Community Prosecuting and Policing

Please write a 550-word summary of video summary below.

Community Prosecuting and Policing (01:46) From Title: Street Crime

Prosecuting one individual changes little in a troubled neighborhood. Community prosecuting gets the community involved. In community policing, police become part of a neighborhood rather than an occupying force.

Video Transcript:

You know, I get seventeen years of prison, I’m probably gonna be here the rest of my life.

The only thing that was on my mind was getting the next drug. That’s it.

There are guys saying, it’s OK to bash faggots. It’s all right.

To desecrate any part of the church– to us, this is the work of the devil.

They call me a nigger to my face.

Sick.

People are reaching out to somebody that seems to care about them. Somebody that knows.

You do not have a right to a good neighborhood. It’s your responsibility.

Get active if you want your neighborhood back. And you can get it back. Remember, there’s more of us than them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Principal funding for Seeking Solutions is provided by The Pew Charitable Trust. Major funding provided by The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The Surdna Foundation. Additional funding provided by the following– The Charles H. Revson Foundation, The Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York.

As towns and cities across America grapple with street crime and social tension, it’s clear that no single recipe can guarantee to make our communities safe for ourselves and for our children.

Hello. I’m Hedrick Smith.

Each place has its own dynamic. Some cities must contend with drug dealing and middle class flight. Others must overcome ethnic differences that are a breeding ground for gangs and violence.

One common obstacle, however, is the collapse of community. People feeling isolated and disconnected, intimidated by criminal elements, and powerless to fight back.

Nowhere is that loss of community harder to combat than in our big cities. But as you’ll see in the next hour, there are places where, against the odds, ordinary Americans have come together to reclaim and rebuild their neighborhood and have come away surprised by their own power.

We begin on the north side of Chicago, in Uptown.

All right. [SINGING] Reverend, please don’t go. Reverend, please don’t go.

In a tough city, Uptown is a tough-looking neighborhood. But looks can be deceiving.

Uptown draws people from all over the world and from all levels of society. Normally when so many different kinds of people are jammed together in the same place, that spells trouble– gangs, turf wars, street violence. But here, the crime rate is stunningly low– half Chicago’s average.

How does uptown do it?

I want you to raise your hand when I ask you what country you’re from, OK?

It starts at the local middle school, where Patrick Derkin, the principal, must educate kids from 36 different countries speaking 24 different languages.

Derkin and many others see a strong community spirit at work in Uptown.

The kids can get along wonderfully well. It’s a totally different example from when I was in this school. The cultures, the different religions– we probably have five or six totally differently religions. Christian, Buddhism, Muslims, Jewish religion. It’s unreal. And they all work together.

It seems like everybody up here is proud that they’re different. And yet they’re together. It’s kind of a unique unity of one group of people that are so happy that they’re so diverse.

Uptown embraces the exile, the homeless, and the unorthodox. It thrives on free thinkers like Rita Simo.

B, B, C, B. It’s the C that is not there. B, B B. Ah, whatever you did, try that again.

Rita has devoted her life to uniting people through music.

Not bad. Now do it on tempo.

And I had this idea about having a free school so that people that want to learn but don’t have any money could do it. And so Uptown was the perfect place, because we have blacks and Latinos and whites and orientals. And we’re all in the same boat.

Does anybody know another name for the word “rock?”

The People’s Music School, founded by Rita 25 years ago, offers free music lessons for anyone. It’s a microcosm of Uptown that brings together a whole range of people and helps weave the fabric of community.

Did he write only jazz music? No. OK.

Free arts education for the public is Rita Simo’s passion and contribution. A way for her to pass on to others what she once received herself.

I got all my music education free in the Dominican Republic and the National Conservatory. And then I have a scholarship. I came to Juilliard, and after that I went to Boston University. I never had to pay.

And I thought if I got it for nothing, I need to give it back.

Uptown was the one neighborhood that embraced Rita’s dream.

When I came around and I started telling people what I wanted to do, they were the only people that said, yeah, that’s a good idea. Most of my friends said, you crazy. You don’t do that.

But here in Uptown, they were so crazy that they also thought that this was a good idea.

Try it again.

The school is supported by donations large and small.

No, wait a minute. I would have expected a dirge there.

For Rita, the source is as significant as the amount.

All of these people participated in the building of this building.

So these are your contributors?

There is even in this– in the middle of all this [? pain– ?] an individual that’s a homeless lady. And she came with $3 and she said, I want this school to be built. Maybe I come and learn something. So–

So how does that make you feel?

It makes me very good. Because then [INAUDIBLE] is the people’s.

Rita feels safe walking from home to work along uptown’s gritty streets.

All right. You’ve lived here 20, 25 years. Have you ever worried about your own personal safety?

No.

Why not?

Well, I don’t take any chances. But I talk to everybody. And the way to avoid being in trouble, you become friendly with everybody.

How are you doing, you guys?

The prostitutes, the pimps, the drug dealers, and everybody else. Because you know them. They know if they do something to you, you’re going to identify them.

