Syracuse’s $1 million gun violence fix struggles to gain trust of would-be shooters

Syracuse, N.Y. — Syracuse’s new, $1 million solution to its entrenched gun violence problem has struggled during its first year to attract participants and has lost one of its key service providers.
The Safer Streets program, a pilot, was billed as an innovative way to get 55 of the city’s potentially most dangerous young men to put down their guns and get jobs. But the start has been an uphill battle where the reality of government contracts and nonprofit work have clouded the simple vision of getting credible messengers — people who had their own trouble with the law — to convince the men to find a better path.
Earlier this month, Syracuse Safer Streets had 18 people officially signed on to its program, despite months of trying to sign up 55 men identified as keys to stopping the city’s gun violence. Some are would-be shooters, others are the ones providing the guns, said Lateef Johnson-Kinsey, director of the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence, who is leading the program.
Project H.E.A.L., the organization that had been overseeing the therapy portion of the program, dropped out recently instead of asking to have its contract extended. The administration of the program was too much for the organization, said Rev. Bernard Alex, whose church, Victory Temple Fellowship, runs Project H.E.A.L.
The therapists who have been assessing and treating the few participants who have agreed to therapy plan to stay on, though. The city is trying to find a different organization that can oversee their work. Just nine of the current 18 participants are in therapy.
“I wish we had more guys sign up for therapy, but being realistic, in the Black neighborhoods, who the hell is going to therapy?” Johnson-Kinsey said. He said that in his other job as pastor at Well of Hope Church in the city, he struggles to get people to agree to therapy, too.
Those problems are that perception and trust have been especially hard to untangle.
That’s the case when it comes to getting people to sign on to the Safer Streets program. Participants have to sign a contract to be counted in the program. That piece of paper has been a tremendous hurdle, with good reason, Johnson-Kinsey said.
In the past, people in Syracuse who participated in a similar program had their participation used as evidence of gang participation by federal prosecutors, Johnson-Kinsey said he’s been told.
This is what happened to one of the Safer Streets credible messengers in the early 2000s, Johnson-Kinsey said he‘s been told. The credible messenger said federal prosecutors used his participation in a community program aimed at gang members as evidence against him in a RICO sting. The contract he signed to get help was used to put him away for several years, Johnson-Kinsey said the credible messenger has told him. And his story is well-known by the young men the city is trying to recruit to the new program.
This perception is one of the major roadblocks, he said.
“Getting them to sign might take a year,” Johnson-Kinsey said.
John Katko, the former assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted some those RICO cases, disputed the notion that community program participation was ever used to prosecute gang members.
“There was overwhelming independent evidence of gang association for each and every one of the defendants,” Katko said.
Trust is not the only obstacle for the Safer Streets program. It has taken a long time to get the effort up and running. At first, there was a debate about whether the city should pay people for participating. This has been done in other communities, with success, but after an outcry from the public and Common Council, the city changed Safer Streets to tie that money to workforce development, instead.
Then there were delays with the contracts. Some nonprofit agencies that were interested initially dropped out once they realized they could not handle the administrative portion of the work. The program was approved by common councilors in August, but the real work of trying to get participants signed on didn’t begin until April because of delays in finalizing contracts with the agencies.
Johnson-Kinsey said many of the nonprofits currently involved have a track record of working with kids who are getting into trouble in school, but that’s vastly different from the work of convincing grown men steeped in violence to reconsider their paths. That, too, has slowed the work.
The four agencies doing the work have spent less than $200,000 of the roughly $900,000 allotted to them. Project H.E.A.L., which dropped out, had spent the most: $107,000. The remaining agencies are The Salvation Army, The Goodlife Philanthropic Youth Foundation and the Northside Learning Center.
Common Councilors recently approved extending contracts for those agencies that would last through March, but Johnson-Kinsey said that after that, he wants to switch the way the program works and have the credible messengers be employed by the city, directly. He might still want to contract with the various agencies for some of the work, but he’d shift the bulk of it back to the city.
When it started, there were five organizations contracted to provide services. One, OG’s Against Gun Violence, dropped out right away, followed by Project H.E.A.L.
“It’s just a lot of organizations,” Johnson-Kinsey said. He questioned the logic of having those agencies go through the same kind of RFP process that contractors do when they bid on construction projects. “This is not repairing pavement.”
Though the numbers are small, there has been success. None of the participants have been arrested for shootings since the program started. Two have been victims; five were in police custody for other issues. Five of the participants found employment through the program.
And then there are the things that are hard to quantify: shootings that didn’t happen. There’s some data that points at that work. There were 25 street conflict intervention meetings, where people who might have been planning to shoot each other got together with credible messengers and worked it out.
Johnson-Kinsey also recounted a recent shooting that ended in an injury, but not a death. Just before the shooting happened, one of the credible messengers was taking a Safer Streets’ participant to his job. The man’s phone rang, but he didn’t pick up because he was on his way to work.
He was getting called to come help with the shooting. He ignored the calls because he had a job. Johnson-Kinsey thinks the outcome would have been deadly if the man had answered the call. Johnson-Kinsey said that the victim survived because the shooter got scared, dropped the gun and ran after getting off a bad shot. The man in the Safer Streets program is a good shot, and would’ve stayed until the job was done, Johnson-Kinsey said.
“The guy we’re working with, he’s dangerous. He could be,” Johnson-Kinsey said. “Our worker took him to work. That’s intervention.”
Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people and public affairs in Central New York. Contact her anytime email | Twitter| Facebook | 315-470-2246.