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February 28, 2005
ROCHESTER JOURNAL

Breaking the Gangs Down, a Merciless Step at a Time
By MICHELLE YORK

OCHESTER

Paul McFadden was only 11 when he joined a gang.

At first, he thought of it as a brotherhood, a haven from his chaotic, impoverished home on the city's West Side. "I just wanted to belong," he said.

But involvement with a gang eventually led Mr. McFadden, now 32, to spend nearly a decade in prison on charges of arson and gun possession.

For years, gangs have been a deep-seated problem in Rochester, fueling much of the city's drug trade and violence and accounting for many of the city's murders, according to the police. In 7 of the last 10 years, Rochester has had the highest homicide rate per capita of any community in the state.

Now, after trying other strategies to stem the violence, city and law enforcement officials are making a dent in the homicide rate with the help of a criminologist who has developed a plan focused on gang-related violence that has succeeded elsewhere in the country.

"Gangs to almost anybody means L.A. and Chicago, colors, turfs," said the criminologist, David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, who has helped cities like Boston, Minneapolis and Indianapolis combat gangs. "Rochester doesn't have those types of gangs. They have small, leaderless, shifting groups." Together, he said, the groups account for 60 to 80 percent of the city's homicides.

Professor Kennedy began working with Rochester officials in 2003, and he, in turn, enlisted the aid of John Klofas, a criminologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who has studied the local homicide problem for years.

First, they helped law enforcement organize a gang meeting, of sorts. That October, officials in the city told all known gang members to attend a meeting in a courtroom in the city's Hall of Justice as a condition of their probation or parole. At the meeting, law enforcement officials delivered a clear warning.

"We told them, 'If anybody in your group kills somebody, we're going to go after everybody,' " said Professor Kennedy, who was at the meeting.

Going after all the members might involve existing warrants or undercover drug buys, the professor said. "It's like going after Al Capone for tax evasion," he said.

County prosecutors promised to do away with offers of plea bargains. "We took a look at the cold, hard statistics," said Mike Green, the district attorney for Monroe County, which includes Rochester. "This is a strain on resources, but we need to do the extra work."

Criminal court judges were asked not to grant leniency in cases involving gang members. "You can't get people to cooperate if they're just going to face a slap on the wrists," said William A. Johnson Jr., the mayor of Rochester.

Professor Kennedy said the antigang plan, called Operation Ceasefire, was a more focused tactic than New York City's successful and broader crime-fighting approach. And Rochester's effort does not address the underlying causes of violence, like the breakdown of families, poverty, poor education and scarcity of jobs. "Social issues are not being addressed, and they need to be," said a skeptic about the plan, Sister Grace Miller, who runs a homeless shelter in a blighted city neighborhood.

Still, it has produced some success, officials said. The number of homicides in the city last year was 38, compared with 57 the previous year. So far in 2005, there have been six homicides.

The police were able to dismantle four of the more violent gangs - the Thurston Zoo, Dipset, Trust Street Crew and Murder Unit - after about 50 members were arrested on a variety of charges, Professor Klofas said.

This year, the city hopes to push the homicide rate down even further. Eventually, the police would like to use their antigang strategy to go after residences where drugs are sold and public places that have become open-air drug markets. "What we've seen in the last year is just a start," said the Rochester police chief, Robert J. Duffy.

Mayor Johnson said combating Rochester's reputation for violence was critical to the city's efforts to promote itself as a tourist destination. "We have to disabuse people of the notion that Rochester is the crime capital," the mayor said.

One of the people present at the meeting between law enforcement officials and known gang members was Mr. McFadden. "I knew they were serious," he said. "It was frustrating because I was already looking for a way out."

He had been paroled into a homeless shelter, lost custody of his three children and been denied even the most menial of jobs.

The police told him about Pathways to Peace, a small city-run program intended to help gang members steer away from violence.

Keenan Allen, the director of the program, grew up in East Harlem in the 1980's, when fistfights had been replaced by gunfights. "I escaped death a couple of times myself," he said.

He saw an earnestness in Mr. McFadden and guided him through a job-training program for asbestos removal. Mr. McFadden later earned a supervisor's license and got a job that paid $10 an hour. "I'm providing for my children again, and that gave me the trust back from my family," he said.

One of his three children - his son, Prince - now lives with him four days a week. "He's 11, the age when I started with gang activity," said Mr. McFadden. "I hope to help him make smart decisions."

Printed by the New York Times, 2005.
©Copyright the Rochester Journal, 2005.