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CLEVELAND PEACEMAKERS ON THE COVID-ERA RISE IN GUN VIOLENCE AS CITY NEARS ANOTHER HOMICIDE RECORD
CARLOS WILLIAMS WILL
always remember three bullets. The first one entered his hip on June 3, 1992, landing him in the E.R. on his 18th birthday. The second was 28 years later, on the eve of his 46th birthday, which hit Williams while he retrieved his mail at home in Garfield Heights, Ohio—a supposed stray shot. The third one, in June of 2015, took the life of his 16-year-old son Michael.
“That’s the one that hurt the most,” he says.
Williams, 48, is a veteran violence interrupter with the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance, a nonprofit violence prevention program born in 2009 to combat the city’s rising homicides, specifically among Black male teens. Localizing a community involvement philosophy rooted in anti-gun advocate Aquil Basheer’s ‘Peace In The Hood,’ Peacemakers’ 16 case managers, staff and outreach workers like Williams spend as many as seven days a week attempting to stymie the city’s staggering homicide rates. The Covid pandemic has made this nearly impossible: Cleveland’s murder count is set to reach its highest rate since 1972 (when there were 333 killed) at a time when the Peacemakers are at their lowest staffing level: A decade ago, two dozen Peacemakers interrupters patrolled the city’s 72 square miles; today, when there’s nearly 10 shootings per week, they only have six.
Cleveland’s not alone. Columbus, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—pretty much every major American city—all surpassed 2019’s homicide rate numbers in 2020, and are set to do it again in 2021. Spikes are so bad in some cities that activists are pushing for emergency orders. Public safety has become the No. 1 issue for many Cleveland mayoral candidates. On June 15, a week before 11 people were shot in a single day in Cleveland, 28 U.S. mayors wrote to President Biden in a plea for a multifaceted approach to get illegal guns off the streets. A week later, Biden echoed the alarm: $350 million of American Rescue Plan funds, he said, would be given to cities to hire back desensitized police officers and refund violence interrupters, “to help resolve these issues before they escalate into crime.”
But interrupters face a murder epidemic that may not be solved by “positive” loitering, participant house calls or after school visits. Myesha Crowe, the Peacemakers’ executive director, believes that a mixture of Zoom schooling, stimulus check spending, high-stakes unemployment and social media overuse has amplified conflict in low-income Black neighborhoods. Conflicts, essentially, they can’t reach.
“It goes right from social media to the blocks,” she said. “It’s cliques that say, ‘Oh you said this on Facebook, so when I see you in the streets, you’re gonna get shot.’”
For Williams, the current national 16 percent rise in firearm homicides isn’t an excuse to brandish fear. The son of a G&L steelman originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Williams escaped the gang life of his teen years after a string of breaking and entering offenses. His youth was a sort of contradiction: “I was a church boy on Sunday, a gangster on Monday,” he says. In 2010, he was hired by the Peacemakers in his mid-thirties, a decade his teenage self never thought he’d live to see. With his shaved head, wide aviators, silver earrings, and graying beard, Williams has the grizzled veteran of Cleveland down to a T. “You have to keep one foot in the street, and one foot in your work,” Williams says. “That’s how I keep kids listening. It’s not, ‘OK man, you been through, get out the way.’ I need some leeway to get to them—or they don’t listen.”
But the Catch-22 has tested both Crowe’s leadership and the outreach workers like Williams she’s attempting to run on a shoestring budget, compared to a decade ago: How can we get through to kids, and their guns, when we can’t even get to them in the first place?
Ibe Cobbs and Tasha Miles were doing usual outreach rounds in
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June, hanging up fliers at an American Food Mart on West 80th and Detroit Ave. when they heard a man shouting. Cobbs, a two-year veteran of the Peacemakers and single mother of two, was showing Miles the ropes. Both had sons at home that were always at the forefront in their minds.
“My son cried to me the other day. ‘You work so much, all you do is work. And when you come home, you’re tired,’” Cobbs says, sitting on a leather couch inside the locked-in lobby of the Peacemakers’ headquarters on Broadway Avenue. “And I tell him, I’m not physically tired, I’m mentally tired.”
At the American Food Mart on Detroit Ave., the two women launched into protocol. They confronted the shouting man who was resisting orders to calm down by Cleveland Police already on the scene. “We were letting him know that we’re not trying to arrest him,” Miles recalled. But the man, who was complaining about the arrest of his girlfriend, wouldn’t stop hollering, Cobbs says, and his unrestrained escalation worried her: Did he have a firearm? Would he be willing to use it? And most importantly, Why did it seem that they were more effective than the police?
