With each gang shooting, the pastors’ voices have gotten louder: They want Seattle to work on saving its Black children, not just arresting them.
Since January, they say, they’ve been calling on the city and Mayor Greg Nickels to consider adopting a gang prevention program that has helped curb violence in other cities. But they say their request has fallen on deaf ears.
So, on Sept. 12, 10 Baptist ministers from Seattle’s newly formed United Black Clergy Association called a press conference and demanded the city fund a local pilot of Amer-I-Can, a national program that works in the schools and on the streets to build self-esteem and help youth find another way.
United Black Clergy formed following the death of Antwan Horton, a 19-year-old killed Aug. 28 in a shooting that left two others injured at the Dakota, a high-rise building that’s part of the new Rainier Court apartments on Rainier Ave. S. near MLK Way S.
“As pastors, we are the ones who have to bury these young men and women after violent death,” said Kenneth Ransfer Sr., president of United Black Clergy and pastor at Seattle’s Greater Mount Baker Baptist Church. “We’re the ones that have to keep peace in terms of gang retaliation.”
It doesn’t have to be that way, the pastors said, but incarceration alone won’t solve the problem. They say it requires the type of early intervention and street outreach offered by programs such as Los Angeles-based Amer-I-Can and Clean Dreams, a fledgling Seattle program that the city cut in August [“County Cuts Off Social Services Agency,” Aug. 22].
“We’ve got serious dropout problems in this city and nothing seems to be being done about it,” said Pastor Robert Jeffrey Sr. of New Hope Baptist Church. “It seems that the primary emphasis is on incarceration and gang prevention at the street level. [But] we believe this problem starts earlier. It starts in the high schools and junior high schools.”
Founded in 1988 by football star Jim Brown, Amer-I-Can goes into schools with a 60- to 90-hour life-skills course that teaches kids how to manage conflict, solve problems, and set goals. At schools in Boston and New York, the program has succeeded in raising grades and lowering absences and violent incidents.
In other cities, Amer-I-Can pays “peace squads” of former gang members to patrol gang areas and talk kids off the streets. Both are preventative approaches, the pastors say, that are far more effective than just adding police officers and making arrests.
“We need police, but we need preventation,” Jeffrey said. “Political expediency has to be put aside for the sake of this community or we’re going to continue to suffer the kind of violence that we’re experiencing now, which I believe is intolerable.”
In January, Jeffrey and a task force of his church paid for two of Amer-I-Can’s trained ex-gang members to visit Seattle, scope out its streets and meet with as many city, police and court officials as possible in an effort to kick off an Ameri-I-Can pilot here.
As a result of the visit, Jeffrey estimates there are up to 30 gangs currently operating in the greater Seattle area, including one in Kent and Des Moines with more than 250 members. Starting in January, he says, members of the church task force met with Seattle’s police chief, gang unit director, prosecutors, judges, city councilmembers and state lawmakers, including Sen. Adam Kline (D – South Seattle), who tried this year to get state funding for a pilot.
But Jeffrey and others say Mayor Nickels, who is responsible for the city’s budget, never responded to a request for a meeting. Pamela Green, the mayor’s community outreach director, says she has no record of the Black clergy ever requesting a meeting, though Nickels did send a representative to a Feb. 2 meeting on Amer-I-Can.
Seattle Municipal Court Judge Judith Hightower, who organized the Feb. 2 meeting, says the taint of gangs may be too much for the mayor. “If you say there’s a gang problem in Seattle,” she says, “people are going to get scared and not come here. That’s the reason I understand why it’s not going to be addressed openly.”
But, “Being involved in the criminal justice system and seeing what happens to kids, particularly kids of color,” Hightower says, “I don’t see anything that’s working now.”