And if you’re walking the street and you worry about the guy that’s following you, you turn around and say, hey, how you doing today, blah blah blah. Then he knows that if he tried to take my purse, I know exactly what he looks like, and I’m going to identify him. So, you know.

The biggest problem in our society is when people live so totally isolated that they don’t know who their neighbors are. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. So once you know who your neighbors are, then you’re OK.

Uptown is by no means a genteel neighborhood. Poverty lives just down the block from affluence.

One person in four is on public aid. One in three was born abroad. But Uptowners band together. And violent crime has eased significantly in the past five years.

In 1998, in a neighborhood of 64,000 people, there were just five homicides.

It pays off in lower crime. It pays off in better relationships.

Officer Joe Cox of the 23rd Chicago Police District lives in Uptown, and has worked its streets for over 12 years.

How do you account for the low crime rate in an area where you would expect there would be a lot of crime because there’s so much diversity?

Traditionally, it was police officers trying to say, we’ll handle this. And we’re oftentimes reactive and very much less effective.

Now we work with the community. We work with the business agencies, and we work with downtown.

I think the community at large understands that we have challenges here that many other districts and communities do not. And they’re willing to work with those challenges for the richness of the whole community.

There’s the beauty of town, the color of our town. They all want to work together for that beauty.

That community spirit is the key to uptown’s surprisingly low rate of crime, according to Dr. Felton Earls of the Harvard School of Public Health. Doctor Earls is principle investigator on an historic, decade-long study comparing 343 Chicago neighborhoods.

The old literature in social science says that ethnic differences within neighborhoods create turf wars, create problems, create gangs, rival gangs. Therefore, violence rates within these diverse neighborhoods would be quite high. That’s the old literature.

Their new research confirms what officer Joe Cox has learned from working his beat– that community spirit and interaction can significantly reduce violent crime.

In fact, the study claims, social cohesion affects the crime rate more powerful than such factors as poverty and race.

What does a cohesive community look like? What are its characteristics?

Well, we see a lot of social interaction between adults. I mean friendly social interaction.

We see kids of different race and ethnic groups playing together. We see a lot of adults accompanying supervision of children.

It comes as a surprise to many that such a diverse neighborhood is considered cohesive. But the glue uniting rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, is the scores of nonprofits, immigrant associations, and religious groups based in Uptown.

In fact, Uptown has one of the highest concentrations of active civic groups in the country. And thanks to the unifying hand of ONE, the Organization of the NorthEast, 64 groups are now working together effectively.

OK. You can work right here. And then when you’re done with that, Bernice will get you a stapler.

Sarah Jane Canoi is ONE’s director.

Last year at the house meetings, we brought squares of fabric and paint. And we asked everyone to tell us what strength they brought to the neighborhood. What was the best thing that they could offer to this community?

And you can see, there was writing in Cambodian, there was writing in Spanish, there was pictures. It’s just beautiful.

And to me it symbolizes the way that ONE brings the community together and calls on everyone’s strengths.

I’d like to see more low-income housing in the neighborhood.

I’d like to see greater support from parents to schools and from schools to parents.

I’d like to see more cross-generational activities for seniors and youth together.

I think in Uptown, there is a tradition of communication.

And make ONE more accessible to everyone.

People may argue. People may disagree. And they do disagree across their diversity. But there’s a tradition of being linked to one another.

In the past, Uptown organizations used to exhaust themselves fighting over the same few social service dollars. But today, member agencies come together to air their concerns.

And do it. Thank you.

And then join hands to seek more resources for the entire community.

I don’t think you can solve any community problem in isolation. If people are engaged in the community, they’re engaged in the full life of the community. And that affects crime. It affects politics. It affects the way that people relate to kids on the street.

How do you explain the way Uptown people work together?

I don’t think we social scientists have a very good understanding of what is happening. It is happening at the neighborhood level. So it’s not that families are changing very much or kids are changing that much. I think that it’s neighborhoods and institutions that are changing.

The heart of it is Uptown’s way of caring for its people. That makes newcomers, many of them refugees from ethnic strife abroad, feel they belong here in Uptown.

I’ve been living in Uptown for about a year and a half. My mother [? Niseta ?] and me, we’re in America. But the rest of my family, they are all in Bosnia.

Dino’s mother nurses her memories of the rest of the family by watching a videotape of a wedding every day.

[SPEAKING BOSNIAN]

For her, it was sad because all of her family over there was not here. So she misses her family, like I did. Yeah. I miss them a lot.

OK, after this group–

But Dino is made to feel welcome at school.

It was interesting to see different people from different countries. In my Bosnia, there were only Bosnian people. But when I came here, it was people from different countries. So I got interested in that, to find out about their country and about them. But in my country I never saw a black person. And then when I saw a black person, I was excited here.

My name is Dino, and I went to [INAUDIBLE] Center.

After school, there are activities such as the multicultural youth project organized by the Chinese Vietnamese, Cambodian, Ethiopian, and Bosnian ethnic associations.

Dino and his mother’s modest apartment in a low-income high rise was arranged through the Bosnian Refugee Center.

