News	Blessed Are the Peacekeepers by Leslie James Pickering

BACK ROW: J. Luis Acosta, Kay Taylor, Bill Peoples. MIDDLE ROW: Arlee "Joop" Daniels Jr., Marc L. Fuller, Nate Buckley, Derrick M. Byrd Jr., Brother Abraham Muhammad. FRONT ROW: Pastor Tyrone Wilson, Carlanda Wilson, Norma Daughtry.

Two thousand six was a bloody year for Buffalo. Seventy-three homicides in a year is a horrifying statistic for a city whose population had dwindled to less than 300,000 people. No one can better testify to the magnitude of the gore than the leadership of the Stop The Violence Coalition (STVC). For three and a half years the coalition has been doing what they call “God’s work,” in its efforts to reduce Buffalo’s homicide rate.

As 2006 was winding to a close, the media almost seemed to be challenging the community to top its 1994 high of 92 killings, but, thanks in no small part to the coalition, 2007 is not shaping up to be one for the record books.

“Last year at this time we would have been at 64 [homicides], and now we’re at 44,” Carlanda Wilson, secretary for the coalition, recites without hesitation. That’s more than a 30 percent decrease, but she expects it to be even greater by the end of this year.

STVC Chairman Marc L. Fuller says that last year’s violent crime statistics were given a boost by what the coalition calls “hot homicides.” These weren’t premeditated killings, but everyday clashes amplified by an environment boiling over with tension.

“A lot of unresolved conflicts were ending with the bullet. It was all over town. Every area was hit, Riverside, South Buffalo,” Fuller says. “There was no area not touched last year.”

“We had 73 homicides last year, with 52 weeks in a year that’s almost one and a half people getting killed every week,” calculates Pastor Tyrone Wilson, vice chairman of the coalition. “This year we had weeks where nobody was killed, that’s a major accomplishment…We had weeks where there were no mothers crying from new homicides.”

Man-up

Fuller remembers the Stop The Violence Coalition being spawned by a call from the community back in 2004. “There was a saying a few years back that the men needed to step up,” he says. “There were so many murders and homicides, and the women were taking too much of this burden on their own.”

The coalition believes that the combination of a lack of economic opportunity and an absence of positive role models for Buffalo’s youth is a deadly mix that too often leads to crime and violence. When a young man, who has no one to look up to and no hope for a stable job in the future, sees drug dealers driving expensive cars around the block, the draw of a life of crime can become irresistible.

“My dad was a great role model for me,” Wilson recalls. “Going way back to biblical history, men have always had a role in governing their surroundings and being a caretaker for the neighborhood and the people…[Now] the environment was created where your back was up against the wall, and it was either eat or starve. You did whatever was necessary. We’re trying to return back to the focus, where we take the young men and train them to become men. I think, [with] that being successfully implemented over a period of time, there will be far less men wandering the streets aimlessly, with no direction and no hope.”

When asked about whether men actually have stepped up, Fuller responds with a firm and reassuring, “We’re working on it…it’s happening now.”

The coalition encourages others to “man-up” by setting the example themselves. Beyond the facilitation of gang truces and the street-level peacekeeping that they’ve become known for, the coalition runs a growing number of community services, from youth mentoring in public schools to a nighttime GED program that graduates more students than any similar program citywide.

At the beginning, the coalition was made up of males exclusively, but that didn’t last. Fuller noticed the change at a STVC meeting when he accidentally addressed a woman as if she were a male. He caught himself, looked around the room and thought, “Wow, there’s a lot of women here.”

“We’ve got grandmommas, we’ve got white, black, Hispanic, young and old,” Fuller says. “When I look at the coalition today, I look at an organization that truly represents the community.”

The coalition works with groups working for peace in Iraq, with Catholics and with Muslims. “This is one big peace movement,” Fuller says, “not just in Buffalo, but throughout the country and throughout the world.”

Buffalo’s peacekeepers

The Stop The Violence Coalition has gained a well-deserved reputation as peacekeepers for defusing street violence by fearlessly putting themselves in the middle of deadly conflicts.

“When we came together we had to attack this thing straight-up. It seemed like we had homicides every other day,” Fuller remembers. “Our first attack was to get to the neighborhood rivalries, deal with the homicides and be at the death scenes.”

The coalition has a 24-hour hotline, listed in the phonebook, which is used for everything from emergency first response to counseling sessions that can sometimes go on for hours. The first month that the line was open, people were calling in the middle of the night just to test them. They’d rise from a slumber and answer, “Stop The Violence Coalition,” and the response would be something like, “I just wanted to see if this was the right number.”

It took a while to build trust in the community, but it worked. When people started noticing and respecting what the coalition was doing at the prayer vigils and on the streets, they began coming forward with information about specific cases.

Within the first six days of each case the coalition takes on, they put themselves on the streets to prevent any violent retaliation, engage in their own homicide detective work, help to arrange safe funerals and burials and connect the families with crime victim assistance programs. After the burial their work often continues, keeping unsolved cases active and using their influence to make sure detectives aren’t leaving families feeling like their case has been forgotten.

