Heavy media exposure led to a public outcry, which prompted the city and state to act. Then-mayor Wellington Webb created the Safe City Office and set aside $1 million for grants to programs that worked with troubled youth. Then-governor Roy Romer called a special session of the legislature that resulted in tougher laws for youth offenders and money to expand juvenile prisons, and in 1994, lawmakers created a $7.6 million fund for community programs aimed at keeping kids away from gangs.
In Denver, a few organizations were already working with youth involved in violent gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips, which had spread to Colorado from California in the mid-'80s. They included the Reverend Leon Kelly's Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives, founded in 1986, and the Gang Rescue and Support Project (GRASP), founded in 1991. But these groups were competing for the same fundraising dollars, so in 1993 they decided to hash things out.
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Paul Callanan, GRID project manager, says GRID isn't about one person or one organization; it's a collaboration.
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"There were a handful of agencies providing various services at various levels around this gang-related issue, and they were sometimes working at cross purposes with each other," recalls Regina Huerter, now executive director of the Denver Crime Prevention and Control Commission. "Very quickly, we decided we needed to have more people at the table and that we needed to coordinate."
Thus, the Metro Denver Gang Coalition was born. It included Open Door, GRASP and the Spot, a now-shuttered hip-hop-focused youth drop-in center, as well as faith leaders, school administrators and social-service providers. "We would sit in a circle and just kind of talk about different issues taking place on the streets and what different agencies were doing, and we'd try to network," Huerter says.
Over time, the groups pooled their resources to apply for grants. In 1999 the Coalition won a three-year federal grant that allowed it to hire a few staff members, including Francisco Gallardo, the program director of GRASP. The staff hosted training sessions, built a database of service providers and organized a crisis team.
But the grant money dried up in 2002, and state lawmakers — facing a budget shortfall that same year — vetoed a request to put $7.6 million into the special fund they'd created in 1994, which had since been renamed the Tony Grampsas Youth Services Program. Without sufficient dollars to pay the staff, the Coalition fizzled out.
Huerter takes the blame, though no one else seems to fault her. "I was running the juvenile diversion program for the DA's office, and I didn't have the time to keep it going, so we largely stopped meeting," Huerter says. "The agencies, both gang-specific and non-gang-specific, continued their work to the degree they could."
Then, on New Year's Day 2007, another high-profile gang-related shooting reverberated through Denver. Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams was killed in a drive-by after some of his entourage got into an altercation with gang members at a Golden Triangle nightclub. Gang murders were once again in the headlines, and the Denver City Council granted District Attorney Mitch Morrissey $350,000 to help solve the crime.
Shortly thereafter, the Metro Denver Gang Coalition reconvened. To say its rebirth was the result of the murder of a sports star would be to discount all of the non-famous people — the brothers, sons and teenage fathers — who'd been killed in the intervening five years, the group's members say. But the attention and resources heaped onto the Williams homicide acted as a catalyst. "Those working in it knew it never went away," Huerter says. "But for me, it was an opportunity to say, 'Can we please come back together again and try to deal with this issue in a comprehensive way?'"
The first meeting drew more than a hundred people, though the number dwindled as 2007 wore on. Lauren Casteel, the vice president of philanthropic partnerships at the Denver Foundation, which awards millions of dollars each year to arts, health, education and human-services organizations, was at the table, and in July 2007, the Denver Foundation gave the Coalition a $16,173 grant to help pay for outreach workers. The next year, the Foundation gave $65,611 to the city's Crime Prevention and Control Commission to hire someone to coordinate the development of Denver's version of a comprehensive gang model. The Coalition researched programs in other cities, such as the Boston Gun Project and Chicago's CeaseFire, and brainstormed its own ideas.
But there were disagreements. "You have turf issues and you have philosophical issues," GRID's Callanan says. "The prevention school is saying, 'We need prevention.' The intervention school is saying, 'We need to work with the older guys.' And suppression is saying, 'We need to hammer these guys.'" In the end, GRID tackled all of it.
"Our project is not to keep all kids out of gangs or to eradicate gangs," Callanan says. "Those are two impossible goals."
Instead, GRID has four realistic ones: to reduce violence in northeast and southwest Denver; improve collaboration among agencies; change the behavior of youth who receive intervention services; and change the attitude that gang violence is normal in certain neighborhoods. The $2.2 million grant that Denver received in 2010 from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention allowed the real planning process to begin. After a few years of behind-the-scenes negotiating and gradually rolling out different partnerships, the entire project launched in January of this year. Though it's housed in the Safe City Office, a steering committee oversees its direction.