Zumra Kunosic, formerly of Sarajevo, is the center’s director.

We are, in this point today, the youngest ethnic group Bosnians. And it is about 8,000 us who live here. And we get along with everyone.

More and more case. Because we do not want the children to have to be home by themselves.

Right.

From 3:00 to 6:00, non supervision.

Today, the Bosnians turn to other immigrants for help in adjusting to a strange land.

Trong Nguyen is Vietnamese.

And I myself was a refugee. And I’ve been through so many problems. So we have to help them to understand the culture, and how to cope with the reality, and how to find a job, how to live in the neighborhood.

That is a star for Uptown is that we are living peacefully with each other.

I have lived in Chicago all of my life. And I’ve never seen a neighborhood like this one.

It’s not just immigrants who find a lifeline in Uptown. For 10 years before he landed in the neighborhood, Ronald Bennett had been addicted to drugs and homeless.

Didn’t nobody matter in my life. My mom, my sister, my brother, none of that mattered.

How did you relate to other people when you were homeless? People on the street.

Back then?

Yeah.

They didn’t exist in my life. They didn’t exist. The only thing that was on my mind was getting the next drug. That’s it.

And getting the money to get it, then.

That’s it. That’s it. I just had this narrow view where I had to have the next one.

Did you do some things you wish you hadn’t done?

Of course.

You mean beyond the law?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It was things that I thought I’d never do. But in order to get the next one, I had to do those things. Yeah. Living in hell, I called it.

Ronald found help from ONE member organization Lakefront SRO, a nonprofit group committed to reintegrating homeless people back into society. Lakefront has rehabilitated six buildings in Uptown, creating housing for more than 600 of the formerly homeless.

This is my home.

For five years, he’s been living in an apartment for which he pays $290 a month.

This is actually my living room area.

With Lakefront’s help, Ronald was able to kick his drug habit.

Couch, bed. This is my home. I love it.

Hi, how are you?

Lakefront SRO director Jean Butzen sees a direct link between providing services and reducing crime.

The process of helping people recover from substance abuse goes a long way towards decreasing the amount of crime that people have in a community. Because once a person doesn’t need that substance anymore, then their need to steal and to create crime in a community completely goes away.

And so we believe by putting people in supportive housing what happens is we create that solution to crime, in part, and to unemployment.

With an affordable home, Ronald was able to earn a college degree, pay his debts, and land a job with a company that keeps him well connected and very busy– Lucent Technologies.

So how do you feel? Lucent is one of the top companies in America. It’s a hot, leading-edge, high-tech company.

Like wow. It was breathtaking. It was like, I don’t have the words for this.

At an annual party held for recovering addicts, Ronald and his Lakefront neighbors celebrate being sober–

I started college.

–and having a home in the community.

Uptown was the place to go where you can actually find help. And I found help in Uptown.

Actually it’s just odd to me how– Have you ever been to the racetrack before?

Yes.

You know how the horse get in the gate and the jockey settles in, and then the door opens and they’re off, right? Well, I’m just settling in the gate now. I still got a lot of things I want to do in life.

So once the door opens, then I’m really on my way.

Now we’ll turn to a public dialogue in Kansas City, Missouri with a cross section of people from this region to discuss what lessons that Uptown teaches us about community building and reducing street crime.

Mr. Helmenbrooks, I wonder if I could start with you. You’re a long time community organizer, a veteran of this. I wonder what your impressions were from this film.

I think what we’ve shown is that there must be a collaboration and cooperation between various entities in the community. No one can do it alone. So there must be some direction. There must be some solution-oriented projects. And it must involve all entities of the community, to the extent that you have some accomplishments so that people will feel that they can make a difference in their lives. And they can make a difference in their lives.

Thanks for your comments. Helen Young, you were a trigger in your community. Tell me what happened. What got you started?

Actually I was sitting at the TV watching Cops. And I looked out the front window, and what I was watching out my front window was more interesting than Cops.

More violence.

And I laughed for a few minutes, and then it really hit me. This is sad. I mean, it’s funny but it’s kind of sick that what I’m looking out my front window is worse than what I can see on TV.

So at that point, we decided that we were going to do something.

And what did you do?

The first thing we did was we went to the police station. We know we had to get to know the police officers, as we would see them going 90 miles an hour to another neighborhood, riding through ours.

So the first thing I did was I went to the Sergeant, and I introduced who I was. And I asked for help. And his suggestion was to contact the neighborhood association.

And when I tried to do that, I found that there was not a neighborhood association.

No neighborhood association?

No. At that time, the leadership of the neighborhood association had gotten elderly and had pretty much dropped off. So at that point, we knew we had to start from ground zero.

So we started with our block. We organized our block. And we got the drug house off our block.

So at some point, you just got to decide to do it.

You got to decide you’re not going to wait for somebody else to clean your neighborhood up. That you’re going to stand up and do it yourself. No matter what it takes.

Thanks.

OK. Mike Bursnell, let me ask you.

