Pubdate: Thu, 07 Sep 2006
Source: USA Today (US)
Page: 1A - Front Page
Copyright: 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc
Contact:  http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/index.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466
Author: Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

FAMILIES RELOCATE GANG MEMBERS TO SAVE THEM

Pastors, Even Police Help in Last-Ditch Effort to Aid Teens Who May 
Be in Mortal Danger As They Try to Leave Gangs

DURHAM, N.C. -- Last spring, a member of Pastor Kenneth Hammond's 
congregation at Union Baptist Church came to him with a desperate 
plea for help: A 15-year-old boy in the community was trying to get 
out of a local gang, and gang members who had learned of the plan 
were threatening the boy's life.

Hammond says he didn't hesitate. He got a few hundred dollars from 
his church's ministry fund and helped the boy's family secretly move 
him more than 400 miles away, to Ohio. Hammond says he had done the 
same thing last year to help another youth escape gang life here and 
wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

"We've been involved with a number of tragedies here," Hammond says, 
leafing through the church's funeral registry, where the names of six 
victims of gang-related violence have been recorded in the past two 
years. "Sometimes, there is just too much danger to keep them here."

Hammond is among three Durham pastors whose churches have sponsored 
secret "relocations" of youths seeking to escape gangs, which often 
try to kill or harm those who go back on pledges to be gang members for life.

At a time when gang-related violence is boosting crime rates in 
Durham and many other cities, a few clergy, parents and even police 
in troubled communities across the nation quietly have been helping 
to relocate youths in last-ditch efforts to extricate them from gang life.

In some ways, such relocation efforts in Durham, Providence, 
Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va., represent a dark twist on 
community-backed, send-a-kid-to-camp programs that for generations 
have given lower-income youths a chance to see a different way of life.

Stephen Tucker, a minister in Washington who helped relocate a 
suspected D.C. gang member and her child, says the effort is more 
like a private, underground witness protection program.

There are no guarantees, Tucker acknowledges: Gang members eventually 
might track down the young defectors or threaten the youths' family 
members who don't relocate. And once youths are moved, there might 
not be much support to help them stay away from crime.

But John Reis, a former gang investigator in Rhode Island who in 2001 
secretly helped move a 16-year-old Latin Kings gang member from 
Providence to New York City, says the point is to simply change the 
scenery for gang defectors and hope their lives change.

"You are dealing with a kid's life here," Reis says. "If you don't do 
something, they could end up dead tomorrow."

No one tracks how many gang members have been relocated through 
community efforts, but such moves remain rare. It's also unclear how 
successful relocated gang members have been at staying out of 
trouble, partly because those involved in relocations typically 
provide the help in secret.

Hammond, Tucker and Reis say that anecdotal evidence from the cases 
in which they've been involved suggests that at the very least, 
relocation provides an immediate safe haven for gang defectors and 
gives them a chance to stay out of harm's way.

Hammond and Reis say they are not in regular contact with the youths 
they helped relocate but say they have been attending school in their 
new towns. Tucker, pastor of New Commandment Baptist Church, says the 
young mother he assisted has been working at a Kmart in Maryland.

For Tucker, defining success in relocations is simple.

"She's alive," the pastor says of the young mother with a satisfied smile.

Some police officials wonder whether the relocation efforts, however 
well-intentioned, eventually will help spread gangs to places that 
haven't had such problems.

There's no indication of that so far, but as police have cracked down 
on gangs in Chicago and other cities, gang members have moved to 
nearby suburbs and committed crimes there. The number of gang members 
is increasing nationwide, according to the National Youth Gang 
Center, which has estimated that there were 760,000 gang members in 
the USA in 2004, up from 731,500 in 2002.

"My fear is that (relocations) won't stop the troubling behavior," 
says police Sgt. Van Ellis of Tulsa, where for years police have 
battled violence stemming from drug wars and now face the emergence 
of Hispanic youth gangs. "It only transplants the trouble somewhere else."

Reis acknowledges that's a possibility. "With the Internet and the 
way everybody is connected these days, it's hard to completely remove 
a kid," he says. "There is really nowhere you can go to completely 
escape this. At some point, we'll be flying kids all over the place to escape."

Around Christmas last year, Durham police Cpl. Vincent Pearsall was 
summoned to the home of a 13-year-old boy whose distraught, single 
mother claimed she was losing her son to the Crips gang.

For years, the Crips and Bloods have been at war on the streets of 
Durham, a city of nearly 200,000 where homicide rates were up 
slightly last year to 36, from 32 in 2004. Local police estimate 
there are 745 gang members in the city, up from 600 last year.

Pearsall says that when he visited the skinny, eighth-grade boy that 
December day, the youth was showing signs of being a gang recruit. 
The boy had become withdrawn and was unusually belligerent. His 
clothing rarely varied from shades of gray and black, the uniform of 
his apparent new family, the Folk Nation, a group affiliated with the Crips.

Following Pearsall's advice, the boy's 34-year-old mother had 
searched her son's backpack and had found the gang's "flag," or 
colors, and writing that linked her son to the group.

In an interview with USA TODAY, the boy's mother said her son later 
acknowledged that he had been sent on late-night "missions" into 
rival Bloods territory, sometimes to provoke violence by marking the 
neighborhoods with Crips' graffiti.

