Boys Fighting at F Train Stop

Once the train finally pulled out of the station, the kid stood with his nose an inch from the door, faced away from the car full of people who'd just watched 3 kids try to beat him up. What set them off, at 8:20 am Wednesday morning at the 15th St/Prospect Park station, I don't know, but somehow he'd managed to get 3 others mad enough to want him to suffer. As the 3 went at it, a man on the Manhattan bound F train, that stood with open doors, started yelling at them,"LET HIM GO, LET HIM GO, LET HIM GO." Unlike me, he seemed fully awake, thinking on his feet, and incapable of standing by and watching this boy be beaten.

The boys kept hitting the other kid, so the man started yelling more and approaching them, other men now at this side, also yelling. Some of them started to pull the boys apart. The opposite train came, and it was scary to think that one of the fighters or mediators might wind up in front of it. Then the 3 stopped and got on the train headed for Coney Island, their victim on the Manhattan bound one. From the train he yelled to them, "Get off the train, Come on! Come on! Get off the train!"

He still wanted to fight. People wanted the boy on the train, safe from the harm he seemed to want to bring on himself.

I've read of incidences where someone was attacked and no one did anything about it. I was glad to be in the company of these responsive men, although I worried about them. Their vigilance means everything. They made me think of the "violence interrupters" described in the May 4 NYT Magazine article called Blocking the Transmission of Violence, about a strategy to reduce inner city violence which was the brain child of epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. He recruited ex-felons, men who'd seen the error of their ways, to work for his program, CeaseFire, for $15 an hour, to talk up the possibility of non-violence after a hit, when hostilities flaired and retaliation brewed. It's unbelievable that Illinois cut so much of the funding for that program. It brought the murder rate down in the Chicago neighborhoods it served, and in Baltimore, where the program's been replicated, the murder rate dropped from 2 a month to 0 in 4 months.

I wonder if Illinois legislators who cut the funding weren't a little peeved that the very people they've been accustomed to demonize have been able to step in and be instrumental in creating more peaceful inner cities. With their gang histories and street clout they have more credibility with violent youth that people who've never walked that path could have. It's an amazing program. The article doesn't mention any similar programs here, maybe because the rate of violent crime has dropped here no one felt it necessary. But as times become a little more desperate in this recession, perhaps it could save lives to have such a network in place in the areas most afflicted with violence.