NYC Mission Society, housed in the Minisink Townhouse, will be running Operation SNUG in Harlem. (Photo by Tahiat Mahboob)

From the outside, the Minisink Townhouse on 142^nd Street and Lenox Avenue looks non-descript with its red brick facade. The sign on the balcony wall says “New York City Mission Society,” with a few missing letters. Inside however, the building buzzes with the sound of children. The Mission Society has worked to help New York’s impoverished children and families in Harlem, the South Bronx and Brooklyn for 198 years. Now it’s adding a new program to its portfolio, Operation SNUG, to battle a persistent Harlem problem: guns.

SNUG (guns spelled backwards) launched by the NY State Senate in 2009, aims to reduce gun and gang violence in New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany and Westchester County. The state allotted it $4 million from its 2009-2010 fiscal budget evenly distributing the money in each area.

The State Department of Criminal Justice Services awarded the NYC Mission Society $500,000 of the state grant, in a contract signed on Oct. 29. Operation SNUG aims to replicate the Ceasefire Chicago model launched in 2000 in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood which experienced a 67% drop in shootings within the first year.

“Guns are too accessible,” says Robin Holmes, Operation SNUG project director. She says that unhealthy household environment, absent parents and inadequate mentors and activities local gun and gang violence.

Holmes has helped manage the Society’s Career Readiness Education Workshop at the NYC Mission Society and its Summer Youth Employment Program. She says that while the Mission Society lacks experience with youth violence, it has a strong record working with young people, which she thinks helped land the grant. “Minisink Townhouse, being on 142^nd, is in the midst of all the stuff that’s going on right now between the gangs.” SNUG will work within the police department’s 32^nd Precinct from 127^th Street to 145^th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas Avenues.

Holmes says that Harlem’s Operation SNUG is interviewing and hiring people using Ceasefire Chicago’s criteria, selecting “folks who may have had a former gang life. Someone who has been incarcerated because that seems to warrant street credibility,” she says. “Someone who has now changed their life because that was not the life they wanted to live. Someone who knows Harlem.”  It has been a little challenging, she admits, but she’s getting referrals from Project Stride, an East Harlem employment service, The Feather and the Phoenix fraternity housed at the Minisink Townhouse and the Department of Parole.

Holmes hopes to be fully staffed by the end of the month and up and running by January. Meanwhile all program members will receive six weeks training from Ceasefire Chicago.

Headed by Dr. Gary Slutkin, a University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist, Ceasefire Chicago takes an innovative approach to dealing with gun and gang violence.

“We work to change behavior and reverse the epidemic qualities of the violence itself,” says Slutkin. “The theoretical basis of the work is that violence is learned. It’s acquired mainly by modeling.” In this case of “epidemic,” he elaborates, one event leads to another until violence becomes socially expected in a peer group and shooting becomes normal.

Ceasefire uses three strategies to reverse the epidemic, Slutkin explains. The program has a new group of workers, called violence interrupters, who detect and interrupt potential events. Interrupters learn of brewing conflicts because an earlier fight might warrant retaliation or they pick up information on the street. Though interrupters don’t have the power to arrest, their information allows them to interact with residents and prevent violence.

Ceasefire also seeks out individuals likely to cause trouble. “They have already integrated the idea that violence is the way to resolve things,” says Slutkin. “That means we have to locate the few dozen or few hundred people who are at the highest risks and work with them.” The program’s outreach workers, dubbed as behavior change agents, know how to change attitudes.

Its third strategy involves changing the norms of the larger community through such methods as public education campaigns and workshops.

A number of cities- Baltimore, Md., Kansas City, Mo. and Basra, Iraq. “If the program is done according to the model it usually starts seeing results in the first or second year,” says Slutkin. Shootings usually drop by at least 20 to 25 percent but more commonly by 40 to 50 percent, he says.

It’s easy to reach out to communities plagued by violence, Slutkin adds, because the program recruits and hires people from a sub-group no longer involved in violent activities. “They still have their Rolodex,” he says. “They still have access. They’re still trusted.”

Ceasefire Chicago will help launch Operation SNUG in NY. “We have a whole training unit devoted to training and technical assistance and a whole unit devoted to research and innovation,” says Slutkin. Both will train Operation SNUG workers from Harlem.