Fortunately, their training, which has thumbs-up approval from Aquil Basheer himself, proved to be a boon during the CPD’s own year of difficulty. (Cleveland.com reported that detectives had only solved 42 percent of homicides in 2020.)
“They do their business, and we do ours,” Cobbs says. “Our goal is to not have anyone go to jail.”
“Or get shot,” Miles says.
Still, fewer patrol officers and Peacemakers on the streets signals the possibility of immunity for criminals. “They know that certain crimes, they’re not going to get punished for. They’re going to get a slap on the wrist,” Cobbs says, smacking her open forearm. “I feel as though they kinda work the system.”
For Myron Phillips, a violence interrupter since 2016, the concern about growing gun ownership among Facebook cliques is a pendulum swing between Gen Z masculinity and social media stiffarming. (The latter, he says, “is a brain of its own, we can’t stop it.”) The social isolation and low school attendance of 2020, to him, was a ticking bomb for boys tempted by the precarious purpose of ganghood. As he made his rounds checking backpacks or backseats in the past 15 months, Phillips noticed a more intense need for high schoolers or twenty-somethings to out-do others in the realm of firepower. The result is a mutually-assured arming: If he’s strapped, I have to be strapped, too. “Man, I’ve seen AK-47s, I’ve seen AR-15s, I’ve seen .40 cals with 30-round clips on it,” he says. “They got them to have them. All because they saying they got beef, that a lot of blood’s been shed.”
Formerly-incarcerated like Williams, Phillips had a similar come-to-Jesus moment in recent years. He made the mistake early on in his Peacemakers career of “wearing his heart on his sleeve,” allowing himself to get too emotionally protective of teens he mentored, what the Peacemakers call “participants.” (Today, they have about 85 open cases, sourced mostly from juvenile or adult court.) In July of 2019, Phillips began mentoring a 16-year-old named Ta’Zhon Greenwood, a baseball and basketball wiz who’d been placed on the Glenville Recreation Center’s banned list after he was caught showing off a handgun to a friend. Phillips was unflappable; he told Glenville Rec employees if he turned Greenwood around, they should allow him to use the facilities. “They said, ‘You have six months.’ I said okay.”
Phillips went through the usual Y.M.C.A.-like protocol of Peacemaker outreach: He led Ta’Zhon through deescalation training and even driver’s ed after Greenwood had been taunted by newly formed neighborhood gang, and had been sent to live with his mom Janetta Burkes and brother Ta’Vhon. “I’d take him home with me, introduce him to my wife, my two-year-old daughter, and show him my jail pictures,” Phillips says. “Show him what life could be.” After a year-and-a-half, Phillips’ mentorship proved worthwhile: Not only did Greenwood’s GPA at the Ginn Academy rise to a 4.5, but he had been accepted into a two-year internship at Lincoln Electric, and had been promised a full-time job after his graduation, despite the test of the pandemic’s virtual obstacles.
On June 2, 2020, a week before his graduation from Ginn, Greenwood attended a party near East 108th and Elk Ave., a neighborhood his father, Erby Greenwood, said he never permitted Ta’Zhon to go. His curfew was 10 o’clock, Erby said, and Ta’Zhon, being the reformed academic, was used to sticking to it. Instead, at 11:07 that night, Greenwood was found by two Cleveland Police officers unresponsive on the pavement, with three gunshot wounds in his chest and arms. EMS tried to resuscitate him, but to no luck. Twenty-five minutes after officers found him, Greenwood was pronounced dead from an “aggravated murder.” He was one week shy of graduating.
Erby, who immediately offered a $8,000 reward for his son’s killer, believes his son’s death is undeniably resemblant of the times. In the past 13 months, he has not received any responses to his reward, nor any leads “or any suitable reply” from Det. Raymond Diaz, the homicide detective assigned to Greenwood’s case. “I get that they’re busy,” he told me, “but at least tell me something.” Though he commends Phillips for his invaluable mentorship through trying times, he’s still uncertain as to what exactly could have prevented his son’s needless death.
“Was it over money? Drugs? A girl?” Erby speculates. “Yet, it doesn’t matter: I don’t blame the pandemic, I blame whoever killed my son.”
