A dozen kids from Banana Kelly High School have decided that being depressed about the violence in their neighborhoods was pointless.
Instead, the students from the Longwood school are drawing attention to the problem by staging public events through a national anti-violence organization called United Playaz, in an effort to get the public involved.
About 20 students and volunteers staged an anti-violence rally on the hottest day of the year at the corner of Hunts Point Avenue and Southern Boulevard on July 24, seeking to get people to sign a pledge to help raise awareness about the need for peaceful solutions to conflict between young people.
The organizers used shock tactics to get the public’s attention, using police tape to cordon off an area of the heavily traveled artery near the Bruckner Expressway. Under a sheet behind the yellow tape lay a mannequin covered in mock blood stains, its shoes protruding.
“I don’t understand how they’re getting guns these days,” said Hunts Point resident Julissa Rivera, 15, a sophomore at Banana Kelly. “We’re here to let people know we’re tired of seeing teens die.”
The adults who lead the group say falling crime rates don’t reflect the violence that continues to plague young people.
“Three or four kids have come in crying because they lost someone,” said Cassandra Ayala, 35, volunteer co-director of the local United Playaz branch.
Ayala, who has lived most of her life in Hunts Point and Longwood, helps organize anti-violence events and counsels the students. She worries that young people from high crime neighborhoods may not always react quickly enough in walking away from trouble when they get together.
“Okay, you can go to a party, but we’re so desensitized we go to trouble, we don’t move away from it,” she said, adding that she is skeptical of police declarations that crime has gone down in recent years.
“Unfortunately, things are still the same,” she said, adding that crime rates and statistics don’t tell the whole story.
One former Banana Kelly student who attended the event remembered the 2009 shooting death of a teen named Javon in Longwood. She thinks conflict resolution could have prevented the killing.
“It was crazy, I had just seen him early that day,” said Felicia Sanchez, 19, who graduated from Banana Kelly in 2009 and will attend college in Maryland this fall.
“He was nice too, everybody knew him. Everybody was just shocked,” Sanchez said, recalling that the shooting stemmed from angry words exchanged with other young people at a party, prompting the other kids to pursue, shoot and kill the victim. “My friends who live in the hood are more cautious now,” she added.
The students in United Playaz meet once weekly throughout the year, and have participated in political events, including trips to Albany to convince lawmakers to strengthen gun control laws.
“This is meaningful, it’s not just something to do,” Felicia Sanchez insisted.
A version of this story appeared in the August 2010 issue of The Hunts Point Express.