By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 30, 2001; Page A01

Second of two articles

Bridget Miller is driving home late one night and a guy pulls in front of her in what looks like an old D.C. police cruiser -- but with Maryland tags, a U.S. Park Police decal plastered on the door and a big spotlight mounted next to the windshield.

Trouble.

Miller, alone in her SUV, pulls up to the driver and motions for him to roll down his window.

"Baby, you don't know me and I don't know you," she says, "but let me see your ID."

Miller is no cop. Neither is the young man in the cruiser.

Maybe he pulls over because she's a fine-looking woman; maybe he's just startled that anyone would dare to confront him.

Miller is part of the D.C. school system's Youth Gang Task Force, five street-savvy plainclothes security officers who know the city's underbelly as intimately as anyone else in town. Violence in the city's schools is way down in recent years -- overall, incidents ranging from break-ins to shootings dropped 35 percent last year, according to the school system -- and police and school leaders say the task force is one reason for the good news.

Miller asks the tough in the cop car where he lives, and when he tells her, she reels off a list of names: his friends, cousins, even his siblings. "I know what you're doing," she says. "You've been using these cars to stop people and hold them up. I'm a tell you, MPD's jump-outs are going to get you, and you might even get time. I don't want you getting caught up 'cause of that light, understand?"

The guy nods, lifts the light off the car and hands it to Miller. She hasn't turned him away from robbing people, but she's made it clear: She knows who he is and she'll be watching. He'll ask around about her, and he'll hear that Bridget Miller does not let up.

None of this is in Miller's job description. It's just what the task force does. Officially, there's a chart produced each month listing the number of school visits (71 in the most recent report) and in-school mediations (three) that the task force has conducted between rival gangs. But the real work that Miller, chief Theophus Brooks and the other task force members do happens on the streets at 3 a.m.; at the Black Hole, the Ice Box and other Saturday night hangouts; at the rec centers where Brooks coaches football; at Miller's apartment in the Mayfair Mansions housing complex in Northeast, where thugs from all over town know they can come at any hour.

"We're young, kind of look like the thugs, dress like them, speak their language," says task force member Mike Alston, 26, a former University of Virginia football player who grew up in Southeast Washington. "This is where I hang out, where my family is. You have teachers who've been in these schools for 30 years, but they don't know the neighborhood, they don't speak D.C. slang. They can't even understand what the kids are saying."

Task force members carry no guns, wear no uniforms. They roam from school to school in sleeveless shirts, sweats, jeans, fancy sneakers -- whatever kids are wearing. Their authority stems largely from encyclopedic knowledge of kids, siblings, parents, the intricate web of turf and boundaries that makes up much of the District. On and off the job, they soak in detail; several task force members also do private investigative work and handle security at nightclubs that draw a teenage crowd.

The old cliche about Washington being a small town is never more true than on a day with Brooks and Miller, who can barely drive a block without being hailed by men standing on corners, women pushing strollers, workers driving to a job, kids up to no good.

"The five of us probably know 80 percent of the hard-core crooks in the city," says Brooks, 52. "This is a clan town. That's why we have crews, not organized gangs. It's not a membership thing. If you live in Barry Farms and you go somewhere and you get jumped, you tell people back home and they retaliate. Does that make you a member? You're involved even if you didn't want to be. It's a real thin line."

Ever since it created the task force in 1995, the school bureaucracy has not known quite what to make of it -- tout its success, hide it as a symbol of the city's roughest edge, or disband it and declare that there are no organized gangs in the nation's capital.

"The task force can sometimes get too close to the gangs, but they are very effective in keeping the violence away from the schools," says schools security chief Patrick Fiel. "I cannot get rid of the gangs. All I can do is work with them to make them understand that they cannot identify themselves or recruit in school. The task force gets that message across."

After last year's shooting at the National Zoo, Brooks and Fiel met at 2:30 a.m., gathered photos of possible suspects from the school system's digital database of student pictures and took them out on the streets, where some of Brooks's young contacts identified the shooter, Antoine Jones.