Soon after his 48th birthday, Williams invited me to ride along with him on a weekday drive, a four-hour trip around purported high crime areas of Cleveland, what he calls the heat, as in “wherever we go is the heat.” As we drive down Imperial Ave., near the site of the infamous murders of Anthony Sowell that’s now been turned into greenspace, Williams opens up about the challenges of Covid violence interruption. He stopped watching the news because it’s too depressing; he’s logged about 106,000 miles on his Chevy Equinox, which bumper jumps in disrepair every time he hits a bump in the road.
As we enter Luke Easter Park at East 110th and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, Williams relays the story of his son Michael’s murder. It was 2015, and he’d saved enough money to relocate from his home on Imperial Ave. to the safer Garfield Heights, wanting “to be in a neighborhood where there wasn’t shooting all night long.” After all, he had seven kids, and wanted to provide them some more semblance of safety than he had growing up. Regardless, a bullet from a drive-by shooting found its way to Michael. Although Carlos is still hesitant to talk about it, I ask him how he’s handling the anniversary of his son’s death. He keeps his eyes on the road, and says, “You know how they say crying is taking the clothes to the laundromat? Well, I took out the laundry last night.”
As we drive through Luke Easter, which is lime-green and spacious as any park in Cleveland, Williams points out the usual spots he pulls up on to say hello to loitering teens, hand out business cards, or catch up with friends barbecuing. For a moment or two, the distraught reality of the pandemic-type gun spike melts away to the picture of a clean summer day in the Midwest. I ask Williams if he’s ever scared, pulling up on unsuspecting teenagers, and he says, “All the time.”
“Even in the park?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?” I say, and ask how many of the park goers around us are carrying.
“About 80 percent,” he says, driving past a baseball diamond. After a moment of silence, Williams explains:
“It’s cause they scared,” he says. “No one knows who is strapped and who is not.”
— Mark Oprea
DIGIT WIDGET
100,000
Tickets sold so far for the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit that debuts in Cleveland on Sept. 22.
$3,596
Amount of bounced checks passed by the Bishop Sycamore “administration” for the football team’s hotel rooms in Canton for the game on ESPN that put the “school” in the national spotlight and prodded Gov. DeWine to call for an investigation.
371,000,000
Polyester-tipped swabs U.S. Cotton, which operates in Bellaire-Puritas, will be making come May next year as it ramps up production to meet demand for at-home Covid-19 testing kits.
9/1
Date by which the Ohio Redistricting Commission was supposed to present to the public its planned redistricting map. It failed to meet the deadline.
Basheer Jones Receives First Dose of Covid Vaccine, Dennis Kucinich Cites Underlying Medical Condition for Not Receiving His
Basheer Jones, one of two Cleveland mayoral candidates who as of last week hadn’t received the Covid vaccine, has now gotten his first dose.
“I chose to get vaccinated after careful consideration and conversation with my family and health care provider,” Jones said in a statement days after his unvaccinated status became a citywide headline. “The risk-benefit balance led to my decision to get vaccinated. As I’ve said, it’s a choice every person should make on their own that should not be rushed.”
Jones initially told WEWS that he hadn’t gotten the vaccine because, “I want to make sure that my elders get it, want to make sure that my children get it. I want to make sure the people of my community had access to it. So it wasn’t something that I wanted to rush and make sure of.”
There is an abundant surplus of vaccines.
Dennis Kucinich wouldn’t answer whether he was vaccinated when initially asked by WEWS, but in a letter dated Aug. 2 that Kucinich released last week, his physician said that Kucinich has an underlying medical condition “which requires prudent consideration of any potential therapeutic intervention.”
Only about 36% of Cleveland residents have been vaccinated. -- Vince Grzegorek
Local Officials, Candidates and Organizations Join in Calling for Cleveland Municipal Bank Exploratory Committee
A host of sitting elected officials, candidates for mayor and city council, and local organizations have voiced their support for forming a municpal bank exploratory committee in Cleveland.
They include Cleveland city councilmen Charles Slife, Mike Polensek, Joe Jones and Anthony Brancatelli; Cleveland city council candidates Kate Warren, Rebecca Mauer, Aisia Jones and Ayat Amin; mayoral candidates Ross DiBello and Dennis Kucinich; and local groups such as Black Lives Matter Cleveland, Global Cleveland, the Chandra Law Firm and ThirdSpace.
