With a gold coffin shining in the brilliant afternoon sun and a towering, blood-stained candle looming in the background, the Rev. Willie Ray said he was tired of violence in Baltimore.
“The senseless killing has to stop,” he said.
Ray, founder of the Stop The Killing Coalition, was joined by several dozen supporters on the median strip that divides Calvert Street in front of the Mitchell Courthouse. Calling on the lunchtime crowd to join hands, Ray said the only way to prevent violence was “one corner at a time.”
“We will ask every pastor, minister and community leader to adopt and reclaim a violent drug-infested corner,” he said.
Calling his proposal the One Church, One Corner program, Ray said he also would ask community leaders to purchase and renovate a vacant house to make it a “haven of safety.”
Frank Conaway, clerk of the Baltimore City Circuit Court, who also spoke at the rally, said the increased violence in the city may be related to gang activity. “Gangs are beginning to organize in Baltimore City,” he said. “They seem to be cropping up all over the place.”
But Conaway, who ran for mayor in the last election, said the rally was not just about the increase in city homicides. “People always check the homicide numbers, but the shootings are a problem, too,” he said. “We have a lot people who end up wheelchairs,” he said, adding, “and they still end up dealing drugs from a wheelchair.”
Police spokesman Detective Donny Moses said there have been 94 homicides this year, compared to 83 at the same time last year.
In addition to initiatives Ray outlined at the rally, Conaway said he has also been trying to reach young people with a program he initiated three years ago called SCRATCH, or Seeing Criminals Raided at the Courthouse. The purpose of the program is to show the “true cost of crime,” Conaway said, by bringing city schoolchildren down to the courthouse to see “drug dealers in shackles,” he said.
“They think the drug dealers are heroes, ” he said. “We want to show them how they end up.”
