Gang shootings Sagas by the Strip

Churches across the country are trying to broker Thanksgiving ceasefires

Churches across the country are trying to broker Thanksgiving ceasefires

MODERN police work in America often resembles science fiction as much as a film noir. Mapping software guides police to neighbourhoods suffering from spikes in crime. Grizzled detectives are urged to follow data rather than their gut instincts, and—in some city districts plagued by gun crime—to focus efforts on small groups of individuals (often young men), who turn out to be linked to a startling proportion of shootings. The scientific approach has shown results: from 1994 to 2014 national murder rates fell by half.

In the past year or two, however, some big cities have seen violent crime rates tick back up. As police and community leaders try to contain this trend, some of the toughest urban areas in the country are placing a bet on a technique that could hardly be lower-tech. Put simply, the new approach involves asking criminals not to shoot one another, notably in the first 12 to 72 hours after one of their peers has been attacked and cries for revenge are loudest.

In such cities as Las Vegas—a sprawling, transient place that draws gamblers of all sorts—the technique seems to work best when ceasefire requests comes from religious leaders. Brian Medina—an 18-year-old whose choirboy looks belie a youth full of fights, street gangs and trouble with the law—was shot eight times in May by a car-full of unknown attackers, as he pushed his bicycle up a hill near his home. Following a protocol that has been rolled out across Las Vegas in the past few years, those alerted to the shooting included not just the police and Mr Medina’s family but a local clergyman, Pastor Troy Martinez of the East Vegas Christian Centre.

The drill is familiar to Mr Martinez, one of a corps of ministers who stand ready for an “activation” by city police commanders or hospitals. He is used to finding shooting victims surrounded by angry family and friends—who often display the clothes and tattoos that signal gang membership. Those shot are “full of tubes and blood, and it smells, and the emotions are off the charts,” explains the pastor.

Mr Medina himself admits to high emotions as he awoke in hospital. He felt “really angry” at being attacked when he was a relative beginner in gang life, compared with his “homies” who had done far more. His assailants were unknown, but gang comrades were undeterred: they told the wounded Mr Medina that their plan was to take revenge on “anybody that we had a problem with”. Then Mr Martinez arrived, asking the young victim whether he really wanted someone else harmed on his behalf—especially when that might drag in Mr Medina’s 16-year-old brother, who until then had not been involved gang life.

“I didn’t expect no pastor,” says the 18-year-old, shyly fidgeting with a baseball cap while recalling that first meeting in hospital. Nor did he expect a pastor like Mr Martinez, a burly 54-year-old with a walrus moustache, who as a young man was—by his own account—an exceptionally brutal gang member in Los Angeles. Mr Martinez was first jailed at the age of 15, before advancing to the ranks of a “shot caller”, a term for those who control foot soldiers on the streets. Mr Medina is now planning a career in air-conditioning, his father’s trade. He is honest about the temptations that still surround him: many local youngsters admire his bullet scars, or “warrior wounds”, he concedes, and some “can’t wait to hit jail, to be the most they can be”.

It will take more than a few tough ministers to transform Las Vegas, which is home to an estimated 20,000 gang members. Its police district covers 1.8m residents, and by October 13th had seen 100 murders this year (compared with 103 by the same date in 2014). But moving to stop cycles of revenge is a start, says Mr Martinez. In June his church and others in the city worked on a week-long ceasefire, or “Season of Peace”, dreamed up by Rebuilding Every Community Around Peace (RECAP), a national organisation founded by a Boston-based minister, the Rev Jeffrey Brown. Mr Martinez took his ceasefire call to some 70 violent criminals inside Clark County Detention Centre, a prison not far from the casinos and bars of the Strip. He was joined by a second evangelical pastor, Jon Ponder, who underwent his own conversion while jailed in Pennsylvania for robbing banks. Both men worked with local police chiefs on “peace walks” in dangerous neighbourhoods and meetings aimed at improving relations with the police.

A longer ceasefire is now planned between Thanksgiving and December 31st, in cities from Salinas and Oakland in California to Baltimore and Boston on the east coast. The aim is twofold, says Mr Brown, RECAP’s founder. When churches can make ceasefires hold, even partially, they gain credibility with police chiefs and the public. Asking local criminals to stop shooting each other also buys time for them to pause, says the Boston-based minister. Often street gangs that live side by side are locked in a revenge cycle but “can’t see how it started”.

Tom Roberts, deputy chief of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, is sure that lives have already been saved since police commanders began working closely with local churches to halt revenge killings. More murders are cleared up today, after years of “deplorably low” detection rates caused by intense mistrust between residents and police. Mr Roberts hopes that the coming “Season of Peace” will convince some old-school officers of the value of crime prevention, admitting that it is a struggle to change policing. Las Vegas, a city built on sin, will never be violence-free. But this Thanksgiving it will try a seemingly fantastical idea—asking its most dangerous residents to stop killing each other.

Correction: This piece originally misnamed the organisation Rebuilding Every Community Around Peace as Rebuilding Every City Around Peace.