As the crime rate has dropped, school violence has receded from public view, but Fiel's officers confiscated more than 400 weapons from students last school year, including machetes, semiautomatic pistols, stun guns, brass knuckles, a pen that pops open to reveal a knife, a cigarette lighter that flips into a scary blade, a cane that houses a two-foot-long scythe, even a working pocket calculator that opens into a knife.

"A lot of these kids hate each other and they don't know why," says Brooks, who has worked in the schools for 29 years.

Kids still kill kids, and for dumber reasons than ever. Brooks has attended 83 funerals of young people in the past three years. "I don't look at the bodies," he says. "I just sign the book and see who's there. All I can think about is I knew him in fourth grade."

Most of the killings, he says, have nothing to do with drugs. Brooks declares that "there are no more drug wars in D.C.," a view police call exaggerated but grounded in truth.

Still, many crews remain active; the killings now are most often not about drugs or territory, but girls. "Look at 'Jerry Springer,' " Brooks says. "That's the kind of disputes we have. Little petty things like who looked at whose girl at the Black Hole."

Even the toughest teenagers often know that these adolescent love troubles are not worth anyone's life. But when leaders of a crew declare war on another crew, there is no turning back. That's when some kids approach the task force.

"They're looking for somebody to squash the beef," Alston says. "They don't want to die for real. He may say, 'I'm all right, I can handle it,' but why is he bringing it up except he wants to be saved?"

"We can help him save face," Brooks says. "Quiet. Nobody has to know."

There's a fight at Eastern High School, 18 girls in the Survivor Honeys crew ganging up on five juniors. Miller steps in -- nothing official. Some kids show up after midnight at her apartment at Mayfair -- to hang, talk, confess, cry.

"In the last couple of years, that's mainly what I'm dealing with -- girls," she says. "They're my babies. I treat them like my daughters," who are 17, 15 and 11.

Miller, a D.C. native, moved to Prince George's County but then came back to Mayfair Mansions, a rough place in far Northeast where crews have fought over drugs, turf and girls for more than 20 years. "I hear teachers saying, 'Don't hug the kids,' but that's what they need. They're not getting hugs at home, so maybe I can make a difference by living here, by being there constantly for them."

At 10:30 the next morning, a spanking new white Cadillac with Maryland tags rolls up to Coolidge High's back entrance. Four guys pop out and saunter toward the door. The guard turns them away: "Too late."

"If the truancy find me, they're going to lock me up," one boy protests.

Miller knows the driver, a Ballou High student who has no intention of attending his own school this day. She sidles up to the car, smiling all the way, chats him up about his mother, his sister, his crew -- she knows the whole roster. And she knows the driver is up to no good.

Can she get him to go to school? Probably not. Can she stop him from dealing drugs, which she knows he does? Unlikely. Can she get him to keep his beefs out of school buildings? She can and does.

Two girls hanging outside H.D. Woodson High School in far Northeast see Brooks and Alston coming and turn away. "I don't deal with no PO-lice," one girl says. "You the PO-lice."

"Don't call me that," Brooks replies.

"You undercover," the girl parries.

"I don't snitch," Brooks says. "You check me out."

And before the girls can get away, he starts calling out the names of their big brothers, their neighborhood, their mothers. The girls stop in their tracks and turn toward Brooks. PO-lice? Nah, Brooks is their friend.

Brooks and the task force walk a fine line between the confidentiality they offer crew members and the cooperation they offer the D.C. police. Brooks meets weekly with police brass and has even given police the names of suspects in high-profile murder cases -- but only after he gets permission from crew members to fork over the names.

Police and principals alike turn to the task force for intelligence on the weekend's events -- who confronted whom at which club, which feuds got hot enough that they might leach over into school come Monday morning.

