Program Employs Ex-Gang Members to Help Stop Street Violence

Program Employs Ex-Gang Members to Help Stop Street Violence Updated 3 hrs ago

January 18, 2011 7:12am

Operation SNUG will use ex-gang members to reduce shootings and help young people leave the gang lifestyle.

 

Members of Operation SNUG. (DNAInfo/Jeff Mays)

By Jeff Mays

DNAInfo Reporter/Producer

HARLEM — It wasn't that long ago that Dedric Hammond was causing a ruckus in Harlem and had a street name that signalled his demeanor and intentions: "Bad News."

"I was the guy you called when you needed something to happen," Hammond said.

But then bad things happened to him. In 2001, Hammond was shot in two separate incidents — twice in the stomach and once in the back. Then came an 8-year prison stretch.

Now, Hammond is back on the streets of Harlem. But this time as an ex-gang member trying to have a positive influence on the lives of young people as part of Operation SNUG.

Modeled after the successful Ceasefire Chicago program, Operation SNUG — guns spelled backwards — looks to prevent shootings and to disrupt situations that escalate toward violence. The statewide program, funded with a $4 million grant from the state Senate, will also target young people most at-risk to be involved in gun violence and provide them with mentors and resources to change their lives.

In Harlem, the program will be run by the New York City Mission Society. The group received a $500,000 grant and will focus its efforts on 127th Street to 145th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas avenues, where many of Harlem's shootings and murders occur. Since 2007, the number of youth gangs and crews in Harlem has doubled to 40, and some say there are even more.

Robin Holmes, project director for Operation SNUG says the outreach workers will have to step into the teeth of violence in Harlem in the hopes of pulling young people out. They will be on call at night to step into escalating situations. That means they will be out on patrol and using their contacts to help quash the situations that lead to violence and offering potential shooters and their victims other options.

Operation SNUG outreach workers with their identifying jackets outside the New York Mission Society's Minisink Townhouse on 142nd St. and Lenox Avenue. (DNAInfo/Jeff Mays)

"In prison, I made a decision to make a change," said Hammond, who is a Christian and now goes by the handle "Beloved." "I decided that I wanted to save lives instead of destroy them."

Hammond will be part of a team of eight outreach workers, six men and two women, who will each have a caseload of 15 people aged 15 to 26.

"They are all what's considered credible messengers," Courtney Bennett, director of community and government relations for the New York Mission Society, said of the outreach workers also known as violence interrupters. "They've been in prison, they've been in gangs, they've shot guns, been shot at and maybe even been shot."

The group will partner with others in an effort to reach young people.

"They are going to people who are going down the same road they've been on but they know the path," Bennett said. "They can go sit down with a guy and say: 'What's going on in your life? If you feel you are in a situation, call me first.'"

Karim Chapman, 31, outreach worker supervisor, said he expects the outreach workers' past to carry a lot of weight with the young people they are trying to target.

"We have all made it out. We are all a living testimony that you don't have to live your life that way," Chapman said  "Some of these young kids need that little bit of hope."

He should know. Chapman had positive influences in his life like the once-respected but now defunct Boys Choir of Harlem where he attended school. He carries a picture on his cell phone that shows him with Michael Jackson and Wesley Snipes after one performance.

But Chapman's father had HIV/AIDS and was in and out of prison. He says he simply didn't have the courage to resist the allure of running with a crew and selling drugs.

"I chose the streets," Chapman said.

His choice earned him eight years in federal prison on drug and money laundering charges. But now Chapman is a married homeowner who sees this job as one of the best ways he can give back to a community he once helped tear down.

"Can you imagine your mother or father making you sit in your room for eight years and only letting you out for one hour a day?" he asked a group of young people at an after school program at P.S. 194 Countee Cullen last week in an effort to explain what prison is like.

The event was organized by the Rev. Vernon Williams, who has tried to prevent violence in Harlem for years, in response to the recent murder of Jonathan Bells, 18, on Lenox Avenue.

"How many of you guys don't mind being different?" Chapman asked. "When your friend says: 'Let's skip school and go to the park,' I need you to be different."

Being different in Harlem is not easy. Especially for the kids SNUG is targeting who carry weapons. Holmes said many are afraid to put the weapons down because of peer pressure and fear that they will become a victim.

"If you are a person that has been bad, there are people out there that want to keep you bad," Hammond said. "It's a challenge, but I did it and other people can, too."