Where was your neighborhood 10 years ago? Where is it today? Real quickly. And then, what’s made the difference?

As far as 10 years ago, I can honestly say that we’re leagues better now than where we were then. I think what has made some of the difference is the neighborhood association.

To give an example, there was a drug house on one of our corners. We didn’t really know the people down there, but they said, for the good of the kids, we’ve got to picket this drug house and take license numbers and names.

And that brought about 50 people together that didn’t know each other. So they formed a cohesive bond, and they have now bonded with the neighborhood organization. And we’re just going up, up and up as far as the northeast area of Kansas City is concerned.

Terrific. Chuck Gatton, you are a neighborhood builder, but in particular you’re a builder. Are we talking about bricks and mortar here, or are we talking about something else?

We’re talking about both. What my organization does is bricks and mortar, which is difficult at best, but it’s not nearly as difficult as rebuilding community. What we discovered– you could build a house, you could build a bunch of houses. But if you don’t deal with the folk who live in those houses, the houses will sooner or later turn back into bad houses.

So what we’ve been able to do is bring people together. The common thing that you saw in that video, and a common theme that the people are saying here, is collaboration, talking to each other. The neighborhoods that we work in specifically, we were invited in. We have a written agreement with them. And we do neighborhood plans, and we follow their lead.

Yeah, we’ll build your building any time, but it’s got to be your building, not ours.

Great. Thanks. Now, we got the message out here, all right? Get active, get involved, get organized, get collaborating.

If it’s that obvious, how come it isn’t happening in more places? There must be some downsides here.

Major Chaplain, I want to ask you– you’re a police officer. You deal with a number of communities. Is fear an inhibitor for people to get involved? Are people worried about violence and getting hurt themselves? Does that slow things down?

It absolutely is an inhibitor. It makes people withdraw behind closed doors. They stay inside as much as possible. They fear the night. They don’t get to know their neighbors. It has a huge impact on neighborhoods and cities.

How people overcome that?

Well, I think we have to show them that there’s strength in numbers. And if we get to know each other between police and citizens and work together, you get a real new strength and vitality there. And I think we have to focus on the joy that is in our hearts, and the good things that are in our neighborhoods. The good people behind closed doors can make a difference.

Thanks very much.

I wonder if there’s anybody else who’s had a crime either in their family or close to them in the neighborhood who works with– fine. One of you all.

Well, I lost my son about 16 months ago to a violent crime in Kansas City, Missouri. And one of the things is fear. I wanted to do something to give back to the community or to say that my– I have a son that’s 18. And I want to do something to save my son that’s living.

How old was the son who was–

The son that passed away is 21.

21?

Yeah. He was Marty, 21.

And at first I was scared. I mean, I was scared to come out my house. I was scared to even live in my house. So fear is a main concern.

But then when I realized that what they were doing is taking my life away from me, too, I had to get up and start fighting back. And so I started a support group over on the Missouri side, and it’s called Save Also. And SAVE stands for Sisters Against Violence Everywhere.

And so we’re trying to target the mothers and the grandmothers, the aunts, whoever want to be a part of this to– trying to come in and try to help save our children, bring back some of the family values into our families, and to try to restore our black families.

Great. Thanks.

Let me ask you about another issue, and that is diversity. I wonder– Bill Rogers, is diversity from your standpoint as a community leader, is that an asset or is it a disadvantage?

We have come to the conclusion that we think it’s going to be an asset. We’re in an older part of town that has been kind of forgotten in between. And we’ve been looking at how we could rebuild our community. We’re devoid of that family structure. We have senior adults and we have the young kids, but we don’t have the families.

And so we believe that we have a lot to offer for families, young families looking for a safe place to grow and to raise their children.

Great. Thanks.

I wonder if there’s somebody else from another community. What are the obstacles you have in pulling your community together?

We’re in Blue Valley, and one of our biggest obstacles is the language barriers and communications. And we would really–

Between–

Between the different cultures like the Hispanics and Vietnamese and–

And what kinds of problems does it cause?

Well, it causes problems mostly with the city services and the rules, the codes. They have barriers with understanding what they are supposed to do. And we have barriers trying to teach them what they’re supposed to do.

I wonder about another issue. Diversity is not just diversity of population, but diversity is different agencies, different social groups.

You’re nodding to that. Were you nodding because what?

I think just as human beings, we develop different mindsets about our approach is the right one. Substance abuse for me is a critical issue. But I heard someone talk about housing. Well, you can’t address substance abuse in a vacuum.

I think we finally learned that lesson. You have to talk about jobs. You have to talk about training. You have to talk about housing.

But it took us awhile to get there.

Money? How about money? Is there enough money for everybody?

Well, I think that’s part of the issue, of course, is that we’re all fighting for scraps it feels like sometimes. Society tells us how important some causes are by how much money government chooses to give to us. And those resources are very, very limited.

I want to– Raul Murguia, if we can get you involved in this. Go ahead.

I have a comment on diversity.