Holmes is looking into finding a separate space for Operation SNUG. She’s considering one of the commercial spaces across from the Minisink Townhouse, close enough so that she can work out of the main office but still be able to go over and oversee operations. “We think it’s better that way because of the kinds of participants we’re attracting,” who may not feel comfortable coming to the Townhouse, she says. “It makes it that much easier for young people to come in and meet with their outreach workers and do their case management.”

Police and clergy participation are also important components of the program. Holmes explains that each outreach worker will take on no more than 15 cases and specific street sections. They’ll be walking the streets, having conversations with young people to tell them about the program, building trust.

Holmes also looks forward to reaching out to community organizations already involved in such work, including Street Corner Resources, Harlem Mothers SAVE and Harlem Clergy Community Leaders Coalition. “They are somewhat the experts because they’ve been out there doing this,” she says.

“One thing we must have is collaboration,” agrees Iesha Sekou, founder of Street Corner Resources and a Harlem resident of 27 years. “We already know this community. And it’s not just knowing the community, it’s knowing the young people and having the credibility. So I think they will have to build the credibility with the community.”

Jackie Rowe-Adams, a co-founder of Harlem Mothers SAVE says that NYC Mission Society has not reached out to her yet but she’s willing to collaborate. “The person they have in charge- I know her. She’s a good person and I’m glad they have her,” Rowe-Adams says of Holmes.

“If SNUG is going to save a life I don’t care who has the money,” adds Rowe-Adams, whose organization applied for the same grant. “As long as they do prevention, education and save another child from getting killed or help another mother Harlem Mothers is for it.”

But some locals are skeptic. “This is a behavior that’s been going on from the beginning of time,” says Denny Moe, owner of Denny Moe’s Superstar Barbershop on Frederick Douglas Boulevard. Moe, who has lived in Harlem for 29 years, opened his barbershop in 2005. It serves as a safe haven spot for neighborhood children.

Moe was unaware that a new anti-gun violence initiative was being launched in the neighborhood.  “They wanna do this now because they’re making these precincts look stupid. They have all these unsolved murders. They have to get up, they have to stand up,” he says of the city. “People are asking questions and they can’t answer them.  What’s the best thing to do? If you can’t solve them, prevent them.”

For more about guns uptown, read Campaign Encourages Guns For Bodegas.

Alex Blair, a mother from St. Nicholas Houses, listens to an audience member during a discussion of youth violence in Harlem. (Photo by Andrew Seaman)

Images flashed on a projection screen before roughly 60 Harlem residents and antiviolence advocates on a Tuesday night. The photographs, taken mostly at night outside buildings, in stairwells and on scaffolding, showed groups of young men, some in their early teens, with black bars obscuring their faces. Under each picture, the name of a group appeared: From Da Zoo, Goons On Deck, Lincoln Ova Everything, All Bout Money. These are upper Manhattan’s gangs.

The images were part of a town hall meeting about youth violence last month, held at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Building in central Harlem and organized by The Rev. Vernon Williams, an uptown antiviolence advocate.

A new initiative – Operation Save Our Children – was born by the end of the night.

Lt. Kevin O’Connor, a 23-year veteran of the New York Police Department, provided a look at the changing gang landscape in upper Manhattan. Gangs are about where a person lives, O’Connor said, urging residents to use Facebook and MySpace to curb gang activity. “Get into their world,” he said. “You’ll be surprised what you find.”

O’Connor urged action. “We need to get public support,” he said. “There’s an army right here, whether you know it or not.”

A panel of 13 people, discussing community organizations and parenting tips, revealed clear tensions between the community and many city organizations and agencies.

One mother, who did not identify herself, made a tearful plea for help with her teenage daughter. “She’s out of control, and I don’t know what to do,” she said. The woman criticized many of the organizations represented on the panel, such as the NYC Administration for Children’s Services, for aiding her daughter’s vices. “I’m here to save my child,” she said.

”We’re all here for you,” responded Alex Blair, a panelist and parent from St. Nicholas Houses.

Williams ended the panel with a comparison to the recent gay teenage suicides, for which school bullying has been blamed. “Their community mobilized,” Williams said. “Their community came together. … Our venting makes us feel better, but it doesn’t get us legislative results.”

A more intimate talk following the panel ultimately led to the creation of Operation Save Our Children. Its members agreed to create a text message distribution list, lobby to change community organizations’ operating hours, support gun control legislation and schedule night walks around the community. Williams also raised his own goal: creating a 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.