By Jeff Mays, DNAinfo.com

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110118/harlem/program-employs-exgang-members-help-stop-violence-on-harlem-streets#ixzz1BOqn3Cj8

Steve Jobs Taking Medical Leave Of Absence: Reuters

 

Steve Jobs has been granted a medical leave of absence by Apple's board of directors, Reuters reports.

According to the Wall Street Journal, COO Tim Cook will run day to day operations for the company.

Jobs wrote the following note to Apple employees:

Read More...
More on Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Taking Medical Leave Of Absence: Reuters
The Huffington Post News Editors
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:52:38 GMT

Anatomy of a School Crisis

N.Y. / REGION

Anatomy of a School Crisis

By AMY VIRSHUP

Published: January 14, 2011

A student’s drowning and a principal’s firing over the last year have revealed divisions at Columbia Secondary, a four-year-old Harlem school with Ivy League ties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/nyregion/16school.html

Published on The Root (http://www.theroot.com)

Home > Naked, Unarmed Man Shot and Killed by LAPD

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Naked, Unarmed Man Shot and Killed by LAPD

By erin.evans

Created 01/15/2011 - 16:10

Reginald Doucet Jr. Shot and Killed by LAPD

erin.evans [1]

Reginald Doucet Jr., 25, was an ex-college football player and model.

Reginald Doucet Jr., 25, was shot early Friday morning by a member of the Los Angeles Police Department. He took a cab ride home after having too much to drink, but when he arrived at his apartment, he didn't have any cash. To prove to the cab driver that he would return, he took his clothes off. And things only got worse from there. He was locked out of his apartment and reportedly started yelling and acting erratically.

The cab driver called the police, and things escalated from there. A police officer with only 17 months on the force shot Doucet. He died at the hospital.

Read more about this story at the Los Angeles Times [2].

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Send Huck Finn to College

By LORRIE MOORE

Published: January 15, 2011

Madison, Wis.

Related

• Times Topic: Mark Twain

EVER since NewSouth Booksannounced it would publish a versionof “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with the “n-word” removed, reaction has split between traditionalists outraged at censorship and those who feel this might be a way to get teenagers, especially African-American boys, comfortable reading a literary classic. From a mother’s perspective, I think both sides are mistaken.

No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that “Huckleberry Finn” is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace “nigger” with alternative terms like “slave” (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from “nigger,” so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college — or even graduate school — where it can be put in proper context.

“Huckleberry Finn” is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature, and anyone who cannot see that has never tried putting an audio version of it on during a long car trip while an African-American teenager sits beside her and slowly, slowly slips on his noise-canceling earphones in order to listen to hip-hop.

The derogatory word is part of the problem, but not the entirety of it — hip-hop music uses the same word. Of course, the speakers are different in each case, and the worlds they are speaking of and from are very distant from one another. The listener can tell the difference in a second. The listener knows which voice is speaking to him and which is not getting remotely close.

No novel with the word “kike” or “bitch” spelled out 200 times could or should be separated — for purposes of irony or pedagogy — from the attitudes that produced those words. It’s also impossible that such a novel would be taught in a high school classroom. And if it were taught, student alienation might very well contribute to another breed of achievement gap.

“Huckleberry Finn” is suited to a college course in which Twain’s obsession with the 19th-century theater of American hucksterism — the wastrel West, the rapscallion South, the economic strays and escapees of a harsh new country — can be discussed in the context of Jim’s particular story (and Huck’s).

An African-American 10th grader, in someone’s near-sighted attempt to get him newly appreciative of novels, does not benefit by being taken back right then to a time when a young white boy slowly realizes, sort of, the humanity of a black man, realizes that that black man is more than chattel even if that black man is also full of illogic and stereotypical superstitions.

Huck Finn refers to himself as an idiot and still finds Jim more foolish than himself. Although Twain has compassion for the affectionate Jim, he has an interest in burlesque; although he is sensitive to Jim’s heartbreaking losses, he is always looking for comedy and repeatedly holds Jim up as a figure of howling fun, ridicule that is specific to his condition as a black man.

The young black American male of today, whose dignity in our public schools is not always preserved or made a priority, does not need at the start of his literary life to be immersed in an even more racist era by reading a celebrated text that exuberantly expresses everything crazy and wicked about that time — not if one’s goal is to get that teenager to like books. Huck’s voice is a complicated amalgam of idioms and perspectives and is not for the inexperienced contemporary reader.

