The red jail album was down from the shelf, and Donte Barksdale fingered its glossy pages. He looked into the eyes of East Baltimore brothers sent to prison. Some were still there, others were back on the streets. Too many had become statistics in the city's grim homicide tally.
"Lance got killed right after the All-Star Game," Barksdale said, as if announcing the weather, to a half-dozen men gathered in a rowhouse on Monument Street.
For Barksdale and the others, it was a fate they once felt powerless to escape. They were foot soldiers and lieutenants in the drug game, and in a city where the No. 1 cause of death for people ages 14 to 24 is homicide, they were waiting for their number to be called.
Now they are soldiers of another kind. Tired of the corner life, sick of the murders, and desperate for their children to grow up in a better place, they have signed on with Operation Safe Streets, a Baltimore Health Department program that hires ex-offenders to stop the shootings in their own neighborhood.
"It's gonna take [guys] like us in the 'hood," Barksdale, 33, was saying to a young man he met on Monument Street last week, not far from the Safe Streets office, pressing a flier into the youth's hand. "The police can't do it. It's impossible."
Safe Streets, modeled on similar programs that have shown promise in other cities, began last June in McElderry Park, an East Baltimore neighborhood just blocks from the Johns Hopkins medical campus, rife with open-air drug markets and controlled by the Bloods gang. More than a quarter of the homes are vacant; about one-third of the residents live below the poverty line.
Pounding pavement
The four outreach workers are drawn from this population, identified through community networks for their passion for something better. Safe Streets sends them out to canvass the community, mediate conflicts and mentor young men at risk of being the victims or perpetrators of shootings. Since June, no one has been killed in McElderry Park. For the same period in the previous year, three people were killed.
Sometimes the workers sort out fights and disputes they come upon while on the streets. Other times they are called for help. When one of the clients was threatened by a rival gang, the workers invited the warring parties to the office. Thirty people crowded into the program's rowhouse, talked it out and agreed not to harm one another.
Putting out brushfires