Whenever different people, more affluent, come to a poor neighborhood, they can be a downfall. In our neighborhood, we’re facing a problem in which– back in 1919, we weren’t allowed to move into Kansas City’s west side. It took generations for Latinos to get in, buy homes. Over decades, there became a Latino community.

Well, now what we’re seeing in my neighborhood is that affluent people have moved in. And we welcomed them, because we wanted diversity. However, now they are doing things that are pushing people out of the neighborhood because they don’t fit the social style or their profile or whatever they want to do.

So they’re beginning to form their own neighborhood organization that only deals with their section. Latino people are not included in their meetings, their plans, agendas. They’re using codes violations.

People are poor there. They cannot spend a whole lot of money in fixing a home when they got to pay for school tuition or they got to pay for kids to eat.

So that’s becoming a problem where diversity can be a problem, because when you have different social levels of economic in the same neighborhood–

So diversity works, but only if there’s give and take and communication.

Yes. When two different groups have different ideas for what they want to do, then you can have people clashing.

Thanks.

I want to talk for a moment about this resource issue that got raised. And I wonder if I get you to join us, Mrs. Wilson.

On the Kansas side of the river, do you feel you’re financially as fortunate as folks on the Missouri side of the river? Because we’ve heard maybe Missouri is doing a little bit better financially.

I think that’s true. I think that’s true. They have a drug task on the Missouri side that helps them in their neighborhood, organizing and to fight crime, which we don’t have on the Kansas side. The Kansas people, I think, have felt like they needed to do for themselves more. There wasn’t anybody there to back us up. I think we’ve felt like we were the poor stepchild. Just ignore us and we’ll go away.

So what’s happened in the last five years, we’ve gone from 20 neighborhood groups to almost 120 neighborhood groups. People have really, at the grassroots level, banded together to take back their neighborhoods.

Great. I think we’re right on a subject that is of critical importance. I’ve heard you talk about networking.

If people are talking together, then nothing very substantial is going to happen. I like to say that life is about relationships. If we’re not connecting people through relationships, then we’re going to be cutting people off from a huge portion of the resources that any neighborhood has to offer.

So it’s through dialogue, through meeting, through finding common purpose, things like that that really help make those collaborations and those connections happen.

Great.

I want to talk about a particular group of folks, young people, with you, Melissa.

Where were you, what’s happened to you, and how did the change take place?

Well, I’ve been actively involved in the community since I’ve been 14 and now I’m 19. So basically, I was one of those children that it was going to be very easily for me to fall through the cracks. And–

Why?

Because I was kind not a child that really stood out educationally. I wasn’t talented, and I wasn’t in the talented and gifted program. But neither was I–

But did you feel included? Was the adult world reaching you?

Yes. When I was 14, an adult, Mr. Arvin Brooks, just really enlightened me. He tapped into the talent in the– he ignited the fire that was in me.

And so that was very important. That was a turning point of my life, because it was just like I was a wallflower. It wasn’t like I was special or had anything to contribute to the community. But an adult came up to me and told me that, yes you do have something to contribute to the community. You are special.

Great. Thanks.

Now we’ll take a look at a neighborhood on the rebound right here in Kansas City.

Drug dealer get up and go.

Drug dealer get up and go.

Blue Hills didn’t always have this fighting spirit.

We’re here to take our neighborhood back.

Several years ago, drug dealers and criminals dominated the neighborhood. Larry Washington lived in the thick of it.

We had drug houses probably on every other block. There were drive-by shootings. People had to actually sleep on floors at night because of fear.

I even got robbed in my driveway a few years ago.

You mean held up?

Help up, robbed, in the morning at 6:25.

Marble Hodge lived next door to a drug house.

This was the worst chapter in my entire life, living next door to a drug house. There were eight different dealers and drug families that sold drugs there. I’ve never lived in as much fear in all my life.

People felt pretty isolated, pretty overwhelmed by it. My guess is they didn’t feel like anything could really be done.

Sister Helen Flemington leads the nearby Catholic church.

I’m sure people did call the police. But if there are gunshots all the time, you end up not calling.

After a murder on the steps of the local elementary school, Sister Helen and others at Saint Therese Catholic Church decided to do something.

We started pulling in neighborhood leaders, church leaders. We invited people to come into this same place and to give us addresses.

Among the neighbors joining the early meetings were Robert Anderson and his wife Lillian.

Before, we had stopped talking to each other because we were all living in our houses. No one was coming outside.

So when we went up to the church, we met our neighbors we had not been talking to for years.

What happened was people stopped being isolated. They started realizing that they could band together. They started seeing that if Saint Therese called a meeting, the officials were there.

We had gotten a power base is what we had gotten.

Sister Helen became a matchmaker, inviting community police officers to use the church offices as their base of operations. As homeowners established a bond with the police, they felt empowered to report crimes on their blocks.

They said, OK, you do the identifying, you point to where the drug houses are. We will close them, and we will help you do that. But we have to be partnership. We have to work together on that.

They’re part of the community now. It’s like they’ve moved in with us.

Hey you. Kansas City is watching you.

Working together, Blue Hills began shutting down drug houses. They held city codes inspections and protests.