There are other books more appropriate for an introduction to serious reading. (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” with its social-class caricatures and racially naïve narrator, is not one of them.) Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which vibrantly speaks to every teenager’s predicament when achievement in life is at odds with the demoralized condition of his peer group, is a welcoming book for boys. There must certainly be others and their titles should be shared. Teachers I meet everywhere are always asking, How can we get boys to read? And the answer is, simply, book by book.

One reader’s sensitivity always sets off someone else’s defensiveness. But what would be helpful are school administrators who will break with tradition and bring more flexibility, imagination and social purpose to our high school curriculums. College, where the students have more experience with racial attitudes and literature, can do as it pleases.

Lorrie Moore is the author, most recently, of the novel “A Gate at the Stairs.”

"No Woman No Cry."

FLAVOR00-NONE-0000-0000-000000000000 0.000000 ;

In the late summer of 2005,

Pianist Monty Alexander

Traveled to Bob Marley's

Tuff Gong Studio in Kingston,

Jamaica, and teamed up with

Top Jamaican session players

To record "Concrete Jungle."

An album containing twelve Bob Marley

Compositions reinterpreted through

Alexander's jazz piano-centered

Arrangements.

Here is Monty's version of the

Marley classic, "No Woman No Cry."

http://www.jazzonthetube.com/page/348.html

- Lester Perkins

Jazz on the Tube

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Fw: 2011 Harlem Book Fair Update

FLAVOR00-NONE-0000-0000-000000000000 ;

HARLEM BOOK FAIR 2011 UPDATE Saturday, July 23, 2011...Save the Date!      We have begun our planning for the upcoming 2011 Harlem Book Fair. This is your opportunity to make presentation requests, submit ideas for panel discussion & readings...to promote yourself in a BIG way at the book fair. Save the date, pass the word, and email promotion ideas to us at hbf@qbr.com. Don't delay - it may be your time to take the stage! Download 2011 HBF Exhibitor Application      Click on the link to register now and take advantage of our early discounts. All registration and preferred placements are done on a first come/first saved basis! This year we have partnered with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), so you know the place will be packed! Reserve now. Register and Promote early!

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Mississippi Winn, Oldest African American, Dies At 113

Mississippi Winn, Oldest African American, Dies At 113

SHREVEPORT, La. â€" When she turned 113, Mississippi Winn could still stand up on her own and never thought her age was a detriment to her life.

The upbeat former domestic worker from Shreveport, known in the city as "Sweetie," died Friday afternoon at Magnolia Manor Nursing Home, said Milton Carroll, an investigator with the Caddo Parish Coroner's Office. He said he could not release her cause of death.

 

Fw: Hatewatch Headlines for January 13, 2011

Hatewatch is a weekly summary of the latest news about hate and extremism compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Week of January 13, 2011 Hatewatch Blog Who is Jared Lee Loughner? The Radical Right Responds to the Tucson Shootings World Net Daily Signs on to Nazis-Were-Gays Tall Tale Intelligence Files Learn more about American Third Position. Hatewatch Headlines AZ Fourth Suspect Possible in Arivaca Case Arizona Daily Star | January 7, 2011 CA William Johnson, Head of White-Power American Third Position Party, Asks Senators How They'll Save the White Race OC Weekly | January 11, 2011 LA Investigation Reveals Details of 1964 Louisiana Klan Murder The Concordia Sentinel | January 12, 2011 SD Guardians of a Restored Republic Holding Meeting The Daily Republic | January 8, 2011 CAN B.C. Mounties Hunt White Supremacist Craig Cobb over Website CTV | January 6, 2011 NY Watch on for Government Hater Times Herald-Record | January 12, 2011 SPLC supporters like you make the Hatewatch newsletter possible.  Follow Hatewatch on Twitter.  Become our fan on Facebook. Subscribe to Hatewatch and other SPLC newsletters. Contact SPLC.

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FDA Announces New Acetaminophen Regulations

FDA Announces New Acetaminophen Regulations

The Food and Drug Administration is limiting a key ingredient found in Vicodin and other painkillers, after a suspected link to thousands of patients with liver damage.

Looking Back at American Fashion’s Coming-Out Party

Rose Hartman/Getty Images

Bethann Hardison (at left with Daniela Morera and Stephen Burrows at Studio 54 in 1977).

