Anti-crime programs in the District are heavy on government bureaucracy and short on human interaction, according to a new coalition of neighborhood leaders who see mentoring and directly intervening with troubled teens and young people as more effective.

The volunteer members of CREWS, or Communities Respecting Everyone’s Will to Survive, say the blueprint to reversing a record year of homicides and carjackings in the District starts with mending internal wounds suffered by the city’s most violent residents.

“There’s no way we can change the condition of the people until we first change the way they think, see and feel about themselves, because how they see themselves now is encapsulated in a discharge of pain,” said Edward Tate, a founding member of the Southeast-based coalition of concerned Black men — aid workers, business people and clergymen. 

“They’re reacting to that pain and making unhealthy choices and decisions that are then borne out of that pain,” he said.

Members of CREWS say easing that pain starts with building trust with young people.

One way the group does that is by running its own version of the D.C. government’s Safe Passages program, where adult guardians are stationed outside and near schools so students can get to and from the building in peace.

CREWS members have been shepherding students to and from John Philip Sousa Middle School in Southeast since the beginning of the school year.

Tyrone Parker, a founding member of the Alliance of Concerned Men who came out of retirement to help get CREWS off the ground, said the group eventually wants to find a way to speak with students in an assembly format.

But as CREWS builds rapport with kids and parents in the Greenway neighborhood, Mr. Parker said the immediate plan is to speak with members of the 37th Street Crew. The local gang’s beef with the Simple City Crew in the nearby Benning Terrace housing development is the source of many lethal shootings in the community.

It’s a familiar playbook for Mr. Parker, who helped broker a truce between warring crews in Simple City roughly a quarter century ago. Then as it is now, the biggest determinant of whether or not the mediation succeeds is if the right people are involved.

“You’re gonna be talking to kids that may be willing to kill someone,” Mr. Parker told The Times. “You’re going to have to have particular people that’s got the demeanor and the spirit to be able to deal with that — no ego, no image, and be open to being cursed out and all that other stuff.”

Mr. Parker said that CREWS hopes their model provides an outline for the city to follow: gain peoples’ trust by being a consistent presence in the neighborhood, and then parlaying that trust into squashing the feuds that inflame violent outbursts.

Mr. Tate said the coalition has trained nearly 15 men to do the gang intervention work. They’ll begin attempting to make some in-roads with the 37th Street Crew in the coming weeks.

Much of CREWS’ ability to show their independent model can succeed will depend on finding the money to scale it up.

The coalition is volunteer-run for now, with almost all of its manpower coming from the operators of mom-and-pop aid organizations and the members of local churches and the Nation of Islam.

CREWS members have said during meetings that their ideal is to be entirely privately funded, much like the Coalition to Save Lives up in Philadelphia.

But the D.C. coalition is starting from a different place than its counterpart in Philadelphia.

The Coalition to Save Lives was the brainchild of executives from major nonprofits and philanthropic organizations who had deep ties to Philly’s city hall, according to Ted Qualli, a spokesperson for the coalition.

Mr. Qualli said that social and political capital helped the coalition raise over $6 million for its efforts in the first year alone — without a drop of government funding. They then distributed that money to aid groups and anti-violence service providers on the ground.

CREWS members, on the other hand, are for the most part service providers in the District.

Mr. Qualli in Philadelphia suggested that CREWS would improve its chances of finding financial backers if it developed a clear pitch that it could sell investors on.

He said the one thing that helped the Coalition to Save Lives win over financiers was that the group was “methodical and very disciplined in making sure that every person we talked to had a baseline understanding of what it is we were talking about.”  

Mr. Tate said CREWS‘ message to would-be financiers is simple: D.C.’s rising violence is bad for businesses.

The owners of law firms, medical practices and large corporations with outposts in the city should want to fund a group that will be more responsive and effective with their investments than the D.C. government, according to the coalition co-founder.

Local businesses are already feeling the financial burden of the crime wave.

Burglaries and violent incidents along the H Street corridor in Northeast contributed to closures of both the Pursuit Wine Bar & Kitchen and the Brine Oyster and Seafood House in the past two months.  

Axios reported that the Surfside taco stand in Dupont shells out $4,000 a week on security. 

Hospitality group Fish and Fire Food Group, which is the parent company of restaurants such as Ivy City Smokehouse, upped its security spending by $200,000 in 2023 year in response to crime.

But others, such as David Muhammad, the executive director for the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR), don’t think  CREWS should shy away from government funding.

City funding helped NICJR produce reports on who the violent perpetrators are in the nation’s capital and what can be done to curb the deadly shootings, said Muhammad.

Outside of funding, Mr. Muhammad said CREWS members should look at the city as the best resource for information on the trigger-pullers they’re trying to reach.

City agencies such as D.C.’s Metropolitan Police have intelligence departments that monitor violent individuals’ social media accounts. Those intel officers can provide clues about where offenders may hang out when they’re not home and who they’re associating with.

That information can lead to more targeted anti-violence efforts. Mr. Muhammad said one nagging issue the local government deals with is getting its city-run violence interrupters to the right places.

“If all the violence interrupter is doing is canvassing the neighborhood three times a week, that’s not going to be enough. There needs to be more of a person-specific strategy,” Mr. Muhammad told The Times. “Some of these guys are doing heroic work, and are working hard and passionately, they just need better management.”  

Mr. Muhammad is of the mind that the District needs an anti-violence czar to implement a citywide strategy and lay out objectives for each program.

He said good work is being done by agencies such as the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the Cure the Streets program run by the D.C. Attorney General’s office.

The problem is that none of the agencies collaborate on how to best complement each other, so they end up bogging down their shared goal of lowering violent crime rates.

Mr. Muhammad said that lack of coordination does give CREWS a “hell of an argument” to interested financiers.

But as the CREWS works to bring in more financial backing, coalition members such as Chris Thomas are focused on showing up for the Greenway youth.

Mr. Thomas, who works as the chief of staff for aid organization 100 Fathers, Inc., said his main goal is to form a positive relationship with the kids. That can include getting them haircuts, taking them on excursions to Northern Virginia or, most often, getting them some food (bags of Takis, specifically).  

He mentioned that many of the children can be hard to crack because, while they are eligible for assistance, aid workers depart after grant money dries up. This short-term cycle often exacerbates the kids’ abandonment issues.

Mr. Thomas said being a frequent presence in their lives, and being honest with children about his own expectations for them — such as no snacks if they’re not behaving in school and at home — gives him the chance to start infusing the kids with more wholesome values.

“One of the biggest things is really just being transparent, consistent with them,” Mr. Thomas told The Times. “A lot of them are standoffish in the beginning. But over time, they will wake up and they will really talk to you, they just have to really, really trust you. So many people have let them down. It’s hard for them to do that.”

• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.