“We are in a unique economic climate right now, with the pandemic still wreaking havoc and significant federal funding on its way to cities around the country,” says Geeta Minocha, who wrote the open letter and sought the commitments of the people and groups who have signed onto the call for action. “It presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how we engage with our institutions. Public banks offer communities a means of making the most of community dollars: A government depository for taxpayer money makes financing for public projects — infrastructure, transit, education, etc. — cheaper. Moreover, scaled partnerships with regional institutions can bank the unbanked.”
The letter calls for a committe of nine members from the public and private sectors representing a diverse group of perspectives and experiences in what would be a local effort similar to exploratory committees in other cities. The Cleveland committee, as its imagined, would advise the mayor and city council on the creation of a public bank.
“I wanted a broad coalition of support for the exploratory committee, because the notion of a new institution can understandably be very scary to some,” Michocha tells Scene. “So it was important to me that trusted community groups and more moderate elected officials signed on before the expected progressives. Moreover, a big misconception around public banks is that they would crowd out small and medium-sized private banks. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as public banks would expand the loan portfolios of these private banks. But it’s an intuitive assumption, so I want to combat that by onboarding as many financial institutions as I can. I currently have one, a hedge fund called Steelyard Capital, and am hoping this gives
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me more credibility as I try to meet with other financial institutions. But overall, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the traction behind this committee, and public banking in general. It’s clear that people have been viscerally feeling the gaps in our existing systems and institutions and are ready to try something new.
She’s been a longtime advocate for public banking, but realizes that while the push in this moment might not make it happen, there are still positive outcomes to be had in bringing together a diverse group to talk about what problems and barriers exist in the community.
“It might be that, when all is said and done, the numbers from the exploratory committee don’t support creating a public bank in Cleveland,” she says. “So one of the major goals of this committee would be understanding how that existing infrastructure can be made more efficient in order to meet the community’s needs, with or without a public bank.”
— Vince Grzegorek
Hysterical Edgewater Residents Kill Metroparks Plan to Widen Sidewalk on Lake Ave.
While public opposition failed to stop Sherwin-Williams’ plans to build two skywalks at its new downtown headquarters, public opposition had a different outcome last week, though the end result of torpedoing public access and pedestrian safety was the same.
In a joint letter, the city of Cleveland, the Metroparks and Cuyahoga County announced that the proposed plan to rehabilitate a crumbling, narrow sidewalk on Lake Ave. in the Edgewater neighborhood into a 10-foot-path has been shelved.
The collaborative project led by the Metroparks would have built a widened path, suitable for the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, on cityowned parts of the properties to serve as a connector from Edgewater to Lake Ave. on Lakewood’s side of West 117th, which has dedicated bike paths on both sides of the road.
Vociferous, hysterical outcry by residents on the north side of Lake Ave., a cloistered and powerful bunch of NIMBY residents, killed the project.
What were their objections?
From Cleveland.com’s Steve Litt earlier this year:
“But the Metroparks proposal, a great idea triggered by a city rehab of Lake Avenue that could start this summer, has stirred debate among residents in the well-to-do West Side neighborhood over everything from fears of big government to nitpicky issues of traffic engineering and urban design in which feet and inches count for everything.”
Resident complaints also included worries about the danger of more pedestrians traversing their driveways and the prospect of construction bringing down or damaging trees.
If those sound like feeble, disingenuous arguments against safer, more equitable connectors in the neighborhood and an effort to design a greener region, it’s because they are. But residents would have sounded even worse if they offered their true reasons for opposition.
“An overwhelming majority of residents along the proposed path signed a petition rejecting the plan,” WKYC reported last week. “Forty residents affected by the path opposed it; five residents supported it and seven residents said they were undecided, according to a copy of the petition.”
That included Cleveland City Planning Commission chairman Dave Bowen.
Again, from Cleveland.com:
“David Bowen, the chairman of the Cleveland City Planning Commission and a Lake Avenue resident, said in a June 2 online neighborhood meeting with Metroparks that he ended up with two metal plates in his face after having been jumped by what he called a gang outside his front door in the early 2000s.
“He nevertheless stayed in the neighborhood. But he said the Metroparks sidewalk proposal might convince him to leave.
“‘It would be a shame that a gang can’t chase me away but the Metroparks can,’’ he said in the meeting.’”
How nice.
As Litt posited earlier in the summer: “The widening is a test of the idea that Northeast Ohio should connect residents of all physical abilities to regional assets, including Lake Erie, in ways that don’t require ownership of a car.”
The city will re-engage with residents to come up with a different possible solution, as the letter states.
But for now, Cleveland again failed the test.
— Vince Grzegorek