While working on one of the coalition’s earlier cases, Fuller and STVC Sergeant at Arms Arlee Daniels found themselves ushered into a room at Buffalo Police Headquarters stacked to the ceiling with boxes of unsolved homicide files.

“The national homicide solvability rate was 67 percent,” recalls STVC administrator Elder James Giles. “The city of Buffalo’s was 36.8 percent…We were at 47 [homicides] on October 19th, 2004, and at that time they had made arrests of characters of interest in only 12 cases.”

When the coalition learned that Buffalo, the second largest city in New York, had years ago dissolved its homicide unit, it took to the streets. They held rallies and put pressure on authorities until, two months later, a homicide unit was reinstated.

“If the police are looking for a certain individual,” Fuller explains, “and he knows that the police are looking for him, we try to reach out to that individual to try to get that individual to surrender himself, to turn himself in, because if he’s labeled armed and dangerous there is the possibility that he could get killed trying to elude the police.”

The coalition has also worked closely with the courts to advocate for defendants and encourage alternatives to incarceration, but any impression one may have that the STVC is at odds with the authorities will quickly be put to rest by District Attorney Frank Clark, who is quoted in the STVC newsletter saying that he thanks God every day for the Stop The Violence Coalition. If you’re confused, Fuller makes it simple: “We have a working relationship with everyone.”

STVC Sergeant at Arms Daniels (known as “Joop” and “Truce-Maker”) is living proof of that working relationship. Daniels has negotiated countless gang truces across Buffalo’s East Side, not an easy or safe task. Instead of the more traditional approach of getting rivals to agree on turf boundaries, Daniels teaches gang members about slavery plantation owner William Lynch.

Lynch delivered a speech on the bank of the James River in 1712 where he announced to the audience, “I have a foolproof method for controlling your Black slaves.” Lynch went on to explain that by instigating distrust and envy among slaves, slave owners could redirect the energy that might otherwise lead to rebellions and keep slaves fighting amongst themselves.

“You must pitch the old Black male vs. the young Black male and the young Black male against the old Black male, You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male and the male vs. the female. You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks,” Lynch orated.

Lynch is also credited as the person after whom the verb “to lynch”—meaning to execute without legal authority, usually by hanging, as in “lynch mob” and “lynch law”—is named.

When Daniels looks at the gang violence and petty quarrels that internally ravage the community today, he sees the legacy of William Lynch still at work. Rather than destroying each other over trivial disagreements, Daniels works to encourage urban youth to better themselves and their community, and it seems to be working. In the coalition’s main focus area—the section of Buffalo’s East Side bordered by Best Street, Fillmore Avenue, Clinton Street and Michigan Avenue/Harriet Tubman Way—there has not been a single homicide this year.

Hearts of firemen

“Every day that I walk out that door I know the look on my wife’s face, and her words are ‘Be careful,’” Fuller says. “It’s never a good call at three in the morning.”

He shakes his head as he jogs his memory. “You’re jumping up at three a.m., and the person is still alive, barely. You go into the hospital with the family and the doctor’s coming out saying there’s a 50/50 chance. The family says, ‘Thank y’all for being here,’ but before the morning, he’s expired…You don’t want those calls, but when they happen you thank God that you are in that position because we keep the peace between the community and the police, we’re the mediators, and a lot of confusion has been minimized because we’re on the scene…and the community knows that we’re there to make sure that nothing happens to them…We can’t save every life, but we’re working real hard to minimize the death.”

“It’s much like having the heart of a fireman,” STVC Administrator Giles adds. “When we get a call, that’s how we respond, because we never know when our presence may avert another violent situation.”

With emotions at their peak, funerals for murder victims can very easily become sites for violent retaliations. The coalition offers their services at these funerals as “honor guards.” STVC Treasurer Derrick M. Byrd, Jr., remembers a particularly tense funeral where he stood as an honor guard at the foot of a casket.

“You could sense the tension in the room as eyes were flipping all around trying to see if the assailant was there, if the retaliation fever was at work there,” he says. “Then all of a sudden you could just feel the peace. It was almost like a snowstorm, like flakes were beginning to fall, and I noticed everybody’s got on the [Stop The Violence] buttons.”

Violence has broken loose at youth funerals in the past, and some churches have grown uneasy about hosting services for homicide victims. The coalition brings one hundred of their buttons to every funeral, and they say it helps to calm the spirit.

“We’re on the frontlines of this battle that we have in our community, which is basically happening all over the country in every urban area in America, not just Buffalo,” Fuller says. “We have a major problem in America.

“Understand that there are a lot of brothers out here that are misguided. They don’t want to be doing what they’re doing. They tell us all the time that they’d rather work, but we don’t have the situation where we can offer hundreds of young men jobs. We hear these young men saying that what they’d rather do is work. Because we’re on the ground level, we get to hear it for ourselves, but seeing it in the media, you’re not getting any of that information. You’re getting a young man who’s a thug and a gang member, but has anybody sat down with him and felt and heard what’s in his heart? We have.”

Contact the Stop The Violence Coalition 24 hours a day at 882-STVC (7882).