Collaborations between the Faith Based Community and Law Enforcement June 2014 Voiceover 00:00 This is The Beat, a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Vonda Matthews 00:08 Hello and welcome. My name is Vonda Matthews. On behalf of the COPS Office, I’d like to introduce you to Reverend Jeff Brown. He’s a nationally recognized leader and expert in gang, youth, urban violence reduction and coalition building. He’s the managing partner of RECAP or Rebuilding Every City Around Peace, a national initiative organized to assist cities to better build partnerships between faith-based community, government, and law enforcement agencies in an effort to reduce gang violence. He is also one of the cofounders of the Boston Ten Point Coalition, a faith-based group that is an integral part of the Boston Miracle, an approach that lead to a 79 percent decline in Boston’s violent crime in the 1990s. It spawned countless urban collaborative efforts based on the Boston Ceasefire Model. He also continues his church ministry as the associate pastor of the historic 12th Baptist Church of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Welcome, Reverend Brown. Thank you for joining us today. Reverend Jeff Brown 01:04 Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Vonda 01:06 How does your faith-based organization work to improve community safety in your community? Jeff 01:11 Well, 12th Baptist Church, the church where I am the associate pastor, has done a lot of outreach. We have come to the decision that if we really want to be a positive element of change in the community that we have to be a community church. This means we have to come out of the four walls of our sanctuary and go to where the needs are. That’s more than just having a soup kitchen, which we have, and a food pantry, and doing programs within the building. We have to go outside the building. So we have a couple of housing projects across the street from our church in which the men of the church, on the weekends, go out walking and try to connect with all the youth within that area—many of them are involved with gangs—and to also work with their families to ascertain needs and try to meet those needs. We also do a lot of collaborative work. Our church has become a hub of community meetings that occur in and around Roxbury. We look at that as a ministry to the community so they could use the separate buildings that we have and the sanctuary, so that they can do their own kinds of collaborative work and community building. We really believe that’s where the church is headed in the 21st century. For a while there, people were obsessed with how to get more members into the church. But I really believe now that the trend is towards outreach and coming out of the four walls of the sanctuary and being a church of the community. Vonda 02:49 That’s good. Could you briefly describe how your relationship with law enforcement has changed over time? Jeff 02:54 Yes. I think that at the beginning of my ministry work, my perception of law enforcement was like every other young black male who lived in or near the city. It wasn’t a good perception. I thought that the police were basically there to harass and to make our lives miserable. One of them has a bad day, it gets taken out on us. When I started doing my work in the streets and started working with gangs who were involved with drugs, it became clear to me that the work that I was doing could not be achieved by myself. It took more than prayer meetings and community walks to really see a reduction in violent crime. It was around that time that the police department in Boston was beginning their community policing program. They were coming to the realization that they couldn’t arrest themselves out of the situation of violence in our city. Only through a collaborative effort could this happen. I think that’s when my perception of the police began to change. I started to work with them one on one and not at the top down. It wasn’t a thing where you met with the police commissioner and then the command staff and district captain, etc. But I started working with the cops I would see every day in my neighborhood. They were generally gang unit officers who would be driving around in those Crown Victoria unmarked cars that everybody knows who they are. But they also had the advantage of meeting and talking with us when we were out there walking the streets at night and when they had an opportunity to connect with us. We discovered that many of the cops that were working in our area actually lived in the area, and they had family that lived in the area. They wanted to see the community improve, and it wasn’t just for the sake of a department but it was also for their own personal lives. What they saw with us, as community leaders, is that they saw leadership in the community who saw what they had to deal with on a nightly basis. That sort of formed the basis of the partnership that we had. They respected us as partners. I think that was another big perception shift for me. They started to look at the work we were doing with youth and with their families, and they started to respect that work. So they tried to find ways to enhance and to help what we were doing. And we in turn continued to say to the youth, “We need law enforcement in our community; no community can survive without some form of law enforcement.” We either have the formal kind that is represented with our police department, or you have the informal kind, young men who are posted up on the block, trying to defend the block. That was what was killing our community. So in all of that work that we were doing, my perception of the police started to change to where it is today. Vonda 05:59 That’s great. From your experience, what has been some of the most effective strategies for the community to constructively engage with law enforcement? Jeff 06:07 If you have community groups who want to effectively engage with law enforcement, you have to have a community group who is concerned and who is working with those families and those youth who are ensconced in the problem. In terms of violence in our community, you have to have community groups and faith-based groups who are working directly