James Chapman was in the back of his T-shirt shop in northeast Park Hill, finishing up a custom airbrush job, when he heard gunshots. Seconds later, a young man came stumbling through the front door, dripping blood on the yellowing linoleum floor.
Bryan Butler, Terrance Roberts and John Lewis of the Prodigal Son Initiative work with youth in northeast Park Hill.
Johnny Santos, an outreach worker with the Gang Rescue and Support Project, likes that GRID brings all agencies to the table.
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"I said, 'Are you shot?'" Chapman recalls.
He said he was, and Chapman, a thin, older man who uses a motorized wheelchair, directed him to the bathroom. He gave the kid a towel, told him to put pressure on the spot where the bullet had ripped a hole in his face, and called the police. "I was like, 'God, don't let him die, and don't let nobody else come through that front door,'" says Chapman, who is used to gang violence in his neighborhood.
The cops responded quickly. They turned Chapman's crowded shop into a crime scene as spectators gathered in the parking lot outside, despite the 100-degree heat. The investigation took a while, and Chapman didn't leave until just after 8 p.m. As he drove home, he saw more police cars streaming down the streets, sirens blaring.
They were headed to City Park, where Denver police officer Celena Hollis had just been fatally shot as she tried to break up a fight at City Park Jazz. The man who was arrested in that case claimed to be a member of a gang, according to reports.
For many people, the combination of this high-profile tragedy and smaller incidents like the one outside Chapman's store has brought back memories of a string of gang shootings in 1993 and what the Rocky Mountain News then dubbed the "Summer of Violence." The police have hesitated to say the fight in City Park was gang-related, and Mayor Michael Hancock has tried to downplay people's fears.
"We don't believe that we are seeing evidence of another Summer of Violence, but we certainly aren't going to sit back and allow it to continue to grow in that direction," he said on June 25, the morning after Officer Hollis was killed.
Still, the Denver Police Department has reported six murders related to, or motivated by, gang activity between January and May. That's up from five deaths during the same period last year and three each in 2008, 2009 and 2010. There have also been several non-fatal shootings and stabbings tied to gangs, but the police haven't released the specific numbers. They haven't released much information about the shooting outside Chapman's store, either, though they have confirmed that it's being investigated by the department's gang unit.
Police chalk up the violence to personal beefs between specific gang members rather than a gang war. But the sheer number of shootings — and the fact that some happened in the middle of the day, in plain view of bystanders — has caused alarm, prompting neighborhood meetings, candlelight vigils and citywide forums.
To coordinate these efforts, the city is pushing a relatively new program called the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver, or GRID. The program began in earnest in 2010, when Denver was awarded a $2.2 million federal grant to develop "a comprehensive gang model." It's a way of attacking the gang problem by making connections between agencies that deal with the different causes, results and symptoms of the scourge.
Those agencies include neighborhood groups campaigning for more after-school programs and therapists who help kids in gang-riddled neighborhoods deal with stress. Cops, probation and parole officers, clergy members, social workers and doctors are also involved. The idea is that everyone wants the same thing: less gang violence.
But previous collective efforts at dealing with gang violence have fallen apart or faded away, and some of Denver's long-running gang prevention and intervention groups are skeptical of GRID and resentful of how much money the city was awarded.
GRID project manager Paul Callanan, a former probation officer, understands that, and he's careful to give credit to the groups that have been fighting gang violence for years. GRID is not trying to put existing programs out of business and create better ones, he says. Instead, the project is about evaluating the services Denver already has, eradicating duplication, filling in the gaps and fostering partnerships between agencies that are doing good work alone but could be doing great work together.
"We're asking all these agencies to take a different look at how they're addressing gang violence," Callanan explains, "and to not just say, 'We've always done it this way.'"
GRID could get its first real test this summer if temperatures and tempers remain hot.
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To understand Denver's response to gang violence, you have to go back to the so-called Summer of Violence. That year, 74 people were murdered in the city. Homicides were actually down from the previous year, but the summer of '93 saw several high-profile shootings that claimed innocent victims, including kids accidentally shot in drive-bys and a ten-month-old hit by a stray bullet at the Denver Zoo. Many shootings and assaults were tied to gangs, and the Denver Post reported that nearly half of the homicide victims were teenagers. The Rocky later reported that nearly one out of every four murder suspects arrested in Denver in 1993 was a juvenile male.
