NYC launches anti-violence initiative to fight gangsterism by example

They arrive around midnight, a group of men decked out in black sweats, hoodies and baseball caps with gang insignia. The neighborhood is East Flatbush, one of New York City’s crime hot spots. Shootings are frequent here, and the area is flooded with police on high alert for any criminal activity. But these men did not come out in force to cause trouble. They are reformed gangsters who now belong to an organization called Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Change (GMACC), and when they hit the streets, they have only one goal in mind: to stamp out violence in their hood.

Sometimes GMACC members are called in to stop shootings in progress; sometimes they attend the funerals of shooting victims in an effort to prevent retaliation. But on this rainy Saturday night, the “gangstas” are joining forces with community activists, members of the clergy and a local councilman to engage with at-risk youth.

“Typically the only community leaders these kids encounter are cops who want to arrest them,” says Shanduke McPhatter, who founded GMACC in 2008. “We want to let them know that there is a whole mix of people in the neighborhood with resources to help them.”

McPhatter grew up in a Brooklyn public housing and, as he puts it, “in a project state of mind.” Like many kids born into poverty, he graduated from stints in foster care to juvenile detention to prison and got shot at along the way. As he makes his way down the dark and dismal streets of East Flatbush, he connects effortlessly with the local youths, many of whom have no difficulty relating to his experiences.

In New York the traditional response to fighting violent crime has been to flood hot spots like East Flatbush with more and more police and to impose sharp penalties on perpetrators. But this law-enforcement-centric approach has done little to address the underlying reasons certain neighborhoods become hot spots to begin with. Now the city is trying a different tack. Just last month Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to create the Gun Violence Crisis Management System, which will provide nearly $13 million to neighborhood-based anti-violence groups such as GMACC.

The system will be based on the Cure Violence model developed by Dr. Gary Slutkin, a Chicago-based epidemiologist. His model is based on the theory that violence spreads through afflicted communities like an infectious disease and treating it requires a three-pronged public health approach. First the infected area needs to be quarantined from external provocations and flooded with “antibodies” — typically former gang members like McPhatter who have turned their lives around — to prevent transmission.

Then outreach workers are dispatched with the aim of identifying and changing the thinking of the highest potential transmitters and, finally, changing group norms. They achieve this this by engaging at-risk youth in after-school and mentoring programs, by connecting community members with better education and job opportunities and by helping the community at large heal from the impact of violence through grief and trauma counseling.

The Cure Violence program has been in operation in Chicago since the early 1990s, and similar programs have since been adopted in more than 25 cities in the U.S. and abroad, with impressive results. From 1991 to 2007, Chicago experienced reductions in shootings of 44 to 73 percent in target zones where Cure Violence was implemented. Although there has been a recent spike in shootings, overall crime has declined significantly in Chicago over the past 20 years, with homicides dropping from 928 in 1994 to 310 in 2013, according to police data. And from 2003 to 2010, Baltimore saw up to 56 percent fewer killings and up to 44 percent fewer shootings.  

Despite these encouraging statistics, New York has been slow to implement the Cure Violence model. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a firm believer in aggressive policing tactics, such as stop and frisk, which was later ruled unconstitutional on the grounds that it discriminated against minorities. From 2002 to 2012, New Yorkers — mostly in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods with high crime rates — were subject to police stops more than 5 million times.

Although the city has experienced a significant overall decline in violent crime, most shootings and homicides continue to occur in the same poverty-stricken neighborhoods. De Blasio’s initiative will attempt to address the underlying causes of crime by expanding the existing Cure Violence pilot programs from five to 14 precincts, which account for 51 percent of all shootings, and incorporate services such as access to mental health treatment, legal aid, education and job training, establishing New York’s model as the most comprehensive Cure Violence program in the country to date.

“It’s a major and much-needed policy shift,” said Councilman Jumaane Williams, who has been a driving force behind the effort. “All the high crime neighborhoods across the city share the same characteristics — high poverty, high unemployment and low high school matriculation rates. You cannot expect to solve all these problems with a law enforcement approach alone.” Community leaders who have adopted the Cure Violence model couldn’t agree more.

“People have no idea what it takes for us to put out our fires,” said Andre Mitchell, the founder of Man Up Inc., a neighborhood organization in East New York that has been implementing the Cure Violence model since 2010. “We need all hands on deck.” Man Up received national recognition in 2013 when it achieved an unprecedented 367-day streak without a single shooting or homicide in its 20-block target area, which includes three housing projects, three schools and 20,000 residents. “It was not an easy feat,” he said. “During that run, our interrupters had to mediate nearly 50 serious conflicts.”

But preventing shootings — although it’s far from easy — is only the beginning of their work, and implementing the second and third elements of the Cure Violence model can be even harder. “Nearly every member of our community has been traumatized in one way or another by violence,” said Sister Karen Yelverston, one of Man Up’s outreach workers, as she opened a thank-you card that had just been dropped off by a local woman whose 6-year-old son, P.J. Avitto, was stabbed to death in the elevator of a nearby housing project. “It’s hard to change the norm when violence is the norm for us,” she said, “but these kinds of tragedies just make us work harder.”

One of Yelverston’s current clients is a 19-year-old who asked to be identified only his last name, Moore, for his safety. With Man Up’s help, Moore, who admitted to having been involved in criminal activities, has been trying to get off the streets. About a year after connecting with Man Up, as he was working toward earning his high school diploma, he was shot five times in an East New York store. He was critically injured but survived and had no long-term disabilities. The assailants, whom he didn’t know, were never apprehended. “It threw me off my game,” he said quietly, pointing to the base of his neck, where one of the bullets is still embedded.

Because Man Up has been able to provide Moore with a variety of services before and since the shooting, including GED training, job training and counseling, his chances of staying out of trouble and getting his diploma and ultimately a job are much greater. At the very least, there has been no retaliatory shooting.

Not everyone is convinced that providing services instead of more police to communities with high levels of crime is the answer. Some commentators have suggested that a recent spike in shootings may be a byproduct of the 2013 ruling against stop and frisk. Shortly after de Blasio’s announcement, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, a policy think tank, rebuked the plan, arguing “crime control means sending the message to criminals that they are being watched and will be stopped and questioned for suspicious behavior” and dismissed the new program as a “social services slush fund.” But community leaders who are trying to effect lasting change in their neighborhoods beg to differ.

“There are some people who believe the only thing that is good for black and brown communities is police and jail,” said Williams. “We’ve had decades of little else in our neighborhoods. It’s time to try something different.”

“They just need to know there are people in the community who care about them,” McPhatter added. “That’s the bit the city is only just starting to figure out.”