The Providence Phoenix (9/5/2003)
Beneath a thin veneer,
Providence is a poor, violent city. By going to the toughest
neighborhoods, eight street workers are trying to make a difference. By Ian Donnis
ON CALL: as much of the city sleeps, the street workers are out and about, trying to squash beefs and connect young people to jobs and other needs.
IT WAS A PLEASANT Tuesday night in mid-August, and many Americans were just learning about the suicide bombings that claimed 23 lives at the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and 20 more on a bus in Jerusalem. Closer to home, four men converged at a public housing project in Providence’s Manton section, trying to prevent a drive-by shooting that seemingly came out of nowhere, leaving two men injured, from producing a violent response.
In the instant, the cause for the gunplay was unknown and far less urgent to the neighbors who had been sitting outside on the warm evening, watching their children play, than the scramble for their lives. "I was trying to get through that door," one woman explains, describing her frantic escape to a nearby building. By 9 p.m., about half an hour after the shooting — in which a pistol held sideways, gangster-style, suddenly emerged from a rented car, unleashing fire — people are back chatting on a sidewalk, and an 11-year-old boy with a sizeable Afro is skillfully executing a series of back flips in the street. "That’s why we’ve got to do something for him," says Angelo Adams, citing the youth as an example of the natural talent that too often goes squandered in poor Providence neighborhoods. An inviting nearby playground, which remains inexplicably dark, despite the presence of overhead lighting equipment, echoes the abiding sense of neglect.
Adams, 34, a former resident of the Manton Heights project, has returned to the area in a new role — as one of eight street workers who spend their time in Providence’s most dangerous neighborhoods, emphasizing the futility of violence and offering to serve as a conduit to vital needs like a job or education, especially if troublemakers change their ways. The other part of the message is that if people continue to embrace violence, they will face the consequences.
This approach was a key part of Boston’s remarkable success in reducing youth violence, which exploded in cities nationwide during the crack era, in the ’90s. It helps, too, that Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline has a multi-part anti-violence strategy, including the long-overdue arrival of community policing. But the success of the street workers’ program could also hinge on several uncertainties, like the willingness of the private sector to provide jobs. "When you instill hope in somebody, you better be there to follow up," says Teny Gross, executive director for the South Providence-based Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, and a former street worker in Boston, who helped to launch the Providence program in early August.
Like Adams and Gross, the others involved in the new program are motivated by a fierce desire to change a world that remains largely invisible to the more fortunate residents of the capital city. Co-coordinator George Lindsay, for example, has seen so many young people die a premature death that he finds himself incapable of going to a funeral for anyone under age 50. And now, after things had been relatively calm around Manton in the weeks before the drive-by shooting on August 19, Adams openly expresses his fear about the gunplay: "With this, it’s just going to go back and forth again."
NEW HOPE: Huntley and Lindsay (at left and second from right), shown here with some of the street workers, are driven by a fierce desire to reduce the violence in their community.
Beneath the veil of pleasant ambiance that raised the city’s stature over the last decade, Providence is a poor and violent place. Although affluent residents are unlikely to become victims of serious crime, the city experienced 23 homicides in 2002 — down from a recent high of 30 in 2000, yet still a number that places Providence’s homicide rate per 100,000 residents (13.2) between that of Boston (10.2) and Los Angeles (17.2). And while 16.5 percent of all Rhode Island children live in poverty (up from 13.3 percent in 1990), the rate is more than twice that — 46 percent — for children in South Providence, Elmwood, and the West End, according to the advocacy group Rhode Island Kids Count. Meanwhile, despite the jarring effect of shootings like the drive-by in Manton, most Rhode Islanders were probably unaware of it. (Two days later, an inconspicuous four-paragraph brief inside the Providence Journal’s metro section recounted how Jason Perkins, 21, and Brian Wilcox, 19, had been shot in the leg.)
On the night of the drive-by, the immediate task facing the street workers is gaining a handle on the shooting. Gross and two of the workers, A.J. Benton and Brother Ray Smith, join Angelo Adams at the scene after making the trip from South Providence in a van borrowed from the Davey Lopes Recreation Center. During the drive, Benton and Gross steadily work their cell phones, seeking bits of information and keeping contact with other street workers in different corners of the city — at the Chad Brown housing project, on Camp Street in Mount Hope, and Hanover Street in the West End.
The trio in the van might seem like an unlikely crew. Smith, 44, an intense born-again Christian, felt compelled to come to Providence from Chicago five years ago and he was conducting his own form of street ministry before becoming a street worker. Benton, a streetwise twenty-something member of a locally prominent black family, has lost friends to violence. And Gross, 37, is a soft-spoken Israeli native, born to a Serbian Christian mother and a Croatian Jewish father, who found his calling in nonviolence after serving as a sergeant in the Israeli army and coming to Boston to study photography. After coming to Providence two years ago to launch the nonviolence institute — arriving not even two weeks before 9/11 — Gross drives the city’s back streets like an expert and his unquestioned acceptance among the black and Southeast Asian street workers is clear.
