Thomas MacMillan Photo
When neighborhood beefs led to blazing guns, two veterans of the street gathered rival crews in a single room. Angry accusations and violent threats erupted, until Trent and Juneboy laid out the options: prison sentences, funeral sermons — or a truce.
That was the scene last month, when street outreach workers Trent Butler (pictured) and William Juneboy Outlaw stepped up to confront a rash of violence between two rival neighborhoods — Read Street and Derby Avenue. Just after Memorial Day weekend, they mediated a truce which continues to hold.
“It made a big difference,” said Lt. Thaddeus Reddish, the top cop in Newhallville. “It really brought the level of violence down.”
The current truce is the most recent of several brokered by members of the street outreach program at New Haven Family Alliance (NHFA). The city-supported program relies on outreach workers with street cred, who can get to know the young men who are involved in the majority of New Haven’s street violence. The workers develop relationships with young people and seek to steer them onto productive paths, dispense advice from hard-won experience, and defuse conflicts.
In a recent interview at the NHFA offices on James Street, Butler and Outlaw (at left in photo) explained how the recent truce came about.
As Memorial Day rolled around this year, on May 31, the street outreach workers at NHFA were noticing an uptick of gun violence. “On May 18th, a kid was shot in Bassett Park,” Butler said. A few days later, someone was shot on Shelton and Huntington. Then there was a shooting at Winchester and Lilac.
Butler and the other street outreach workers talked about the problem in their June 2 staff meeting and agreed that much of the violence was due to an ongoing beef between crews on Derby Avenue and Read Street.
The next afternoon, Thursday June 3, Butler and Outlaw got in their cars and headed out to round up leaders in both neighborhoods. Outlaw went to Read Street. Butler went to Derby Avenue. They knew where to go to find the neighborhood leadership. They’d built relationships with them over several years.
“Our ears are to the street,” said Butler, who’s 40.
“We are the street,” said Outlaw, who’s 42.
On that Thursday, Butler and Outlaw each came back to NHFA with five men in their early 20s, the leadership of the crews based in the two neighborhoods. They had patted them down to make sure they weren’t armed.
They brought the ten young men into a room together with four tables in a rectangle. Five sat on one side. Five sat on the other. Butler and Outlaw sat on the ends. They were joined by another outreach worker, Ernie Jones (at left in photo).
“It was tense,” Outlaw said. “Very tense.”
The room erupted in threats and accusations. There were calls of “I hate you!” and promises to settle old grievances violently.
Outlaw and Butler stepped in to cool things down occasionally, but they also let both sides air their complaints. That’s part of the mediation process, Outlaw said. “First they vent, then we come in with solutions.”
“The first question we asked was, ‘What’s the problem?’” Outlaw said.
“What’s the beef?” Butler said.
It wasn’t gang or drug-related, Butler and Outlaw said. The beef dates back to the ‘80s. It’s perpetuated by a history of animosity between the neighborhoods and tit-for-tat retaliations. That’s what came up in the mediation room: back and forth accusations about real or imagined slights.
The next step was to convince the young men that the fighting could never end happily. It could end either by way of a truce, or with the intervention of “235 Church Street,” aka Superior Court, Butler told them. “Do you want them to stop the beef?”
The other option was the graveyard. Somebody was going to die if the violence didn’t stop, Butler said. “Who wants to be dealing with [Howard] K. Hill” funeral home? Butler asked them.
After two hours and a delivery of pizza and chicken wings, the two sides agreed to bury the hatchet.
“At the end of the day, they agreed it wasn’t worth it,” Outlaw said.
“Finally they’re buying into what we’re saying,” Butler said. He facilitated some handshakes and some promises not just to stop shooting bullets, but to stop shooting even dirty looks if they happen to bump into each other.
“We call that ‘face-fighting,’” Outlaw said. An angry grimace or a scornful sneer can quickly escalate to violence, he said.
“Face-fighting starts wars,” Butler said.
The handshakes and promises weren’t the end of it, Butler said. The hardest part of a truce comes when the neighborhood leaders head back to their respective turfs and have to spread the message that the beef is done. That message can be hard to hear for younger boys on the street, Butler said. They can be anxious to show they’re hard, eager to fight to earn a name for themselves. “The younger guys always start the beef after the beef is dead,” Butler said.
So far the beef has stayed dead. For that, the 10 guys who were in the room at NHFA deserve all the credit, Outlaw and Butler said. They are the ones doing the hard work of changing their habits and their neighborhood culture.
Successful mediation depends on “a high level of trust and respect for the mediator,” Butler said. “You have to be a good salesman.”
Butler said he’s a good salesman because of his past, because of “me being there, having done that.” He’s got credibility on the street.
Butler said he doesn’t like talking about his past. He said he’s “had some brushes with the law,” and “experienced incarceration.”
He carries some of the marks of his past on his body. A tattoo on his chest reads, “Built out of courage and armor.” The outside of his left forearm reads, “Loyalty.” His right reads, “Honor.” A big skull with a starred beret occupies the inside of his right forearm. “General” is written below it.
“I’m a leader,” Butler said, explaining the tattoo.
In prison, he started reading. “I was forced to read law books,” he said. “Because of some of the unwise decisions I made.”
Through reading in prison, Butler developed a taste for learning and law that’s carrying him towards a bachelor’s degree at University of New Haven. His goal is to become a probation officer.
Butler and Outlaw met in their early teens, when their families lived in Newhallville. Butler said he knows everyone in the neighborhood. “I love them. They know me.”
He uses those connections in his street outreach work. He rattled off a description of the things he does: “engaging high risk youth … save lives … decrease violence … prevent incarceration … advocate in court” for young men he’s working with.
The same is true for Outlaw, Butler said. “Juneboy can go in any neighborhood,” Butler said. He’s respected in all neighborhoods, Butler said. “He can say, ‘You, put the gun down,’ and people listen.”
Since brokering the truce, Outlaw and Butler have also been checking in on the two crews to extinguish any flare-ups. “We’re still engaged,” Outlaw said. “We still have a hand on the pulse.”
Part of follow-up is looking for alternatives to life on the street, Outlaw said. He’s helping some young men to find jobs.
Butler and Outlaw are also working to expand the horizons of the young men by organizing trips to New York City. On Sunday, Butler took four of the Read Street youth to New York City. On Monday, Juneboy took five of the Derby Avenue crew.
“We would love to bring them all together,” Butler said. But it’s too much to ask them to tolerate each other for hours on end. “We can’t force them to be friends.”
“We had a beautiful weekend,” Butler said on Tuesday. “I took them over by the Apollo. We went to 125th Street and 7th Avenue. … They’ve been fiending to get to Harlem.”
The young men bought sneakers and clothes. One bought a couple of outfits for his young son. They went out to a nice dinner.
“This was the reward,” Butler said. “It was like another world to them.”
Some of the young men have never left New Haven, said Shirley Ellis-West, the head of the street outreach program at NHFA. For them, their neighborhood is their world and their identity.
Outlaw said the trip is a chance to show the young men that your neighborhood affiliation doesn’t need to define who you are. For instance, when he takes them to Harlem, nobody will challenge them for treading on their turf. “Nobody in Harlem is going to be like ‘What are you doing around here?’”
Since the truce was brokered, Butler said, he’s been able to hang out with the young men he works with later into the evening. They play basketball together. There’s less fear of a fight looming at every corner.
Even the police have noticed the change, Butler said. “Nothing’s going on. No drive-bys.”
Ellis-West reached over and rapped her knuckles on a nearby tabletop. “I always knock on wood.”