A City That Pays Criminals To Behave

Kamari Ridgle (right) tells Michael Okwu that growing up in the streets gave him a business mindset, and he's now going to college to hopefully break into the world of legitimate business.

RICHMOND, Calif. – Even by the grim standards of this city, Kamari Ridgle grew up fast and hard.
A drug dealer at age 12 and jailed for carrying an assault rifle to school at 13, Ridgle says he was “one of the people out there doing most of the shootings” back in 2010, when this industrial city of 100,000 was one of the most violent in America and gunplay between warring neighborhoods claimed dozens of lives.

Program director Devone Boggan (left, in hat) meets with ONS fellows.

  In May that year, Ridgle’s lifestyle caught up with him.
“I got shot on Fifth and Silver 22 times,” said Ridgle, now 19.
His own cousin had set him up to be killed. The attack by some cross-town rivals in broad daylight left him paralyzed from the waist down.
“I think one of the hardest things for me was to let it go,” said Ridgle, seated in his wheelchair. “If I was shot and I was able to walk … I’d probably be on somebody’s corner, shooting at 'em.”
But as Ridgle was leaving the hospital after a year of surgery and rehabilitation, he was won over by agents from the Office of Neighborhood Safety, a city program that takes some unusual steps to prevent gun violence: building close relationships with some of Richmond's most dangerous young men, helping them find jobs and counseling them at City Hall.

Some ONS fellows have traveled as far as the Middle East and South Africa. These young men from rival Richmond neighborhoods visited some stables in Northern California.

But there’s another step that raises some eyebrows: Over an 18-month period, if the men demonstrate better behavior, ONS offers them up to $1,000 a month in cash, plus opportunities to travel beyond Richmond.
While critics insist this amounts to rewarding criminal behavior, backers of the program counter that the strategy has yielded extraordinary results where so many others have failed, and that its lessons can be applied to stem gun violence in other volatile cities.
Program Director Devone Boggan says that when the city hired him in 2007, desperate times called for drastic measures.
“Almost every day someone was being shot and there was multiple gunfire every day,” Boggan said. “I mean it was literally popping. It was on fire, no question about that.”

Read more: http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/6/6/a-city-that-payscriminalstobehave.html


Courtesy:Al-Jazeera