The mother, who declined to be identified or name her son for this 
article because of ongoing concerns for their safety, says she sought 
counsel from a range of sources. She says the school district 
declined to transfer her son to another school. Other law enforcement 
officials, she says, told her there was nothing they could do.

Through a friend, the mother contacted Pearsall. His advice was to 
the point. "Get him out of town," Pearsall recalls telling the 
mother. "Had he stayed, he was gonna get hurt or worse. There was no 
doubt about that."

Within a few days, the mother had arranged to move her son to another 
state, to live with her sister.

The mother says that at 4 a.m. on Dec. 28, she led her son out of 
their house with a single duffel bag, a small television and a 
photograph of the boy's father, who had been killed five years 
earlier in a shooting not related to gangs.

She says she purposely left behind her son's other belongings, 
including the bedroom furniture, to avoid rousing any suspicion among 
her son's fellow gang members who might be watching them.

Since making the seven-hour drive to her sister's home that night, 
the mother estimates she has spent $5,000 on furniture, clothing and 
counseling for her son. She kept her job and house in Durham, and 
makes periodic trips to visit her son.

The mother says she is in debt and lives in fear that her son's 
former gang associates may come calling one day, demanding details on 
her son's whereabouts. Her home now has a security system with motion 
sensors, and a local undercover police officer makes regular passes 
by her house at night.

While describing her son's relocation, the mother tearfully says the 
ordeal and the continuing separation are difficult. Even so, she says 
she has no regrets.
Now, "he never wants to come back here," the mother says, adding that 
she is trying to sell her home so she can join her son in time for 
his next birthday in October. "He's doing good," the mother says. "I 
did what I did to save my son's life. I was not going to be one of 
those parents who did nothing."

Five years ago, Reis, a former gang investigator with the Providence 
police department, was involved in a relocation that showed the depth 
of gangs' reach into some communities.

Reis says he cobbled together a few hundred bucks -- some of it from 
a leftover federal public safety grant -- to help a 16-year-old youth 
move away from gang life.

Reis recalls that before the teen could go, there were delicate 
negotiations with his family. The boy's mother and uncle also were 
members of the Latin Kings and agreed to "release" the teen to live 
with a friend in New York City on the condition that the youth not 
return to Providence, where he could have faced retribution from the gang.

In New York, Reis says, the friend agreed to take in the teen only 
after she was assured that the mother "would not come after her." A 
short time later, Reis says, he took the anxious teen to the local 
bus station. Before boarding, the youth offered a simple "thank you," 
and then he was gone.

Today, Reis and two other gang specialists -- Jerry "Doc" Semper, 
special assistant to the county attorney in Prince George's County, 
Md., and Moses Robinson, a police officer from Rochester, N.Y. -- 
travel the country for the Justice Department, counseling police 
departments on gang issues. They say relocating young gang members 
isn't ideal in every situation, but they say it can be an effective 
last resort.

"When kids reach the point, at 15 or 16, when they are in (gangs), 
the resources (to help get them out) just aren't there," Reis says. 
"If you are a hard-core gang member, there is nowhere you can go."

During a recent Justice Department session in Washington on gang 
issues, Reis, Semper and Robinson briefly discussed relocations with 
several police and church officials, including Tucker. The discussion 
spotlighted the significant role that churches play in many 
relocations, in part because houses of worship often are considered 
off-limits by warring gangs.

"I don't know of any church that wouldn't try to help if it was 
presented with a life and death situation," Tucker says. "It wasn't a 
stretch for us to do it. I viewed it as an extension of our ministry."

Relocated gang members could be in "real danger" in their new 
communities without much of a support system, says Malcolm Klein, a 
sociologist at the University of Southern California. Without a home, 
education or job training, many of them likely will fall in with the 
old crowd in a new location.

"How do you judge when a kid is ready to get out?" Klein asks. "And 
what do these (benefactors) really know about these kids and where 
they are sending them? These are complex questions."

Relocations aside, Durham Police Chief Steven Chalmers says his city 
is trying to reach out to youths in a range of ways. A local police 
officer founded an annual "boot camp" where gang members and other 
youths ages 11-15 can volunteer for military-style training for more 
than a month, including two weeks of survival skills training in the 
North Carolina wilderness.

Late last year, Chalmers says, the department identified 10 gang 
members to participate in a job-training program in which candidates 
were subjected to drug screening and other monitoring. After word 
spread about the program, he says, the department was "bombarded" 
with inquiries from about 125 youths who expressed a desire to get 
out of gang life.

Still, Chalmers says, there will always be instances in which the 
only option is to "get them out" of town.

Until there are better options, church leaders such as Tucker, 
Hammond, Charles Barnes of Morehead Avenue Baptist Church in Durham 
and Bishop James Daniel of Greater Joy Baptist Church in Durham say 
they will continue to dip into their contingency funds, if necessary, 
to save more youths.

"When you learn about the gang culture," Barnes says, "it's all about 
death. But a lot of these kids, when you get them by themselves, are 
totally different. They want help; they want discipline. It's just 
that a lot of them feel the only way out is to die or be beaten half to death."

Barnes says he has helped relocate four gang defectors. "When they 
get so deep in (gang life), they not only put themselves in danger, 
but also put their families at risk. Sometimes, (sending them away) 
just has to be done."
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