Philadelphia Weekly

In the city's latest crime-fighting initiative, police commissioner Sylvester Johnson, along with a group of community activists including music legend Kenny Gamble, is asking 10,000 men--particularly black men--to voluntarily patrol the city's crime-ridden neighborhoods to prevent violence.

My first thought was this call reeks of desperation. Then again, desperate is what we are.

Last week the city marked 300 murders so far this year. With an average of more than one murder a day, and an estimated five shootings for every murder, Johnson is desperately trying to do something.

And that makes me want to curb my cynicism.

But it's hard. Especially when I juxtapose the city's political leadership with its rising gun violence. Last week City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller introduced a resolution calling for the "voluntary moratorium" of the sale of guns--toy guns. It passed unanimously. Apparently City Council believes toy guns are the gateway to the semiautomatic weapons that make our city a war zone.

With this 10,000-men initiative I can't help but wonder, instead of deputizing our male citizenry, why don't we train them, give them uniforms, badges and guns, and call them police officers?

"This is a disaster waiting to happen," says my friend Emile. "You want 10,000 men to go out and basically do a job that most officials are cautious about doing because of the violent potential associated with it. Now you want me to volunteer to do the same thing. Then if I get involved in some type of conflict and something serious happens, I may end up in front of a judge facing jail time. They need to find some money and hire 10,000 more police officers."

That's what I said.

"You can't have it both ways," warns Temple urban education professor Marc Lamont Hill. "You can't complain about the police then refuse to police your own community. We have people dying in the streets, so you can get a crippling sense of cynicism that the police don't operate in our interests, and we're just going to throw our hands up. But this initiative is saying, 'No, we're going to intervene in the public conversation.'"

There is a sense of pride in this 10,000-men initiative, a kind of do-it-yourself, unified community effort that's long overdue--especially one led by black men.

It has the spirit of the historic Million Man March.

Imagine fathers--long maligned for abandoning their sons who now unleash hell on our neighborhoods--returning home to heal the pain they've wrought.

Imagine ex-gang bangers, ex-drug dealers and ex-cons coming back to tell the next generation it ain't worth it.

Imagine men leading men.

But when discussing the initiative with two male friends over coffee one evening, they raised valid points: Isn't public safety what I pay tax dollars for? And will the police have my back then when they can't control gun violence now?

"My biggest issue is that it's reactionary," says my friend Jay. "There's definitely a role for the community, but we need a comprehensive solution."

That made me think of 18-year-old Michael Magobet, whom I recently wrote about, who once dropped out of high school for months because he got tired of meeting his school's low expectations. What would one of these 10,000 volunteers tell young men like him? Go to school?

And what would they tell a drug dealer with no employable skills? Get a job?

The problem is our young people know we're liars. We tell them to go to school, yet we give them an inferior education. We tell them to get off the corner, but we offer them no place to go. We tell them to put down their guns, yet we make the guns so easy to get.