At Manton Heights, it doesn’t take long to develop some leads. A decision is made that Adams will remain at the scene, while the others proceed to visit the shooting victims at Roger Williams Hospital. Joined at the hospital by another street worker, a physically imposing man named Bear, several of the workers speak with the injured men in the emergency room, ultimately giving one of them a road home. "This is a young man that Brother Ray talked to a week ago," Gross tells me later. "Nothing happens by miracle speeches. It happens by being there."
As it turns out, the initial theory about who was responsible for the shooting — young men from another part of Providence — is mistaken. Mindful of the street workers’ need for credibility with their target audience, Gross is guarded in discussing the motive for the attack. But after the two injured men and some of the street workers made a cross-town trip, it was learned that the responsible party is actually from out of town. "Without the street workers, it wouldn’t have really been known," Gross says, and were it not for the intervention, misplaced retaliation might have been made, perhaps sparking yet another cycle of violence. The streetwise student of nonviolence takes the victory in stride. "A lot of conflict," says Gross, "is just a result of bad communication."
IN SOME WAYS, the street workers seem to face daunting odds. Guns are easy to find in Providence, shots are fired virtually on a nightly basis (even if no one is hurt), and the conditions that influence violent crime — include poverty and longstanding beefs — aren’t easily remedied. Still, after shadowing the street workers in their rounds on two recent nights, it’s hard not to have a sense that they’ve accomplished a lot in a short period of time. Everywhere they go, it seems, they know the players, the terrain, the history, and what’s at stake.
Dyna Kun, 31, is a case in point. The Cambodian native was once the fearsome leader of a Southeast Asian gang, the Bad Junior Boys, which formed, he says, for self-defense after non-Asians attacked members of his community. But now, after seeing too much pain — including the loss of his god-brother in a double murder on Washington Street in July — Kun has adopted the cause of nonviolence, walking the area around Hanover Street in the West End until the early morning hours if he perceives a hint of trouble. His approach to gang members is simple and direct: "What’s your point — to kill each other? Life in a gang — you either die or get locked up."
Kun was initially disinterested when Gross approached him after his god-brother’s death, throwing away the business card he was offered. With more convincing, though, he began to appreciate the appeal of trying to prevent shootings from occurring, rather than reacting to them after the fact. "The old people are so happy about it," Kun says during a pause from his work on a recent Thursday night. "They don’t want their kid to die."
For people like Kun, being a street worker is almost as much about community empowerment as squelching the level of violence. He mixes talk of interventions with young people with his hope that a recreation center will be established for the Southeast Asian community. Perhaps most importantly, Kun says, there seems to be a strong measure of acceptance among gang members for his message. "They feel the same way," he says, about the futility of violence. "They don’t understand each other. They don’t want to shoot each other," but there haven’t previously been people to serve as intermediaries in getting things talked out.
Similarly, Brother Ray Smith and A.J. Benton were back up in Manton Heights about a week after the drive-by, collecting signatures on a petition to try to get the lights turned on at the darkened playground. Under an agreement reached with Cicilline, City Hall will try to expedite related needs, based on input from the street workers. Available around the clock, the street workers have made a mark within a few short weeks. "They’re spreading the word," Gross says, as we drive away from the West End and toward Camp Street in his white Ford Contour. "People are talking about it in many places. A lot of the groups are saying, ‘Let’s give this a chance.’ "
TRANSFORMED: Gross and Kun once carried guns -- as a soldier and a gang leader, respectively -- but now they preach peace.
IN EARLY JULY there was a sense of nervous energy and anticipation when I met with George Lindsay, Cedric Huntley, and Gross — the three voluntary coordinators of the street workers’ program — at Gross’s home near Roger Williams Park on a weeknight. Word had been received that day that Cicilline would fund the street workers’ program with a $75,000 grant from the Dexter Donation, and it seemed as if what the three men had been working toward for months was about to come to fruition. The trio had hoped to hire 14 street workers — $75,000 was only enough for three full-timers — but it was a start. Additional funding made it possible to also hire five part-time street workers.
Huntley and Lindsay share experience as directors of recreation centers in South Providence, and they came to the anti-violence effort with a strong desire to reduce the familiar level of carnage in their midst. As Huntley put it, "If 23 white kids got killed in the city of Warwick, it would be a major issue. Everyone from the governor on down would probably be involved." Given the wider indifference greeting the violence in poor neighborhoods — like the slaying of 12-year-old Jermaine Ellis, who was gunned down at Chad Brown in September 2002 — the men describe how society is failing a generation of young people. Adds Huntley, "I want them to know that there are people out there who are with them and support them."
Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston, says politicians typically recognize and respond to crime in poor urban neighborhoods only "when middle class constituents become fearful and fear as if they’re being victimized." The reason for that, he says, "is because poor people don’t vote. They’re just not likely to get the attention they deserve — the money just doesn’t go their way. That’s true across the country, not just in Providence." And when it comes to criminal justice policy in general, Levin adds, "We look for politically expedient, short-term solutions that won’t work, but [that] get [politicians] reelected. We’re very impatient with the results."
