Project Ricochet aims to deflect gangs (News & Observer)

Project Ricochet aims to deflect gangs

RALEIGH– Ambitious. That was the sentiment among an influential group of community leaders and activists who gathered in downtown Raleigh this week to discuss a new way to save area youth from the lure of gangs and crime.

Some present noted that similar efforts in recent years began with unbridled optimism only to falter.

Still resolute in their mission, the group — which included state legislators Dan Blue and Deborah Ross, Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker and noted gang activists Jeffery “Mafumbo” Smith and Richard “Monk” Henry — met to discuss their newest hope.

Project Ricochet is a new initiative to fight the gangs’ attraction by organizing traditional community resources — parents, grandparents, youth service providers and faith-based groups — to work in tandem with a brigade of “boots on the ground” ex-gang members.

At the heart of Project Ricochet are youth-driven entrepreneurial projects and job placements in area businesses to offer financial reward to young people who are determined to steer away from gangs and crime. Financial opportunities listed in the proposal are a bakery, a publishing press, landscaping and general maintenance, clothing design and silk screening.

“As quiet as it’s kept, many times a young person is out there selling drugs to try and help support his family,” said Abeni El-Amin, a co-founder of the project.

On May 25, Rodriguez D. Shay Burrell, 18, was gunned down outside his father’s house at 500 Haywood St., a few blocks from a newly formed police command unit.

Days after the fatal shooting, several members of the Wake County Gang Prevention Partnership met with concerned citizens at a Southeast Raleigh community center, and Project Ricochet was born.

“We talked about the impact of gun violence and the ricochet effect of a bullet,” El-Amin said. Along with the loss of Burrell’s life, the slain man left a 4-year-old daughter fatherless. Three suspects have been charged with his death.

El-Amin and other members of the Project Ricochet organizing committee presented a year-long budget estimate of $485,072. That figure includes wages and salaries, youth and staff training and youth transportation to help thwart an illicit youth culture that has spawned 56 gangs and more than 3,500 gang members in Wake County. The funding would come from a combination of public and private sources, they said.

The group did not sugar-coat the monumental task before them.

Jeanne Tedrow, founder the nationally recognized community development corporation Passage Home, pointed out similar efforts in the past have not been able to develop a sustained effort. “CHOICES was for only six months,” she said about one highly touted program that targeted habitual street level drug dealers. “It should have been three years.”

The Lost Generation Task Force, aimed to reduce the number of young black and Latino men going to prison, struggled with organizational structure, Tedrow said.

“It is a big disappointment to me,” admitted Bruce Lightner, a member of the organizing committee and a co-founder of the LGTF. “I think lessons have been learned. We have very little choice but to summon the will.”

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