For more than a year, GRID has coordinated joint operations between police, parole and probation. Using crime-mapping technology, the police figure out which neighborhoods — and which specific blocks — are hot that month, and law enforcement pays a visit to the offenders who live there and have been identified as high-risk gang members. "We let them know, 'There was violence in your area, and if you're involved, we're going to find out,'" Prendergast says.
Prendergast says GRID has formalized the relationship between the various agencies. Whereas before he may have known a few cops whom he could count on, there's now a steady stream of information passing between probation and police.
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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For example, a while ago, the police got a call from an elementary school in northeast Denver reporting that Hispanic students weren't coming to school because they were afraid to walk by a particular house. Black gang members lived there, and they were taunting the kids; the school suspected it was partly racial and partly because the gangsters assumed they were associated with a rival gang. The police pulled the homeowner's information and ran the last name by probation. Prendergast's unit had an offender with the same name, and the officers asked him if he knew the residents.
"He said, 'That's not my house, but it's my family,'" Prendergast says. The offender was an O.G. who'd been dealing drugs since he was eleven but who had always been careful not to get too greedy — or get caught. He was finally arrested when a cop pulled him over for a traffic stop and found a tiny bit of crack in his pocket.
The probation officers told him about the trouble and asked if he could help. "A couple days later, he comes in and says, 'They're moving,'" Prendergast says. "Apparently, he went there and said, 'You're bringing in heat. Unless you want your world to fall apart, leave the kids alone.' Because he's an O.G., they decided to move.
"That's an example of how GRID works together to solve a problem."
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Much of GRID, however, focuses on intervention. The six outreach workers are key to that strategy. None of them works directly for GRID; they're paid by GRID funds but are housed in two existing anti-gang organizations: GRASP and the Prodigal Son Initiative, a nonprofit started by former Blood Terrance Roberts that offers after-school programs, field trips and a safe place to hang out for the kids who live in northeast Park Hill.
At first, Roberts wanted nothing to do with GRID. Like Reverend Kelly, he prefers to direct his efforts toward prevention, not intervention.
Those efforts are manifested on a sunny Sunday morning in June. Just after 9 a.m., Roberts pulls up to the Prodigal Son headquarters, at East 33rd Avenue and Hudson Street, across the street from where Crips burned down the Holly Square Shopping Center in 2008. He shares the formerly abandoned building with state senator Michael Johnston, who's attended and helped organize several of the recent meetings about gang violence. The low-slung brick building is in the heart of Bloods territory, and a week or two after Johnston moved in, a shooting left three bullet holes in the siding.
Today is the first of Prodigal Son's five summer field trips — and the most unpopular. The kids would rather go paintballing or ride roller coasters at Elitch Gardens than go on a hike at Chautauqua Park in Boulder. By 9:30, only two thirteen-year-old girls have shown up.
"This is the kind of stuff I want you guys to be doing!" Roberts tells them.
"I know," one says, "but people be lazy!"
Roberts's cell phone buzzes; two boys want to come, too. A volunteer picks them up and brings them to Prodigal Son, but there's a problem: One of the boys is wearing slip-on sandals, a surefire way to twist an ankle while hiking. Roberts is quick with a solution, digging out a pair of sneakers from a trash bag full of shoe donations for Haiti.
None of the kids are expert hikers — one girl has never hiked in her life — but they're determined once they hit the trail. The boys run ahead, sprinting past experts with Camelbacks and families with dogs. They're quiet on the way up, and on the way down, they talk about Biggie and Tupac. If they notice that they're the only African-Americans on the trail, they don't mention it. When asked why they decided to come, one boy shrugs: "It gave me something to do," he says. Roberts, who was shot in the back during the Summer of Violence, knows all too well what the alternatives are.
"Should we let those two young men become Bloods?" he asks along the trail. "Why would you even allow a kid to get in a gang and then hope they choose to get out?"
Roberts was also wary of GRID's funding structure, a concern shared by Kelly. "When GRID came through, it showed some promise," Kelly says. "We'd have meetings with them, and it was said that certain resources and money would be given to our neighborhoods. But come to find out, it didn't turn out that way."