Gross learned from some of the best when it comes to getting politicians and other parts of the establishment to pay attention to the needs of poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods. In Boston, he worked closely with the Ten Point Coalition, a group of inner city ministers who came together in the early ’90s after a gang attack reached into one of their churches. Working with law enforcement, the ministers helped to identify the most hardcore offenders and instituted a tough love approach in steering other youths to jobs, counseling, and education. Gross remains in contact with the Reverend Eugene Rivers, the most controversial and charismatic of the original Ten Point ministers, whose face has graced Newsweek and is currently working with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton.
After gaining a good reputation for his efforts as a street worker in Boston, Gross was invited to Providence several times after particular incidents of violence in the ’90s. As it happened, he met his wife, Julia, the daughter of the Warwick-based activist minister Duane Clinker, while in Boston, and the couple subsequently moved to Rhode Island. In reaching out to blacks, Gross, who can talk with equal aplomb about political philosophy and the Wu-Tang Clan, draws on the self-empowerment mode of how Jews, and other historic targets of persecution, have become successful in America. At the same time, he makes a passing reference to Israeli-Palestinian relations in noting, "Every community can become a victimizer after they’ve been victimized."
Senator Jack Reed and other VIPs were prominently represented when plans for the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence were unveiled at the Rhode Island Foundation in December 2001. The center, based for now at St. Michael’s Church on Oxford Street in South Providence, has sponsored non-violence programs in a variety of Rhode Island schools and transitional efforts for former residents of the state Training School.
Still, even though the congressional delegation is said to be pushing for funding, the obstacles facing a prevention-based strategy are familiar and frustrating to Gross. In the context of social services, "Basically, what’s billable is provable, which is ridiculous," he says. Some of the street workers’ accomplishments, including preventing two stabbings, a shooting, and establishing a truce to gain time for more extended discussions, aren’t the kind of things that can be readily documented.
Much of the work of being a street worker, Gross says, is patient, incremental, and about building relationships. In terms of the at-risk audience, "Succeeding with them is not the first go-round, the second go-round," he says. "It’s having the stamina. You’ve got to be out there and doing it consistently." The relevant issues — poverty, inadequate education, broken families — are complex and not easily dealt with. "But if we stay with them long enough and they don’t get killed in the process, we will get them to the safe shore."
And so, after a violent start to summer, August went without a homicide until the last day of the month, when Edgar Ortega, 24, was beaten to death, seemingly after a spontaneous argument at The Keg Room, a Richmond Street bar. Speaking before the murder, Gross attributed the improvement to a gun task force initiated by Providence police, heightened recreation programs by the city, and the street workers’ outreach efforts.
COMMUNITY WAS THE word of choice when outgoing US Attorney Margaret Curran announced a $285,000 federal grant, including about $70,000 for use in the street workers program over two years, during an August 20 news conference at Richardson Park in South Providence. But although the money — the rest will be going to the Providence police gun task force and community-based prosecutors — is certainly welcome, the amount for the street workers seems like a drop in the grand scheme of federal largesse.
Cicilline, who is well regarded by the street workers since he delivered on a pledge to fund the program, has a multi-part anti-violence strategy. It consists of developing trusting relationships between the community and law enforcement through enhanced accountability; Taking a proactive approach to problems through the street workers; Aggressive enforcement and prosecution of gun crimes; Offering recreational opportunities to young people; And building better relations between police and youths through the presence of resource officers in city schools.
It seems like a sound strategy, but improving the relationship between police and the residents of poor Providence neighborhoods will take time and steady effort. Lisa Niebels, a community activist in Mount Hope, applauds the coming of a community police station to the neighborhood, for example, and the lieutenant who has been chosen to lead it. Ongoing incidents, however, lead her to say, "I just think it’s very difficult to change the nature of the police department." Problems with disrespect are "still going on — it’s still the same."
Major Andy Rosenzweig, deputy police chief, asserts that the perception that police are sometimes too aggressive "is a perception problem. We need to let the community know that we are taking these actions for them. Sometimes the people we’re going after are dangerous." He stresses, however, that a foundation of the neighborhood-based policing program is that "people always need to be treated with respect, even people we’re arresting."
A more fundamental problem, as Niebels notes, is a lack of jobs and how, "Our young people are not educated at a high school level. That makes them unemployable, and the combination leads to a high rate of crime in the condensed neighborhood that is Mount Hope. If the intense level of criminal activity that occurred in the Mount Hope neighborhood occurred on the other [more affluent] side of Hope Street, there would be an uproar."
The problem of troubled public schools, poverty, violence, and a lack of employment opportunities extend, of course, well beyond Camp Street. Part of the task facing the street workers is to voice the challenges faced by the residents of the neighborhoods in which they work. "By hiring the eight street workers — who are from the community and connected to the community — they’ll be some very vocal voices," says Gross. "They will be able to voice what is quietly going on, on the street — that quiet desperation."
If the early indications are any clue, the street workers — especially if they can galvanize wider support — will also be able to help diminish some of this hardship.
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@phx.com
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