Brooks and his colleagues also provide police with glossaries of street slang -- "Agent Scully" = "oral sex," "getting my cake" = "dating my girl," "chedda" = "money." (A version of that list, along with a catalogue of the city's crews, is in a book that Brooks and Miller wrote, "Shadows Behind the U.S. Capital.") Like the crews themselves, the city's lingo has tight, distinct borders. While kids in Northwest refer to police as "one-time," Northeast teenagers call them "bo-deen" or "hot dog," and in Southeast they're "po-pos" or good old "feds."

D.C. police have a wary, if respectful, attitude toward the task force: "They know a lot, they hear a lot, and they can be very helpful to us, but they don't always choose to tell us what they know," says a detective who has worked with the task force.

"I call these guys the school system's CIA," says Richard Jackson, principal at Coolidge High in Northeast. "Because while the grown folks are making a decision, these guys are out there stopping something from happening. If I say to them, 'Trinidad is going up against 21st Street -- we're going to have a posse here ready to do war,' they are on it. They have relationships. If I say that to the higher-ups, they're as confused as ever. There's an unwritten code in the system that everything's fine. Well, everything's not fine. Because everything that's wrong with society comes into the school."

Principals citywide are eager for more tools beyond the weak system of student suspensions. Jackson suspended for 25 days a boy who had been a leader in a gang fight at the school, but the boy returned almost immediately with a lawyer. Within five days, he had won the right to return to classes. "That sends the message that I can upset this school and there are no repercussions," Jackson says. "That quietly says to every child, I don't have to control myself."

At Ballou High School in the Congress Heights neighborhood of Southeast, school psychologist Karen Donaldson says the task force has helped "some of the hardest, toughest guys in the city" break away from the violence that killed eight Ballou students last year.

"The students were so devastated last year," Donaldson says. "We did a lot of grief counseling." Crews from the Barry Farms and Condon Terrace neighborhoods remain active, but teens "were constantly getting kicked out of school and they were sick of it, sick of being blamed. These kids don't want to fight. They're tired of it. They'll talk to the task force; they'll open up to them."

Some of the task force's prevention efforts are one-on-one conversations in a schoolyard at midnight, at an apartment on neutral turf. Some are formal mediations in which members of two crews are put in a room with the task force, sometimes for most of a day, with no parents, no teachers, no police. The squash can be loud, the language slashing, but in virtually every case, the crews end up in hugs and the beef is no more.

When Principal Mildred Musgrove first came to Anacostia High in 1997, "we had daily fun," she says. "We could name 19 crews operating at the school at that time. At first, I thought, 'Oh, come on, 19 crews?! This task force must just be trying to justify its existence.' But then I saw them in action; we're talking full-blown organizations with generations of history. To see them so young and so massed! I came from a cute little elementary school, and here you are in your heels and stockings, with your little degree on the wall, and then you see such toughness. I'm not saying they're not still here, but they understand now that this is a school."

After Brooks and his officers held weekly mediations at Anacostia -- chaotic exchanges featuring profuse profanity, especially among the girls -- many of the worst offenders calmed considerably.

Those who didn't met Musgrove's ultimate sanction. "I forgive what happens before the mediation, but after that, I exercise Chapter 25 [of the system's disciplinary code]. I walk them to the door, I give them a hug and a kiss and I say, 'My love is not working for you,' and their educational careers are redirected." Ousted students go to alternative schools, the Job Corps or a GED program.

Alston catches a boy smoking marijuana behind Coolidge. "What you doing, man?" Alston says. "I'm going to call your father."

"How you going to call my father?" the boy replies. "He smoke weed, too."

Alston could make a lot more money doing something other than hanging out with teenagers in school hallways. But he's chosen the task force because he sees himself in too many of the kids he talks to. "I was a big guy in junior high school, and I would fight a guy without knowing what the fight was about," he says. "In my household, my father would sniff cocaine at the dinner table. But I decided I would always be different from my father. I don't drink or do drugs because I don't want my kids to look at me the way I looked at him."