Landon Dais, an active community member and former city council candidate, volunteered to organize the text message list for upper Manhattan. Dais, also one of Williams’ neighbors, said he was confident that with Williams at the helm, the initiative would succeed. Williams got him involved in antiviolence advocacy, he added. “He gave me the dirty secret why crime is the way that it is in Harlem.”

Kita Williams, a Harlem resident, sounded cautiously optimistic. “I feel inspired,” she said. “I feel motivated.” However, she added,“a lot of people are just talk.”

Jason Tomassini, a reporter for The Uptowner, recently chronicled Williams’ efforts to use Twitter to stop gang activity.

Interactive graphic by Andrew Seaman and Paula Rogo

Zaheer Cassim, Paula Rogo, Andrew Seaman, Makkada Selah, Maru Smith and Jason Tomassini reported this story.

Homicides have increased 46 percent in upper Manhattan for the first nine months of the year, compared with the same period in 2009, according to statistics compiled by the police.

“This area is dangerous,” Sharon White said of her Harlem neighborhood. “The police and the city know this. I don’t understand why there is not more police protection.”

White is the mother of teenager George White, gunned down Sept. 24 on the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 140^th Street.

The increased uptown homicide rate mirrors a higher murder rate citywide, up 14.5 percent for the first nine months of 2010, compared with the same period in 2009.

Experts note, however, that last year was a record low for homicides.  “Now the city is fighting its own success,” said Eli Silverman, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The spike doesn’t result from new factors, Silverman said. The precincts seeing the biggest increases are merely those that had seen the greatest declines in recent years. He also noted that after a period when high-crime precincts were “flooded” with officers, about 1,000  had been reassigned to anti-terrorism duty.

Among those recently slain uptown:

• George White, 15. Sharon White and her mother, Kate, said they believe the shooting was gang related. Officers at the 32^nd Police Precinct won’t comment on a gang connection, citing the pending investigation. No arrests have been made.

• Keisha Floudd, 23, whose fatally shooting  on Sept. 30 was recorded by a nearby parking garage surveillance camera. A parking attendant, who refused to be identified, said he believed the victim may have known the shooter, based on the video he saw. “She was walking fast, fast, fast like she was trying to get away,” he said. There have been no arrests.

• Cheyenne Baez, 17, shot to death Oct. 3 in the courtyard of the A.K. Houses on  East 128^th Street. Another victim, a 30-year-old man was also wounded and taken to Harlem Hospital. Boris Brown, 20, of Harlem, was arrested and charged with murder, criminal possession of a weapon and assault on Oct. 12.

• Two men were found stabbed at around 3:55 p.m. Oct. 12 at 736 West 181 Street. The victims have not yet been identified. A 33-year-old man, stabbed in the head and chest, was pronounced dead at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The second victim, 43, was stabbed once in the torso and taken to Harlem Hospital, where he is in stable condition. No arrests have been made; the investigation is ongoing.

• On the same day, a 42-year-old man, yet to be identified, was found shot at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 132^nd Street. He was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. There have been no arrests.

Many uptown residents point out the young ages of some of those involved.

“Recently a lot of kids have been dying, and there’s been an uptick in crime,” said Lashawn Shephard, who lives in Harlem. “How do they get guns? It’s crazy. I think the parents of these kids aren’t doing their job.”

Ana Almonte, the community affairs officer at the 30^th Precinct, related the spike in crime to a lack of activities for youth.  “We’ve got nothing to give them, no sports facilities, nothing for them,” she said. “There’s a lack of supervision and we need more sports facilities.”

William Pla, the 23^rd Precinct’s deputy director of community affairs, agreed. “There are a lot of kids with nothing better to do than commit these crimes,” he said at the precinct’s most recent community council meeting.

The Rev. Vernon Williams, often a mediator between rival youth gangs, said many of upper Manhattan’s community organizations are too focused on securing grant money to make any long-term impact on violence.

“I don’t have time to chase the money and turn around to find somebody dead,” said Williams, who runs Perfect Peace Ministry and patrols Harlem’s streets almost nightly to deter youth violence.

Williams proposes an 11 p.m. curfew for upper Manhattan; any offenders, along with their parents, would have to perform community service if they violated the curfew more than once.

He said community courts could handle enforcement and that some law enforcement officials have contacted him supporting the idea.

Elsewhere in the city, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced last month the formation of the Brooklyn Clergy/NYPD Task Force to reduce violent crime there, along with a gun buy-back program and a clergy ride-along.

