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www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2009/09068<http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2009/09068

>Disarming teens' gun violence

Churches, communities have key role in overcoming juvenile
crime, pastor and chaplain tell ACSWP

>by Jerry L. Van Marter
>Presbyterian News Service

BERKELEY, CA ― For George Cummings and Charles Tinsley, the
escalating plague of violence in urban America is way too
personal.

Last summer, a 20-year-old woman member of Cummings' United
Community Church in Oakland was killed when her boyfriend's
car was strafed by automatic weapons fire. The boyfriend,
the target of the reprisal shooting, survived.

"Everyone knows who pulled the trigger," Cummings told the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s Advisory Committee on Social
Witness Policy (ACSWP) during a two-hour conversation on
the topic of urban violence Jan. 23 here, "but there still
have been no arrests because you need evidence and,
especially, witnesses and no one will come forward."

Tinsley, a Presbyterian minister who for 30 years has
served as a chaplain in the juvenile justice system in
neighboring Contra Costa County, lamented that though he's
steered more than 200 juvenile offenders into college, "a
lot more of my kids have wound up murdered."

The ACSWP is collecting background information as it
develops study resources on gun violence in the U.S. It got
an earful from Cummings and Tinsley.

Cummings, a leader in the broad church-based Oakland
Community Organizations (OCO) said his group is pushing a
"four-legged" model to addressing violence in Oakland:
prevention, intervention, enforcement and sustainability.
He noted that a similar program in Boston reduced youth
homicides by 75 percent.

"Here in Oakland, and in other places," Cummings said, "the
only approach to increasing violence has been to increase
the police presence on the street. But simply locking
people up is not the comprehensive solution we seek."

Cummings told the committee that three factors drive urban
violence ― which in Oakland as in most other major urban
areas in the U.S. is perpetrated disproportionately by
young black me ― the pervasive cultural propensity to solve
problems by resorting to violence, media-driven models and
images glamorizing violence, and, most importantly, poverty.

"Who can live on McDonald's wages?" Cummings said, "and why
would they when they can make more in two hours selling
drugs than in a week at McDonalds."

Tinsley said that violence comes all too naturally to too
many young people. "Many of these kids come from situations
where they were subjected to violence before they were even
born due to the addictions of their mothers," he said.
"They were assaulted at birth. They were hurt first, before
they ever thought about hurting someone else."

Most kids he sees in the juvenile justice system don't have
a father in their lives and some have no mother present
either, Tinsley said. "These kids were literally raised by
the streets and the institutions they got thrown into, so
their perspective on the world is based on those values.

"My goal," he said, "is to extricate them from those
systems."

Cummings' goal is even more immediate than that ― to
strengthen communities, particularly schools, so that kids
don't get caught up in the juvenile justice system in the
first place. "You see, once they enter juvenile justice
system it's all over," he said. "If they can't read by
fourth grade, they're going to somehow wind up in 'juvie'
and once they're in juvie, statistics show they WILL be in
jail [as adults]."

Cummings said community policing ― collaboration between
police and community individuals and organizations ― is the
key to successful prevention and intervention. "Violence
affects so many people's lives that only by mobilizing the
many can we bring down the few," he said, noting that
"contrary to media hype violence is perpetrated by very few
individuals."

Those who actually pull the trigger are very few in number,
Cummings explained, "and everyone in the neighborhood knows
who they are. The trick is to get the leaders, the
'shot-callers,' because they are the ones who perpetuate
the violence after the shooters get busted. Those who are
easily influenced desperately need alternative influences."

Tinsley said "the most important role I've played is
surrogate parent ― sowing seeds that we hope will break the
chain that's gone from one generation to the next." Like
all kids, he continued, the ones he serves have potential,
"but they haven't had the guidance, support and training
any kid needs to be successful."

After-care for released juveniles is a critical component
of ministry, Tinsley said, and the place where churches can
play a critical role in their communities. "It takes an
awful lot of pastoral care to take care of this population,
with all the excess baggage," he said.

It takes a lot of time as well, he added. "You have to
build up trust because these kids have been 'faked on' so
much all their lives. Inside we can try to persuade them
'use time' rather than 'do time.'" That takes the form of
GED preparation and other educational and job-training
programs.

"If we had 500 men of faith serving as surrogate parents
when these kids get out," Tinsley said, "it would save us
the $33 million we just spent on that new facility for
juvenile offenders in our county."

Unfortunately, he said, "When the church talks about
'youth' it doesn't mean those youth. We have become so
frightened of our young people that they are out there by
themselves in too many instances."

Reversing the violent trends in urban areas will also take
more effort by governments and other public institutions,
Cummings said. "The problem of street violence won't be
comprehensively addressed until we learn in our society to
redistribute the wealth to benefit more of our citizens,"
he said. "It's not rocket science ― the more money we spend
on the military and on prisons, the less we have to spend
on schools and if we don't have the resources to address
these issues, we'll see increasing violence."

Tinsley agreed. "The prison industry in this country is a
$50 billion a year business," he said. "We have to put some
of those resources out on the street so we can fix some of
these kids before they're vectored into a life in prison.

"These are God's kids," he said, "and we've got to take
some responsibility to address their needs."

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