Boston and its surrounding cities are no strangers to gang violence, and recent trends have suggested that the situation is not improving.
The Boston Globe reported this week that 81 children ages 10-24 were the victims of homicides in 2005 in Massachusetts as compared to 46 in 2000. It also reported that 28,000 Massachusetts students in grades 9-12 were involved in gangs during the last school year.
In one of the most recent incidents, three Roxbury residents, one of them a 68-year-old grandmother, were caught in gun crossfire and rushed to the hospital.
On the streets of East Somerville, tensions between gangs manifest themselves in ways as small as clothing choices: those supporting El Salvadorian gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) wear blue and those opposing it wear red.
But unlike in the larger Bay State, the situation in Somerville may be showing signs of improvement.
When the Center for Teen Empowerment (TE) first arrived in Somerville in 2004, its members thought the situation was bleak. The organization is dedicated to inspiring youth to think about the problems in their community and ways to mend them.
"Kids were dying left and right," TE Associate Program Coordinator Danny McLaughlin said.
MS-13, in particular, had a strong presence and many areas meant for children had become gang hangouts. H-Block (a Haitian gang) and the Bloods also were visible.
Still, Somerville Police Department Public Information Officer Paul Upton said that gangs have never been a tremendous problem in Somerville.
He said that there is and always has been a "limited presence [of] organized street gangs" that is comprised mostly of "individual members traveling through."
While a recent armed robbery has raised security concerns among Tufts students, Tufts University Police Department Captain Mark Keith said his office had "no reason to believe" that it was gang-related.
While Upton could not provide any specific statistics on how many local crimes stem from gang activity, he said that they constitute "a miniscule percentage" of the overall crime numbers.
"The majority of violent crimes are not known to be or believed to be gang-related, [but I'm] not going to hide that it happens," Upton said.
Even so, the "not known" category may be more expansive than imagined. The Boston Police Department has estimated, for example, that while 27 percent of shootings in Boston in 2005 were attributed to gang violence, 55 percent or more would be a better guess.
Regardless of how prevalent the violence is, a number of local initiatives aim to curb whatever remains of a gang presence in Somerville.
The Charles E. Shannon, Jr. Community Safety Initiative is one component of this anti-gang campaign.
Run through the Executive Office of Public Safety, it received $11 million in Governor Deval Patrick's May budget.
Somerville received $86,610 in Shannon grants for this year, $48,000 of which went to the Somerville Police Department (SPD). The rest went to Teen Empowerment.
While Somerville has not received its allocation for next year, city Public Information Officer Jackie Rossetti expects that it will be similar to last year's.
With the help of these funds, the SPD has added a number of its own programs with anti-gang goals. One of them brings local fourth and fifth grade students to the station to interact with officers and learn about gangs, crisis management and other issues.
"Mostly we're targeting kids before they get into gangs as opposed to after because it's too late at that point," Upton said.
With the help of these programs, Somerville has been able to cut down on its gang activity. McLaughlin believes that because of them MS-13 has less authority in East Somerville and the youth center, one of its former strongholds, is "safe" again.
Part of the success, especially that of TE, stems from Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone's commitment to youth programs as a solution to gang violence.
"A main focus of my administration has always been to increase and improve youth services," Curtatone said in an e-mail.
He has attended some of the events sponsored by TE, including last spring's Youth Peace Conference, which focused on issues such as street violence and what could be done to stop it.
Even though there has been a decrease in the violence, McLaughlin says the biggest problem facing Somerville now is the "sense of hopelessness" that residents feel.
Curtatone, however, disagreed.
"I feel very strongly that 'hopelessness' would be absolutely the wrong label to apply to the attitude of the young people I see today in our schools, in our streets and in our community groups," he said. "I see hope and promise in the faces of our city's young people."