Seventy-two percent of all shooting victims in New York City last year were black, and 80 percent of suspected shooters were black, according to the task force.

“We are here to send a message that we want to stop homicide, violence and shootings of any kind of people, but especially we want to speak out on black-on-black shooting, hurting and harming one another,” Gerald Seabrooks, a bishop at Rehoboth Cathedral International Inc., said at the press conference with Kelly.

Read additional stories in the Victims of Violence: Homicides 2010 special report.

In addition to nightly street patrols, the Rev. Vernon Williams, pictured here in his Harlem apartment, tracks youth crews on social media. (Photo by Jason Tomassini)

On a recent weekday evening, the Rev. Vernon Williams drives through the darkened streets in his black SUV, which doubles as his headquarters for monitoring street activity. The Twitter application on his phone tracks beefs between youthful troublemakers in real time and text messages from in-the-know Harlem residents warn of potential altercations. In the backseat, three teens from a Harlem youth crew discuss the latest goings-on — who got arrested, which crews are at odds and who recently took a beating.

Williams, 52, interjects, sometimes with a hearty laugh or his own tidbit of street intelligence, sometimes with a reminder to stop cursing. He learns via text that a youth crew called TND — The New Dons — is mobilizing to attack another, LOE — Lincoln Ova Everything — and sends a text message blast ordering other Harlem youth workers to the scene, near West 132th Street.

Toward the end of the night, Williams will learn via a more old-fashioned method — an in-person conversation near Lenox Avenue and West 128th Street — that, in the gang beef, although one teen pulled a knife and spit in the face of an another, there was no retaliation and no one got hurt. But both boys are now targets, and to prevent another tragedy for another Harlem teen, Williams will mediate between both crews.

“The sooner the better,” he says with a sigh near the end of his nightly patrol. “If this goes until tomorrow, it’s too late.”

Williams, an ex-convict with his own troubled past, never thought he’d be using the Internet to prevent youth violence. But as he, Harlem residents and police are learning, young groups of low-level gangs, called crews, are stoking their territorial rivalries via Twitter, then acting them out in the streets.

Crews, typically based in public housing projects, conduct less-organized crime than gangs — robberies and assaults, often armed, police say. Their members are younger and more ethnically diverse than established gangs and some crews even include members of rival gangs, police say.

In the past few years, crews have become more visible, coinciding both with an uptick in Harlem crime and the emergence of social media services like Twitter and Facebook, says Miguel Murphy, community affairs officer for the 23rd Precinct. “You might not have money to eat but you have computer access,” Murphy says.

Twitter, the most popular social network among youth crews, only recently supplanted AOL Instant Messenger and MySpace, Williams says. The crews’ most avid users are between nine and 15 years old, using Twitter mostly to set up fights.

Social media have helped generate a complicated mishmash of rivalries in Harlem, where some housing projects war with each other, others team up to control a block and sometimes two housing projects move in on another sandwiched in between, Williams says.

“It’s a territorial thing,” 23rd Precinct Community Council President Ceasar Vasquez said after a public community council meeting in East Harlem last month. “If you live in one housing development and go in another, you can get shot.”

The 23rd Precinct, which covers the lower part of East Harlem and contains at least four active street crews, has seen 26 shootings this year, leading all Manhattan precincts. Between June 1 and Aug. 23, police made 725 arrests for major crimes, said Maria De La Rosa, deputy director of community affairs for the Manhattan District Attorney, at the meeting. Increased police patrolling has begun within a quadrant bounded by East 106th and East 115 streets, between Second and Park avenues, police say.

“It was a long summer and it seems to be continuing right now,” 23rd Precinct Deputy Inspector William Pla said at the meeting.

At the Taino Towers in East Harlem, private security has also increased and several entrances have been closed, a response to increased crime that began two years ago, says Maria Cruz, executive director of the complex. A crew of about 15 teens recently emerged, robbing food deliverymen and fighting with rival crews from Lexington Avenue, says Cruz.

She downplayed crews’ online presence. “Some of them don’t even have computers in their home,” says Cruz, who suggested a 10 p.m. teen curfew in a July letter to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. “I think these boys are in the streets.”

But when 17-year-old Cheyenne Baez was shot to death on East 128th Street earlier this month, the following day Baez’s name was the second-highest trending topic on Twitter in New York City. A few days later, a Twitter user who Williams believes is from the YGz crew and tied to the shooter—who has not yet been identified by police—began boasting about Baez’s death and posting that he was going to shoot up her memorial. Teens were afraid to attend the memorial events, Williams says. The Twitter account has since been deleted, after Williams and other community leaders tracked down the user and told him to stop.

