Manual offers ways to fight urban violence

Young men shoot and kill each other by the scores in our region each year, and most of us assume there's not much that society can do to stop it.

It isn't true. Police, social workers and academic researchers have identified tools and policies that have been shown to reduce urban violence, such as brokering truces among rival gangs or other neighborhood groups.

Now the Alliance of Concerned Men, a District nonprofit group with a proven record of achieving peace for a while in some of the Washington area's most dangerous neighborhoods, has published a training manual to share some of its methods with the rest of the country.

The alliance's approach is refreshing, because it supplies practical advice from people with real-life experience. The members are men who've gone unarmed to meet killers with Uzis to ask them to "squash a beef" with rivals.

The group, which has negotiated five major truces in the District and Prince George's County since it was founded in 1991, presented its 41-page guide Tuesday at a conference at the U.S. Capitol attended by 300 social workers and others active in the field.

I hope the alliance's effort will help, at least in a small way, to reverse the apathy and neglect with which the Washington region and the country treat urban violence. The U.S. murder rate dwarfs that of most other industrialized countries: Homicides claimed three times as many lives last year as total combat deaths since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

The guide offers tips such as barring cellphones from meetings so participants won't worry that calls are being made to arrange an ambush. It says that it's important when picking a mediator to weigh whether to send a young man, who might be perceived as a threat, or an older one, whose presence might be "a negative trigger, a reminder of a lost or abusive father."

The alliance recommends using prayer, food, trips to the movies and, believe it or not, hugs as a way to create the right atmosphere. "Hug a thug, and you might not get mugged" is one of the group's numerous sayings. Others are "just show up" and "the sun's always shining."

Above all, the training guide emphasizes the need to believe that the tough young men would like to solve their problems themselves and need a credible outsider to assure them that it's possible.

"We tell our youth the truth: 'You're Black, you're angry, you don't have any education, and I'm here to tell you that if you want to do it, you can,' " the manual says. (Since the alliance leaders are more hands-on than academic, it was written for them by three locally based staff members of groups that specialize in conflict resolution.)

The approach sounds awfully upbeat and kumbayah, but the men in the alliance have some hard-earned credibility. Executive Director Tyrone C. Parker, 62, served more than eight years in prison for bank robbery, and his son was killed at age 19 by another teenager. President Arthur "Rico" Rush, 62, was imprisoned for 18 months, and some of the group's young outreach staff members are also ex-offenders.

Admittedly, the scale of the problem overwhelms their work. It will take improved performance by police, parents, schools, social agencies, churches and other institutions to transform communities and drastically reduce the number of homicides. There have been 123 homicides in the District this year, compared with 164 at this time last year.

Nevertheless, the alliance draws praise and backing from law enforcement officials up to U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. "I've seen the miracle they've brought," Holder said in a statement published in the manual. "It needs to be duplicated. It can work in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and any other community in America with similar problems."

D.C. police officers are supporters, too, partly because the alliance cooperates with them, albeit carefully. The manual says a balance is necessary "to counter the perceptions that our outreach workers are 'snitches.' Conversely, outreach workers can mistakenly be viewed by law enforcement as being in collusion with criminal elements."

D.C. police Cmdr. Charnette Robinson, head of the Youth Investigations Division, said in a panel discussion at the conference Tuesday that the District should implement more of the policies and procedures recommended by the alliance and similar groups. The city "has a reputation of throwing a lot of money" at problems, Robinson said, but "unless you have good policies and procedures in place, it doesn't help."

Money needs to be part of the effort, though. The alliance has had to reduce its budget, to about $500,000 for the coming year, after suffering cuts by the D.C. government and private funding sources. It's charging $25 for the manual, and some of the proceeds will offset those cuts.

The alliance is probably past its prime, as it was formed by Parker, Rush and three other men who were friends at Eastern and Spingarn high schools in the mid-1960s. Its greatest triumph occurred a dozen years ago, when it negotiated a truce in Benning Terrace in Southeast after a 12-year-old boy was slain.

It's still active, though, and has worked recently in the Benning Terrace, Clay Terrace and Park Morton neighborhoods and with crews based near Seventh and O and Fifth and O streets NW.

Moreover, it's to the credit of these graying members of the community that they've acted to help ensure that others can benefit from their experience. The sun's shining a little brighter in the District because they "just showed up."

Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this article.

I discuss local issues at 8:51 a.m. Friday on WAMU (88.5 FM). E-mail me at mccartneyr@washpost.com.