People who did not have hope all of a sudden had hope.

We’re here to take our neighborhood back.

Well, they’ve been apart for so long. It’s about time they come together.

I want to try to help, if I can, to make it better for the younger generation or the older generation. And I thought maybe if my little part helped, then hey, I want to do it.

But drug dealers didn’t want to move out. They fought back.

They threw a fire bomb through my window at 2:30 in the morning.

Marble Hodge, who had been an activist on her block, woke up one night to a fire smoldering on her porch.

Do you think they were trying to run you out of the neighborhood?

They wanted to run the older people out who had lived here a long time. They wanted to take over the neighborhood.

More angry than scared, she wanted to leave Blue Hills.

This is a sign I had in the yard. I kept it out there about three weeks.

Hello, Sister Helen. How are you?

But she stayed, because neighbors rallied around her.

He wanted 20,000, right?

The next move was for Larry Washington and the Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance to buy and rehabilitate the house next door.

Abandoned properties are the problems. They’re just trouble, not to mention eye sores in the community.

So we target the abandoned houses in order to convert those to convert the community back around.

KCNA is buying and restoring many of the properties left behind when drug dealers are forced out.

All along this wall right here, I’m looking for upper cabinets here.

What’s going to happen here when you’re finished? Is this going to be rented? Is it going to be sold?

We instill home ownership. We like our home ownership. And, of course, with home ownership, people are more apt to take care of the property.

In addition to fixing up nearly 50 abandoned houses in Blue Hills, KCNA helps homeowners with repairs by organizing volunteer cleanup days like this one for Mary Lee.

This is something I couldn’t do by myself. I needed help. I can paint, but I can’t paint the whole house by myself.

I can move the boards inside, but I can’t move it by myself. Everybody needs help every now and then.

Even Blue Hills’ teenagers are getting involved in their community again.

The neighborhood association is thriving, says president Linda Spence.

It’s easy to get the neighbors out to clean up the block, to have parties, to come out to meetings. Once you can show the neighbors that we can be effective if we all work together, hey, it just happens.

Their biggest challenge was this neighborhood bar, the Chateau Lounge. Kansas City police who shot this aerial surveillance video said the lounge attracted traffic, crowds, and crime.

When a fatal shooting took place on the Chateau’s dance floor, captured by the club’s security camera, residents wanted to shut it down.

That was it. That was it. The police had had it. The neighborhood had been fighting it. We had had it. The church said enough’s enough. And so we banded together.

A county prosecutor assigned to the community teamed up with residents.

They asked us what they can do. And we said, what do you want to do? They said, we want to bring attention to this.

And so we had a vigil there for all the victims. And then Ad Hoc Group Against Crime got involved.

Shut them down!

So it wasn’t just the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office trying to take away a hardworking person’s liquor license. It was, this is a community problem, and we’re all coming together to fix it.

After a legal fight, a judge revoked the Chateau’s liquor license and closed the bar.

But without the neighborhood– I mean, if they never came out other barricaded doors, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything.

Overall, crime is down by 25%. But the battle isn’t over.

The 100 men of Blue Hills provide neighborhood security at night time and for kids on their way to school. Blue Hills is serious about neighborhood watch.

Our neighbors are watching. We will call the police to call any suspicious activities. We have this in every entrance in Blue Hills, from the north to the south.

Safer streets mean the Andersons can enjoy their front porch again.

It’s a real pretty day out here.

You can walk to the store. You can walk your dog in the evening, not just during the day. You have that freedom.

And I can even feel safe when I’m planting my flowers and taking care of my flowers. I don’t have a fear of being shot like I was a couple years ago.

With all these improvements, property values are going up. Kids are back playing in the park. People’s spirits are rising.

You do not have a right to a good neighborhood. It’s your responsibility. You have to get out and talk to your neighbor, find out who they are so you can all work together.

We feel like, OK, we’ve taken our neighborhood back. We’re winning.

Get active if you want your neighborhood back. And you can get it back. Remember, there’s more of us than them.

That was a fascinating episode. And one of the fascinating things for me about Kansas City is that you all have some very special concepts here. Community prosecuting– Kathy Finnell, what’s the essence of community prosecuting kind of in a nuts and bolts way in terms of your links with individual neighborhoods?

It’s an integration of prevention, intervention, and law enforcement. We can prosecute them. We can put them in jail. But that’s one person with one problem. That is not really effectuating a wide-scale, comprehensive solution.

I think what I’m hearing you saying is if you prosecute an individual drug dealer, you may put one person in jail, but you may not changed the situation in a community. Talk about that a little bit in terms of what community policing is.

It’s not just about dealing with the one individual who’s slinging the crack. It’s also about the property that is being used, and holding the landlord or the property owner accountable. It’s also about saying to citizens, you see it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We won’t know if they’re dealing out of the side window unless you tell us. We won’t know that you have to ask for a certain person unless you tell us.

And we can send undercovers all day long, but if we don’t know what to ask for, then we’re not going to get in.

So it’s real two-way communication with communities.

