Aqeela Sherrills, a former Grape Street Crip, who was one of the primary architects of the famous Blood-Crip truce of 1992, has been working for nearly three years to lower gun violence in Newark, New Jersey, as the creator and director of something called the “Newark Community Street Team” or NCST.
Sherrills, who lives in Watts, originally came to Newark at the invitation of Mayor Ras Baraka to create a small pilot project to address the city’s violence at a time when Newark’s police department was being investigated by the feds for “troubling patterns” of the use of excessive force, along with mountains of complaints about cops targeting minorities for questionably legal searches, plus allegations that certain officers blithely stole money and property from civilians.
With all this going on, the mayor decided to bring in Sherrills, whom he called “a Godsend,” to jump-start the program that would become NCST. The concept of the new strategy was to train veteran community members, many of whom had served time in jail or prison, to work as “mediators and interrupters” who could de-escalate and diffuse violence before it occurred in Newark’s highest crime areas, among other duties.
[For more on this story by Celeste Fremon, go to http://witnessla.com/how-la-vi...wer-its-murder-rate/]
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