By GUY TREBAY

Published: January 12, 2011

IN the annals of fashion smackdowns, few events have attained anything resembling the legendary status of the 1973 Grand Divertissement à Versailles. A stunt benefit ginned up by Eleanor Lambert, the publicist who invented the Best Dressed List, this fabled fashion show, promoted as a Franco-American collaboration, was always destined to be seen as a battle for dominance: the Old World slugging it out with the New, a muscular group of comers with Studio 54 as their shared point of reference taking on the fusty world of the haute couture.

 

Click here for NY Times full article

The Three Burials of Alston Anderson

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

Alston Anderson was buried on Saturday for the second time — or the third, if you count the slow sinking that constituted his long but unrewarded life. He was an African-American short-story writer, poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent three years in the Army in World War II and three months of 1955 at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He studied philosophy at Columbia and the Sorbonne.

He had sharp talent and famous friends: Richard Wright, Terry Southern, Robert Graves. His work was chosen for anthologies of “jazz fiction” and of the best “Negro writers.” He had a story in The New Yorker and an interview with Nelson Algren in The Paris Review.

What he didn’t have were money, lasting acclaim and, evidently, family. When he died in Manhattan on July 15, 2008, at 84, no one claimed his remains. The government buried him in the potter’s field at Hart Island.

The next two-and-a-half years would have extended into forever but for a program that tracks down the remains of indigent veterans and provides them proper military burials. That was how Mr. Anderson came to join 19 other veterans buried on Saturday at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island.

No one could say much about them. The eulogist did what he could, reading everyone’s name and years of service, and then a poem about going to the arms of Jesus. He did not say that the coffin in the first row on his far right held the author of “Lover Man,” stories of Southern black life, told in a voice jazz-inflected and rural, and a novel, “All God’s Children.”

Courtesy of the NY Times

I found him myself only through chance. Googling “Anderson Alston” from the funeral press release led to the suspicion that the name was backward. The author’s Internet trail matched the soldier’s exactly: born 1924, Panama Canal Zone; lived in Kingston, Jamaica, and Oxford, N.C.; 1943 to 1946 in the Army, private to master sergeant; then Germany, France, New York.

On Friday, I e-mailed Micki McGee, a Fordham University professor who wrote a book about Yaddo that led to an exhibition at the New York Public Library. She called back instantly. She told me that it had been Mr. Anderson’s sad file that convinced her to tell the Yaddo story. “I think I’m going to cry,” she said when she heard about his reburial.

Mr. Anderson was at Yaddo with James Baldwin. He left under a cloud; notes in his files tell of bad behavior and his mixing with “objectionable characters.” He was dunned for months after for an unpaid $13.36 phone bill.

He tried to explain. “I find it impossible,” he wrote to Yaddo’s executive director, Elizabeth Ames, “to work eight hours a day and write at the same time.” He survived on “baby-sitting and odd typing jobs, just enough to provide one meal a day. It would be a very simple thing for me to get a job and pay my debts, and I’m very much aware that this is what I should do. But I feel that once I make such a compromise I’ll become an $80-a-week clerk and that will be the end of me. I am determined that that shall not happen.”

He changed addresses six times that year, and later told Graves that he nearly froze to death that winter. His request to return to Yaddo was rejected. “Lover Man,” however, got great reviews. “Perfect ear, warm heart,” said The Times. “First-class,” said Time magazine.

Graves wrote its foreword. He said he couldn’t imagine how his young friend with the “nervous smile, tall, spare body and soft voice,” had been a master sergeant. “Behaviour too mild, sense of humour too keen, habits too vague,” he wrote. But an officer Mr. Anderson was, at 21. He served in Bandar Shahpur, Iran, editing the post newspaper.

I don’t know the rest of his story, but I saw the last bit of it. It was in a big white tent, on a gray day after a snowstorm. The honor guards maneuvered 20 coffins with crisp dignity. Veterans, in embroidered jackets and baseball caps, stood at attention and saluted and applauded. Politicians gave speeches; this consecration far above their power to add or detract.

Mr. Anderson, like the others, had an engraved nameplate on his silver coffin and was given a flag, a volley of gunfire, taps. Twenty men, received an overdue wave of respect and admiration, even though it was too late for them to accept it, and nobody knew who they were.