with those who are involved with gangs or those who are involved with drugs. There used to be an approach where people would try to just grab the youth who are at risk, who may be on the fence. The time has come where we have to stop that kind of behavior. If we’re going to see an effective reduction of violence in the city, you have to be directly involved with those who are involved with the violence. One of things that I found out is that even though that group can be fearsome to many people, the reality is it’s a small number of the youth who are actually in the community. So we’re talking about 1 to 2 percent of the youth in a given city [who] drive 50 to 65 percent of the violence. We’re not talking about a large group, but we need to address that group because that small number has a disproportionate effect upon the tenor of all the youth in the community. You can go to a high school and ask a high school kid how many teachers do they know and what they teach. They can probably just tell you the teachers that they have been seeing that year and maybe a previous year. But if you ask any given youth how many gangs are in their community, what are their names, and who the heads of the gangs are, they can tell you all of that information. All of the youth know who the players are. So if you’re going to have an effective violence reduction strategy, you have to get involved. Part of what you do is that you go out and become visible. We do community walks. And we don’t do community walks at a convenient time. We do it at the times where we know the youth will be out there hanging out. You have to have programs that could help their families. Many of those families have multiple difficulties. They are seen by multiple social service agencies. So it’s not going to be easy work, but it’s the kind of work that has to be done if we’re going to see effective reduction. Finally, you have to have messaging in your church that turns your attention away from the pop theologies of the day and really towards the kind of work that’s going to see a transformation in the community. Vonda 09:03 That’s good. What can both the faith-based community and law enforcement do to improve their relationship? Obviously, you have some experience with that. Jeff 09:12 Absolutely. I think on the faith-based side, what I have found to be most effective are those leaders who become really hands-on workers. There are some pastors who will say, “Okay, we’ll do this kind of ministry outreach to gangs,” and then they’ll look for people within their congregation to do that, which I think is an important piece. But this is one of those times where the pastor himself or herself has to get personally involved. And there is a very simple reason why: when gang members walk past your church, it’s your name they see on the marquee. So they are expecting leadership to respond to them. The second piece for the faith-based side, in terms of working with law enforcement, [is] you really have to take the time to begin to build the relationship. Many people will say we won’t do that until we start addressing, for example, police abuses of power, etc., etc. But the problem is, what is hurting our community, is youth who are, through whatever conditions have been created within the community, are shooting each other. We have to find a way to address that problem. Part of the reason why we need the law enforcement is because they are the ones in the community who are supposed to address these kinds of issues. We have to find ways of working with them in order to make violence reduction effective in our community. As a result of that, you should have faith groups who are willing to sit down and talk with gang unit officers, with officers who are rolling around in districts in their cars. Or, if they have walking beat officers, sit down and talk with them and talk about the work you want to do in the community with those youth and how can we more effectively partner together. On the law enforcement side, I would say that to be able to do all you can, to encourage those faith leaders to really understand what it’s like to be out on the streets, part of it is a conversation with them, but another part of it is just encouraging them to be out there and to be out there by themselves. A lot of folks have a lot of fears of being out on the streets, but one of the things that I have found in all the work I have done is that once you go out there, your perceptions of the streets change dramatically. You find out that all of the fears you may have are just that—they’re just fears. And the youth that you are encountering are just youth. There are a lot of them that feel they don’t have any options or don’t have any way to deal with the situations in their streets other than through violence. When there is another element of the community that is showing them a different way, many of them—I would say the bulk of them—take that other way. They go and they take a chance to take that other way. Anything law enforcement can do to encourage faith leaders to be out there on the streets and be active on the streets, not as show horses, if you will, as work horses, it can really make a difference. Vonda 12:39 Thank you so much for sharing all your experiences today, Reverend Brown, and for really doing all the work that you do to reduce violence and build coalitions. Is there anything you want to add? Jeff 12:49 The last thing I’d like to add is that there really is a real movement among community groups and, in particular, the faith community to really come out of their safety zones or the four walls of their sanctuaries and to meet youth where they are. I think for law enforcement groups, it would really be a good investment of time and effort to really discover who those clergy and who those leaders are, so that they, through partnership, can build a more effective strategy. It can go a long way in building police-community relations if they really make that kind of investment. Vonda 13:28 Thank you. I appreciate all your words of wisdom today. Jeff 13:31 Thank you very much. Voiceover: Beat Exit 13:32 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 13:48 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.