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Meet the People Walking St. Louis's Most Dangerous Streets to Defuse Gang Violence

A local clergyman makes a point of walking the street every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to do his part to keep the peace.

Ruth Garnett, Reverend Ken McKoy, Reverend Cornelius Brown, and Dr. Reynaldo Anderson in North St. Louis. Photo by the author

St. Louis is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. In the spring of 2013, the so-called North City—where much of the killing takes place—had two neighborhoods on the list of the "25 Most Dangerous"in the country. This part of St. Louis has been called one of the worst ghettos in America, where drugs, poverty, and violence reign supreme, and brutality, narcotics, and gangs are a way of life.

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Unfortunately, the area has been making headlines again this summer with the murder rate reportedly on the rise. St. Louis may not have the same urgent grip on the cultural imagination as nearby Ferguson—the old stomping ground of former cop Darren Wilson and late teenager Michael Brown—but it's in a bad way. While local politicians and city officials bemoan the the effects of the drug trade, law enforcement is busy implementing various anticrime methods to stop the flow of heroin. Last month, a local man perched himself atop a billboard in protest, vowing not to come down until the city went a whole week without a murder (he finally came down on Sunday, even though the gap in killings was a few hours short of seven days). But despite all the discussion, posturing, and police tactics, the violence continues.

Enter Reverend Ken McKoy of the Progressive African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, who three months ago started organizing walks down the Hodiamont streetcar tracks that cut through the middle of North City. No longer occupied by streetcars, the tracks now serve as the main strip where addicts, drug dealers, and gang bangers congregate—and where some of them die when disputes turn violent.

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"I did a funeral for a 17-year-old whom I had baptized when he was 14," Reverend McKoy told me. "He got caught up in some kind of little drug thing, he was beaten to death, rolled up in a rug, doused in bleach and thrown into a ravine. I remember how absolutely, I mean, I felt like a complete failure. He had called me and asked me to help him get a job, and I don't think I looked as hard as I should have, because at the time, I swear, I didn't know he was caught up like that. I don't think I worked hard enough. I should have done more. And at that point I decided I needed to do something, but what that something was I didn't know."

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McKoy—whose own son is a Crip who was hit in the leg during a shooting—now journeys through the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 10:30 PM to 2 AM. As he told me, "That's when all the action occurs—it's a different world out there around midnight."

On Friday night, I drove down to North City and met the Reverend at the Burger King on Kingshighway and Delmar to see for myself. We were joined by three of his colleagues and set out on the walk down the Hodiamont tracks, armed with only matching yellow reflective vests as we started the sojourn into the night.

I didn't really know what to expect, though I recently lived in Dismas House—a halfway house just a couple of blocks away—when I first came home from prison. Still, it's one thing to pass through an area in a car and another to walk with the Reverend and his partners.

"I wanted to feel like I was doing something more then just going and listening to a sermon and giving somebody some money," Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, a professor of communications at the city's Harris-Stowe State University, told me as we got on our way. "I just wanted to get out and walk around and meet people at night [because] that is when all the stuff was going on.I don't have to rely on the news to tell me what is going on in this neighborhood because I was here."

Anderson believes in getting his research in the field—not something many academics are inclined to do when the "field" is north St. Louis. We walked up Kingshighway, which is the main thoroughfare, and turned onto the Hodiamont tracks. Immediately after we walked past the barriers that blocks cars from the street, we were surrounded by a group of locals—older men, a couple of women, and a few younger guys. Reverend McKoy engaged them promptly.

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"Hey, how you all doing?" he asked. "I'm looking for my friend Mario. Have you all seen him?"

A few of the gentlemen were friendly and shook hands with the Reverend and the others. A few even shook my hand, but I noticed a lot of the younger guys dispersed quickly. One older black man, who was clearly intoxicated, told the group, "Don't tell him nothing," referring to McKoy. He turned to the Reverend and said, "You can't come around here asking for people."

To his credit, Reverend McKoy just smiled.