DOT To Resume Alternate Side Parking Rules On Monday

DOT To Resume Alternate Side Parking Rules On Monday

The Department of Transportation announced today that alternate side parking will resume citywide on Monday, after it was suspended for two weeks because of the blizzard. | NY1's LIVE, wall-to-wall coverage of the City Council hearings on the city's response to the snow will begin at 11 a.m. Monday.

Harlem legend dead Bobby Robinson, owner of Happy House on 125th St.

BY DAVID HINCKLEY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Saturday, January 8th 2011, 10:33 AM

 

Roberts for News

Musician, personality and business owner Bobby Robinson owned Happy House Records for more than 60 years.

BOBBY ROBINSON, whose tiny record shop on Harlem's 125th St. spawned No. 1 national hits and made him an uptown patriarch for six decades, died yesterday.

He was 93 and had been ill for several years - though he regularly went to work at his shop until it was forced to close in January 2008.

Impeccably dressed, well-spoken and ambitious to make his mark in the entertainment business, Robinson opened Bobby's Happy House in 1946.

His shop was the first black-owned business on 125th St., and within five years he used it to launch a series of record labels.

Sometimes working with his brother Danny, who also had an office on 125th St., Robinson recorded hundreds of artists from Gladys Knight and the Pips to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Knight's first hit, "Every Beat of My Heart," was released on Robinson's Fury label.

Robinson, a South Carolina native, had a No. 1 national hit in 1959 with Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City" - and said years later that a hit of that magnitude crippled his business because he had to press so many copies he couldn't promote any other artists.

But his Red Robin, Whirlin' Disc, Fire, Fury and Enjoy labels became legendary in the rhythm and blues world, and his releases by artists like the Channels, Teenchords and Scarlets helped define the sound of the New York streets through the 1950s.

Robinson ultimately recorded a wide range of artists that included the great bluesman Elmore James, whom Robinson inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In the late 1970s, Robinson became one of the first label owners to record rap music, cutting artists like Flash, Doug E. Fresh and Spoonie Gee.

Robinson eventually had to move the shop around the corner in the late 1990s, and he closed for good on Jan. 21, 2008, when his new landlord decided to raze the building for a development.

"I've seen 125th St. at its best and worst," Robinson said in late 2007. "And I'll tell you, there's no more exciting place in the world."

dhinckley@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2011/01/08/2011-01-08_harlem_legend_dead_bobby_robinson_owner_of_happy_house_on_125th_st.html#ixzz1AY1C6S1g

Fw: Dr. Billy Taylor remembered on WBGO

FLAVOR00-NONE-0000-0000-000000000000 ; WBGO remembers Dr. Billy Taylor
Sunday, 1/9 @ 6pm - JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater features Dr. Billy Taylor.
Monday, 1/10 @ 8pm - Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz with Dr. Billy Taylor.
Tuesday, 1/11 @ 12pm - Jazz Profiles spotlights Dr. Billy Taylor.
Wednesday, 1/12 @ 9am Dr. Billy Taylor Jazz at the Kennedy Center with Joe Lovano.
Wednesday, 1/12 @ 6:30pm - JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater features Dr. Billy Taylor.
Thursday, 1/13 @ 2pm Dr. Billy Taylor Jazz at the Kennedy Center with Nancy Wilson.
Friday, 1/14 9am Gary Walker with Dr. Billy Taylor at the piano.
Saturday, 1/15 3pm JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater - Dr. Billy Taylor's 80th Birthday Tribute Concert.
Dr. Billy Taylor by Dalibor Plavsic

 

On December 28, 2010, the jazz community lost another luminary, Dr. Billy Taylor.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Dr. Taylor's name to Jazzmobile—154 West 127th Street, New York, New York 10027 or online at www.jazzmobile.org.

A memorial service will be held in New York City at Riverside Church this Monday, January 10.

WBGO will honor Dr. Taylor's memory beginning at 6 p.m. (Eastern Time) on Sunday with a weeklong celebration of his life and music. For broadcast details, see the left column of this email.

You can listen now to Dr. Taylor as he played at WBGO in the late 1980s, on the WBGO Blog. You can also log on to hear the tribute to Dr. Taylor which was broadcast during Toast of the Nation on New Year's Eve.

 

 

WBGO is a publicly-supported, cultural institution that champions jazz, an American art form, and presents news to a worldwide audience through radio, other technologies and events.

Become a member today!

This e-mail was sent from WBGO Jazz 88.3FM
.

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