February 5, 2009
by Jerry L. Van Marter

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."

Presbyterian News Service