loves you and cares for you is real. Your ​‘boys’ are not real. Turf war is not real. Tribe and Ville, they’re not real.”
Sharkey asked for questions from the boys in the audience. There were none. It was not clear if the graphic descriptions had stunned the boys or if they were just being teenagers. Gary Henderson, (first row left), age 11, seemed to be taking everything in quietly, deeply. He had gone with the group on Tuesday to the Whalley Avenue jail on Tuesday, a tough love field trip. ​“I stretched my arms out and the cell was just about that size. Really small. And the sandwiches were dry. That’s not a place you want to be.”
Let’s hope not. On Monday, the police officers, who are the heart of the support for this program, are taking the boys for three days of non-tough love and camping — with no guns in sight.