It’s a complete reciprocal relationship.

Great. Thanks.

Now let me ask you, Major Chapman from the standpoint of the police– community policing is a term that’s now being kicked around all over America. It’s very popular. What in practical terms does it mean?

We take our cues from the neighborhood now. Rather than being an occupying force in the neighborhood, going in and telling people how to solve their problems, we are an active partner. And we are part of the neighborhood. It feels so different to be a part of the neighborhood and to be wanted and appreciated there, and to work together on a problem and to look at the physical constraints and say, well, maybe I can change the environment for the better as well.

Great. Thanks.

Jim, I want to ask you– this county has something very unusual. You have a tax system. Tell us about that in terms of what we have just been talking about, community policing and hitting the drug dealers.

Very Good. The brave citizens of Jackson County chose in 1989 to not only pay lip service, but to pay their money to go after a problem and all the problems around substance abuse. They strategically webbed law enforcement, treatment, and prevention into a single force that went after the evils surrounding substance abuse.

Let me ask you, who foots the bill? And how big is the bill?

It’s a quarter cent sales tax. And that’s important too, because every citizen participates in this tax. That also means that we are accountable to every citizen.

It raises between $14 and $18 million a year to go after prevention, law enforcement, and treatment in a dedicated, multi-disciplinary way.

So this is Jackson County, The Kansas City area, pay as you go, we vote for it and tax ourselves.

Absolutely. And the most important thing is that everybody knows what to expect.

Thanks very much.

I want to come back to you, Eddie Wilson.

Here we are across the river in Missouri, and they’re voting this tax. Now, does that push all the crime over on you in Kansas?

Yes. Yes. It does. The people who deal drugs are very smart. They know the law. They know the games. They know where they’re least likely to get caught, where they’re least likely to be prosecuted, who has the resources to go after them and who doesn’t. Definitely.

So if it goes across state lines, it’s tough to deal with.

It’s tough to deal with. That means we have to now be even more connected, utilize our resources, and do what we can to run them out.

Are voters in Wyandotte County, Kansas ready to vote a one quarter percent sales tax to do the same thing?

We’re already taxed to the max.

So it’s tough.

It’s tough.

There are slightly different approaches here.

I want to come back to you, Raul Murguia, because you were talking about this problem a little bit before.

In Blue Hills, very effective. We’ve had other people talking about it. Get together, push them out, they go over to Kansas. What’s your reaction?

My reaction is– and this is a problem that I’ve been facing, especially with the gangs in Kansas City. Because when Missouri has a lot of resources and we have prevention, we have law enforcement, we have many different things that are helping us address the gang problems and the crime problems in our youth in this side of town, well, the kids don’t know state lines.

And particularly in the Latino community, we’re right next to the state line. That’s another problem we are close to. So when kids from Kansas come over here and feud with the kids from the west side, they’re only 30 seconds away from the state line. So they run back over there, and then law enforcement over there can do nothing because they think that the problem happened in Missouri.

So that is an issue that is affecting us dramatically. And I’m working with a lot of kids who are in Kansas when I can on my own time, because you because you can go back and forth over here. But it’s an issue that we have. We live in the same neighborhood where we have a line that’s dividing us.

And there’s more money here and no money over there.

OK, Great, thanks.

Ron McMillan, I’d like to get your take on this. Are we chasing crime from one area to another and it just matters which neighborhood is better organized?

Well, I liked the Uptown piece where diversity was in action, where people were living together, people were unafraid of each other. I love Rita and her piece, welcome to the community, not being strangers, having relationships. And starting at a young age, where communities were mixed together and the different ethnic groups were interacting, having relationships.

In Kansas City, however, a whole different piece. We’re segregated. You have east and west troops, you have traditional money streams that fund the racial separation. So we have a long ways to go.

Your Latinos over here, your blacks over here, your whites over here. That’s our reality. How we will work towards diversity– they call it harmony in a world of difference– is still something for us to really look at.

And Uptown Chicago gives us something to look at.

Great. Thanks.

I wonder if somebody wants to respond to that. It must be– yes, please.

I’d just like to take a moment to respond to the Kansas City, Kansas, and Missouri dichotomy of sorts. You have to get beyond the idea of Kansas City, Missouri, Kansas City, Kansas, Independence, Blue Springs. This is one community. And it’s about community justice. It’s not about community prosecution, community policing. It’s about community justice. And when we get beyond our mental boundaries, then we’re really able to do some things.

And that has been the core focus of our unit. And really just being able to go out and develop partnerships and collaborations, and more importantly, getting some consensus that there’s a common goal here. And we can all do something if we work together across borders, across blocks, across fences, across agencies and things like that. So that’s what we’re doing here.

I want to hear from some young people. Jermaine Reed, how old are you?

I’m 15 years old.

OK. Are you involved in any programs here? Are they reaching you?

Yes. I’m involved in the and our Group Against Crime Saving Youth in Crisis youth group. And we are a group that felt like there was nothing for us to do. So we got out in our communities. We are finding things to do, and we are getting out in our communities and helping people with problems. We have a 24-hour hotline where if you’re a teen and you ran away from home, you can call in. And Melissa Robinson and myself, we go on the radio. Every item we report these missing runaways.