"Mario is my friend. I haven't seen him. If you all see him, tell him I'm looking for him," he replied. We walked on down the track, the night becoming more complete as dilapidated houses towered over us ominously.

Ruth Garnett, an activist and writer on the African American experience, was with us on patrol. As the only woman in the group that night, she had her own reasons for walking the tracks. "We are hoping to engage the young people, and if they want to turn around what they are doing, we can give them hope. It's about providing them a sense of identity that doesn't culminate with self destruction," Garnett told me. "It's a mental health crisis—it's been this way for three decades or more, and the suicide rate and the despair and the drug cocktails that fuel this irrational behavior are basically coping mechanisms that are really deadly."

Still, I felt quite secure on the walk. The Reverend McKoy emanates a sense of confidence and warmth that seemed to infect those around us. We were accompanied by another reverend, Cornelius Brown, and together they went out of their way to engage the street walkers, addicts, drug dealers, alcoholics, gang bangers, and derelicts of the night. This isn't something I'd have been up for by myself, but in their presence, I felt pretty comfortable in the hoods of North City.

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Of course, some don't receive the peaceful message too kindly. One group of three men we encountered were drinking beers and a whiff of pot smoke lingered in the air. The reverends engaged them. One was open to talk, one seemed nonchalant, but the third was a bit hostile, telling our group, "You need to move on… We're not trying to hear it."

Again the Reverend smiled and kept it moving. He wasn't there to argue or even to preach—just to encourage an end to the violence and help those looking for another way of life. We had a bunch of encounters, and the two reverends handled all the conversations with tremendous care and delicacy, even with those who were clearly out of their minds on drugs. But I was surprised how receptive a lot of the people were to their message.

We didn't witness anything too crazy that night, but Reverend Brown described some of the stickier situations he and McKoy had faced in the past.

"There was this one young man pacing back and forth, he was so geared up he wanted to kill someone," Reverend Brown said. "He kept raising up his shirt to show his gun, and Reverend McKoy grabbed him and said, 'Nah man. I don't want to lose you like that.' We continued to talk to him and convinced him to go home." It seems the denizens of the block just want to know that someone cares, and Reverend McKoy and his group offer that sense of community.

"I made up my mind this is what I need to do," McKoy explained. "Going out at night on a regular basis, just engaging and challenging people—I decided I need to get out in the streets and do this… Missouri has a real problem, not only when you talk about racial profiling and police brutality and militarization and all that stuff, but St. Louis has real problem when you talk about fratricide and social homicide."

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This night's watch holds no illusions about the community of young gang-bangers and drug addicts they're trying to reach—or the enormity of the challenge.

"We know exactly who is doing the killing," McKoy told me. "A lot of these dudes are on prescription stuff—percocets… That's what a lot of the spontaneous crime is about. It's not necessarily something they sit down and plan. It's very spontaneous: They kill each other over that kind of stuff because they're tripping on those drugs.

"We have a major gang problem," he continues. "We have a lot of gang activity here, and you mix that with drugs, you combine that with very few economic opportunities, failing public schools, the whole nine yards, and it is a cocktail for disaster."

McKoy was a bit spooked the first night he went out on this patrol.

"Before I brought anybody out, I walked this whole track by myself to get a feel for it, to walk the whole area—Fountain Park, Wells Place, Lewis Place—all dangerous areas where people can't come outside because they are shooting so much," McKoy said. "The first night was very intense. There was like 15 to 20 addicts walking the track. It was like something out of the Night of the Living Dead to see them walking out of the mist. I was a little nervous."

As the murder rate in North City continues to draw headlines, one man with a small group of allies is out in the thick of it. McKoy has vowed to keep going out every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night at a time when many of the people out on the street are up to no good. The only question is whether the powers that be will match his urgency and deliver the resources St. Louis so desperately needs to break this cycle of violence.

Seth Ferranti is currently raising money for a comic series on the Supreme Team. Follow him on Twitter.