Safe Streets Making Progress In Curbing Violence BALTIMORE, MD (wypr) - Since his release from prison, Gardnell Carter says he has been trying to make a positive impact in his community. He's a supervisor for Safe Streets, an outreach program that focuses on community mobilization and violence prevention.

TAPE: (26 SECONDS), Gardnell Carter, Track 20--00:11:36
IC: What we ask is, Man don't kill nobody, don't shoot nobody. If anything occurs, let's talk about it. What do we have to do, take you out to dinner? Throw a barbecue for you?' So, that we can bring these results. And what happens is that this spreads out and they see that we're for real and then they take on this attitude and this approach, and it's starting to blossom, it's definitely starting to blossom.

According to Carter, clients of the program must be between the ages of 14 to 25. They also must be either active in a gang, recently shot, or recently released from prison. Other Safe Streets workers, like Dante Barksdale, build relationships with people on the streets, they work most days of the week from two o'clock in the afternoon until two in the morning. He says that when a shooting occurs it affects a whole community.

TAPE: (29 SECONDS), Dante Tata Barksdale, Track 23--00:13:23,
IC: This stuff out here don't just affect those two people that's beefing. You got families involved. Everybody becomes victims. When somebody gets shot, both of their families become victims, the person who saw it that became the witness, he became a victim. His or her family became victims, everybody becomes victims, all because we couldn't find an alternative to the violence.

Barksdale works face-to-face with his clients on a weekly basis. He said that many of them don't have a photo I-D or a birth certificate. He helps them get started on the process, so they can obtain employment, enroll in school or get drug and alcohol treatment.


Jacquelyn Duval-Harvey serves as the Deputy Commissioner for Youth and Families, at the Baltimore City Health Department. She said that Safe Streets has worked to prevent violence, even in the parts of the city that have yet to implement the program.

TAPE: (29 SECONDS),Jacquelyn Duval-Harvey, Track 11--00:12:34
IC: In neighboring communities, what people had assumed would happen is that violence would shift if there was a concentration of positive efforts in one location, in one neighborhood that those perpetrators would simply move to another neighborhood and that's not happening. What we actually seen is that there are decreases in neighboring communities, so the message is spreading in a way that's very positive in that it's not shifting to other locations and just moving the problem to another site.

According to Baltimore City Health Department officials, the East and West Baltimore centers opened up about a year ago. The first Federal grant was for 382-thousand dollars. Subsequent federal grants provided 350-thousand dollars. With the help of this public and private money, the program has been extended for another 13 months.

Daniel Webster is the Co-Director for the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence and the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. He evaluates Safe Streets and says that shootings have gone down in East Baltimore, from an average of two-a-month three years ago, to less than one-a-month this past April. Reflecting the usual hot weather spike in shootings, Baltimore City Police say that 10 shootings and one homicide were recorded in the Eastern District last month.

TAPE: (26 SECONDS), Dr. Daniel Webster, Track 9--00:9:12
IC: So many people in Baltimore have become very cynical, that Oh, Baltimore is always going to be a violent place, it always has been a violent place.' A program like Safe Streets really is trying to change the whole way that we think about gun violence and the way communities think about gun violence, not as some inevitable thing that happens if you live in a somewhat low-income neighborhood in a central part of Baltimore that it's sort of a fact of life.

Carter says that Safe Streets is modeled after a program in Chicago, called CeaseFire. CeaseFire works to provide public education, conflict mediation and safe havens for members of their communities. He says he wants to do that too, and that his mission in life is to change community norms.

TAPE: (10 SECONDS), Gardnell Carter, Track 22--00:6:24
IC: Shooting and killing is not normal, it's not a normal thing, so, what we're trying to do is let people know that something that we have accepted as being normal is abnormal. And what is normal is that people should be loving one another instead of killing one another.



Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are still gathering data about the Safe Streets program in West Baltimore. They say that they still need more time to report on results. Health Department officials say they will publish them officially in December of this year, and conclude investigation of the program in 2009.

I'm Farrah Childs, reporting in East Baltimore, for 88-1, WYPR.
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