On Tuesday, 20-year-old Boris Brown, of 212 West 140th Street, was arrested and charged with Baez’s murder. It is not known if he is tied to the deleted Twitter account.

“I’ve never been a tech person,” Williams says. But somewhat reluctantly, he’s become one of Twitter’s more advanced users. After a Daily News report last year mentioned Williams’ online anticrime strategy, programmers from the search service TweetReports contacted him.

Via Skype, the online video chat service, TweetReports employees showed Williams special search functions to improve his gang tracking. Now when a specific Twitter user uses a term, such as “ratchet” — street slang for a handgun — he receives an e-mail, viewable on his Blackberry.

“It’s naive to think law enforcement isn’t having a more aggressive posture when it comes to listening and eavesdropping on social media,” says Trygve Olsen of the Tennessee-based TweetReports.com.

“To go about using tools like ours with the best of intentions to save lives, de-escalate violence and resolve conflict are the kinds of things that everybody in the world should be involved in,” he says of Williams’ campaign. “If not, someone is going to the emergency room or jail.”

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

The Rev. Vernon Williams keeps an eye on his phone and the youth gathered at the corner of Lenox Avenue and West 128th Street in Harlem recently. (Photo by Jason Tomassini)

Williams says he gets street intelligence from about 6,000 teens he can contact through Twitter, although he officially follows about 2,000 people and, in turn, is followed by almost 400. Through e-mail and Blackberry’s BBM text messaging service, Williams can reach dozens of people, grouped by their community role, in an instant. Always alert, he wears a Bluetooth earpiece and uses the voice-activated OnStar service on his SUV’s console.

The teen crew members riding in his backseat this night provide additional examples of modern street life.

“I got spanked and they put it on YouTube!” one boy, hitching a ride to a college prep class, says of a rival crew.

“And they put that on Twitter too!” says another whom Williams is driving to the veterinarian along with his puppy.

Williams is an active participant in these conversations, as he is on Twitter, where he’s known as PastorVernon. While some of his tweets resemble sermons, others are couched in street slang that is outlined in an actual document — a dictionary, of sorts — that’s distributed among crew members. Those tweets are often sympathetic to the crew members he follows, a method he says differentiates him from other authority figures. Now, he’s not only a recognizable physical presence on Harlem’s streets but in cyberspace as well.

“I walk down the street and two girls will stop me and say they know me and I don’t know them,” Williams says. “They say, ‘I know you from Twitter.’”

Girls are increasingly involved — Williams estimates about eight of the dozen or so fights he learned about during the weekend of Sept. 17 to Sept. 19 involved female crews. And when a crew member goes to jail, it’s his girlfriend who often takes over his Twitter account, Williams says.

Though crews don’t actively recruit online, indirect forms of recruiting, like YouTube videos of a crew beating up another or photos of crews posing with guns, are common, he adds.

In the past, gang prevention relied on keeping youth out of the streets, where trouble could find them. In the Twitter age, teens are starting trouble inside, then taking it to the streets, with even watchful parents helpless to intervene, says Vasquez, the community council president.

“There’s no way the parents could know,” he says. “Some parents aren’t aware of how the Internet works.” He later added, “I don’t think kids should have unlimited Internet access anyway.”

But as long as they do, crews will openly conduct business online, a sharp contrast, Williams says, to his own past as a heroin dealer, when street code valued secrecy. “It’s real dumb,” he says. “If you’re going to a party and know it’s a place where you have beef, why will you say on Twitter you are rolling up with the ratchet?”

As a result, Williams anticipates more teen arrests as their online presence increases. “Whatever I’m doing to track this, I know the police are doing it 100 times better,” Williams says.

At the end of his recent patrol, Williams monitors the corner of 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, where at 9 p.m. about 20 teens congregate, chatting loudly and slapboxing. For a moment, things are under control; no one has been hurt on his virtual watch. But as vigilantly as Williams uses technology to track the streets, teens will always fall through the cracks.

That weekend a 15-year-old, George White, was shot to death close to his home on Eighth Avenue near 140th Street. Police are investigating whether the incident involved rival gangs or crews.

“I’m going to Church to pray!” Williams declared on Twitter shortly after the shooting. “4 the Homies we lost, to pray for all of us and to pray God’s Love in and through believer’s for us!”

