The cops in Baltimore's Southwestern Police District knocked on 28 doors, searching for 28 juveniles they had locked up in the past month. They were serving not warrants to put them back in jail but invitations to a meeting, to teach, to guide, to inform, to keep them from being locked up a second time.
Deputy Maj. Charles V. Carter Sr. led off the meeting, held Friday night at the Kedesh House of Prayer Christian Church on West Lombard Street, with a prayer and a reading of grim statistics of juvenile crime - 260 kids under 18 arrested this year in his district alone, 16 of them deemed violent, 27 of them repeat offenders.
Of the 28 teens representing the most recent arrests, exactly zero showed up to hear Carter's message.
That's not to say people didn't come. The hall was packed. There were kids in blue shirts from the Police Explorers club, kids in tan shirts from the Boy Scouts, kids from the church and kids of the evening's speakers.
When one looked around the room at the well-behaved, the smartly dressed, the polite teenagers, it was quickly obvious that these were not the kids who needed saving. Nor were their parents the ones who needed training.
Tanon Brunson, the church's youth minister, spoke toward the end and heaped praise on the meeting, its organizers, the speakers and the kids who seem to be doing everything right. But he also saw a problem. He recognized nearly every child in the room.
"You already belong to something," he told the group.
It's the kids who don't belong to anything - or at least anything other than a street gang - who needed to be in the room.
And those kids, even with a personal invitation from a cop knocking at their door, don't come to meetings like this.
"We can't do this indoors," Brunson told me later. "We have to do it outside."
He told the group of already dedicated youngsters to recruit one friend to join whatever it is they have joined, and then, he said, "we get one more off the corner."
Carter acknowledged the frustrations but refused to give up. He said most of the 28 kids he invited aren't really kids at all, but around 17 years old, and he wants to go after the 14-and-under group for the next meeting. Those kids are more likely to attend and listen to his cops and their parents.
"If you quit, you never win," Carter said.