But there are things for things to do. If you don’t get out there and find something to do and you just sit home and watch Jerry Springer, you won’t find nothing to do. So they–

Are there many involved, or are we talking about a small group here?

There’s at least about a group of 30. But we have 150 or more people in enrolled, but they don’t want to find anything to do.

What do you mean?

I mean, they’re enrolled. Like we go to the school–

But they’re not active.

Yes.

They sign up, but they don’t show up.

Yes.

OK. Fine.

Sean Morris, we saw the young people working to help clean up in Blue Hills. What’s the program all about?

I’m working with an initiative of the YMCA which is called CCYD, Community Change for Youth Development. And basically it’s a real unique initiative. Instead of a program that we take into a neighborhood, we’re trying to develop things that the neighborhood actually want.

And we incorporate our youth, our neighbors, businesses in the neighborhood, to all be on the process of the planning of what the youth needs in the neighborhood.

Who gets to decide? Do the adults decide what programs the youth are going to do, or do the youth decide what programs the youth are going to do?

It’s both ways. We meet weekly, and the youth, they have their own meetings. And they come up with some of the things that they want to do in the neighborhood.

Are these a couple of your guys with you?

Yeah.

All right. Let’s hear from them. What are you guys doing? What do you like doing the most?

Well, one the most enjoyable things that it seems the youth like doing are the community service projects. Surprisingly, when we go out to do community service, even though they know they’re not going to get nothing but seeing the person happy that we’re helping, a lot of them will show up and work and enjoy themselves.

And community service means what?

Well, for our community services, we’ve done– earlier this year, we had some houses in our area that got flooded, so we went and we helped get the stuff out that the people wanted out. We have some elderly and some disabled people in our area. We’ll go over to their house and we’ll fix up their house for them, we’ll mow the lawn for them. And then we’ll come back every so often and make sure it’s not trashed again.

Mr. Alvin Brooks, you’ve spent a lot of your life working with young people. What are the keys to getting young people involved in community activities, making them feel a part of it, making it effective for them?

Well, first of all, I think you have to let young people know that you love them, that you involve them. I think we were one of the few groups against crime that actually have young people on our board, the governing board.

I think we’ve failed to involve the faith community. I think that the only way a person can stay off drugs, stay out of gang activity, leave the violence along, is to have some morals and character. If they have a spiritual background– but you have limit yourself. You have to be a product of yourself.

But involving them in things where they can see some results. If they can see the fruits of their hands, the fruits of their labor, the participation– doing something that they run it and you turn it over to them. And being honest and being good listeners.

Being good listeners to young people. Thanks.

All right. Being good listeners is part of what we’re doing today. We’re talking about exchanging experience.

Rita Simo, I wonder whether or not you go back to Chicago having learned anything here in Kansas City that you can take back there.

Lots of things. First of all, I’m amazed to the group of people that are here. This is like– talking about diversity down here, we have a lot of diversity right here. And I love that line that this lady said, something about more of us than there is of them. I think that this is going to be my line from now on. I have 300 students, so there’s a lot.

But regardless of what happened, first I have one comment that is totally outlandish. But I think we also in the neighborhood– and we have so many difficulties– we need to learn how to celebrate. And there’s nothing that make more community than to break bread together. And one thing that’s happening in our place because our school is free and we have to raise money, we have food sales.

And to have a Cambodian person and a Ethiopian person and Guatemalan discussing the food that they brought, that is terrific. Because it’s real. Are life is full of problems, but once in a while, let’s live it up. And let’s do it. And I think that that is really [INAUDIBLE]

Thanks for your comment. And thank all of you for taking part in our discussion here tonight.

We’ve just seen two effective examples of how people in our big cities can take back their neighborhoods from drug dealers and gangs. We’ve heard how neighborhoods can protect their children, create safer streets, and dramatically improve the overall quality of life– provided that ordinary people decide to get engaged.

As one person put it, no one has the right to a good neighborhood. It’s our responsibility to create it.

And as our two stories have shown, success can happen even on tough terrain. Once people get active, form networks, and develop partnerships with community police and prosecutors.

In our next program, we’ll focus on hate crime. A form of violence that’s especially menacing to many Americans because of the obvious differences among us. We’ll visit the Deep South and Southern California to see what two very different parts of our country are doing to try to prevent the violence spawned by bigotry and intolerance.

I’m Hedrick Smith. Thank you for being with us.

To learn more about this program and grassroots movements to combat crime, visit PBS online at the internet address on your screen.

Next time on Seeking Solutions.

There’s guys saying it’s OK to bash faggots. It’s all right.

They call me a nigger to my face.

Sick.

I would have gone all the way to stand up and say, you can’t do this.

Standing up to hate.

A presentation of South Carolina ETV.

Principal funding for Seeking Solutions provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Major funding provided by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The Surdna Foundation.

Additional funding provided by the following– the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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