Jackie Rowe-Adams, co-founder of Harlem Mothers SAVE, speaks out against youth violence at a protest outside Public School 123 on Oct. 5. District 7 Councilman Robert Jackson stands far left; the Rev. Vernon Williams is at right. (Photo by Joshua Tapper)

By Joshua Tapper and Cecile Dehesdin

A raucous brawl outside a Harlem elementary school last week left three teenagers injured–one shot, one stabbed, one slashed—and has driven community leaders to pledge to eradicate gun violence on their streets and keep Harlem’s children safe.

“I have tears in my eyes; I’m saddened,” said Community Board 10 Chairman Franc Perry at a protest the evening of the melee. “This is absurd, disgusting, humiliating. It’s been happening for far too long. When are we going to recognize that we need to take guns out of our children’s hands?”

The Rev. Vernon Williams, who has been in contact with the families, identified the injured boys as Jonathan and Joshua Bell, 17-year-old twin brothers, and a teenaged friend, whose name could not be ascertained. They were wounded in a gang-related fight outside Public School 123, at West 141st Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, at 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 5. Days earlier, the teens had been involved in another fight on West 141st Street, according to 32nd Precinct inspector Kevin Catalina. They were taken to Harlem Hospital, but have all been released, Rev. Williams said.

To prevent retaliation, police have installed a Sky Watch tower, an elevated booth that allows officers to scan the street, at the corner of West 140th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and will be stationed near the school mornings and afternoons.

Police are stationed near the entrance of Public School 123 as children arrive at the school on Oct. 6. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

Despite this latest incident, and exasperation from locals–”I’m to the point where I want to get out of the city,” said Lisa James, a mother of three boys–shootings in the 32nd Precinct have fallen dramatically, from 47 at this point last year to 25 this year. (See accompanying chart on gun violence in New York.)

Still, the violence has galvanized Harlem leaders and organizations. At an emergency meeting on Oct. 6 at a senior center on West 124th Street, more than 60 people crammed the room to join an impassioned dialogue on youth violence—including representatives from Community Board 10, the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Nation of Islam, and officials, among them likely district attorney Cy Vance.

Emotions flared as speaker after speaker called for neighborhood unity and compassion. “I’m pleading we don’t just have unity when bullets fly,” said Shaka Shakur, city chairman of the New Black Panther Party. “We are killing each other and we are tired of burying each other.”

Many exhibited frustration at the lack of community response to youth violence. Abdul Kareem Muhammad, vice-president of the Harlem Clergy and Community Leaders Coalition, which organized the meeting, deplored a chronic unwillingness to build sustained social programs like after-school activities. Unlocking playgrounds after school, like the one near his home on West 133rd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, provides recreational space that can keep kids off the street, he said.

Grassroots activism is key to community peace, said Rev. Williams, who leads the Perfect Peace Ministry and is known as “Pastor on Deck” for his penchant for breaking up Harlem gang violence. “This is a challenge to all of us to be responsible for our community,” he said. Whereas the police, when called, are going to “suppress, this is about cultivation.”

A lack of paternal role models pushes teenagers to the street, Rev. Williams also said, stressing that “parents have to start being parents.” Without anyone to look up to, Williams said, teenagers begin to seek comfort in a gang. “We have to come out and captivate them,” he said. “They’re not animals, they’re human beings.”

Harlem has reached a critical juncture, said Tomasina Riddick, co-founder of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, at a parents meeting the next night, sponsored by Harlem Children’s Zone at Public School 194. The community has to organize, she said. “We can hold our elected officials responsible, we can hold our police department responsible, our schools, our community organizations, our clergy, but it’s for us to do.” In a community that has seen a major reduction in crime since 2001—murders, for example, have fallen nearly 40 percent in the 32nd Precinct—a distrust of police remains.

A common perception is that young black men are accosted by police simply for hanging out in groups–51 percent of 531,159 people frisked in New York in 2008 were black, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Handcuffs don’t solve our problems, we solve our problems,” said Shakur, promoting a Black Panthers program called “WUCUSU”—meaning “Wake Up, Clean Up, Stand Up”—that mentors black youth.

Catalina agreed that police presence in Harlem is not the sole answer. “This is really a community problem, not a police department problem,” he said at the parents meeting. “Gang violence is going to go away when the community gets together and says it’s not going to tolerate it anymore, and when the community starts talking to its sons and daughters and says, ‘Hey, I’m not having it.’”