'Us vs. them' becomes 'We'
CHELSEA - Frank Garvin had heard the rumors about Molly Baldwin.
She was hiding fugitives. Her workers were lying for gang members in court. Her outfit was selling drugs and guns.
When he became Chelsea police chief in 2001, Garvin wanted nothing to do with her.
"She was an agitator," Garvin recalls. "Let her hug trees and save another whale, but stay away from me."
Here was Garvin, a former homicide detective, trying to clear out Chelsea's rotten kids - the gang bangers and drug dealers, the thieves and taggers. And there was Baldwin and her crew, hanging out with those same kids on the corners, showing up in court to get them breaks, coddling them at Roca, the nonprofit Baldwin had started in 1988 to give counseling and jobs to high-risk youth.
Garvin's approach was "lock 'em up and let's go from there," he says. "They were just a cancer, and we had to deal with them."
Baldwin gave them chances. And if they screwed up, she gave them more chances. She and her street workers were up in their faces night after night until they agreed to come inside. And then she stayed on them till they got into her training and job programs. And when they failed there, she went after them to try again. She reckoned she could turn around a lot of the hard cases in three years. Some needed 10. That was OK, too.
She made some enemies. Five-foot-two and fierce, she had no problem marching over to the police station to butt heads.
"I was an us-and-them kind of thinker," she says. "We were so angry all the time, defending these kids."
Roca grew, without much help from the police. But the standoff began to nag at Baldwin.
"I realized, we're full of it," Baldwin says. "Pushing them away maybe made me feel good, but we weren't making any progress."
For their part, the police kept putting kids away. But the battle began to nag at Garvin.
"We would solve a case and I'd feel good I brought the victim's family some closure," he says. "But two days or a week later I'd see the same thing again. I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach: 'What are we doing here?' "
City Manager Jay Ash brokered a meeting between Garvin and Baldwin a few years ago. Garvin remained wary of Baldwin, but they started meeting to talk about the youths they were both seeing. Garvin was realizing that a lot of the kids he once called a cancer came into this world with troubled families and little hope.
Baldwin had long used "peacemaking circles" to resolve conflicts in the community. Participants passed a feather around so whoever held it could speak without interruption. Baldwin wanted Garvin to come to a circle. He became the object of her dogged persistence. Garvin had come to like Baldwin, but he wasn't going to sit in any woo-woo circles.
"What the hell is that, 'We pass a feather round?' " Garvin recalls saying. "I'm the police chief!"
Garvin sat in the circle.
"This is it," he says he realized. Sit kids in a big group with their parents and their victims, hold them accountable for tagging or thieving, let everybody say their piece, agree on restitution, and suddenly people start thinking of each other differently. And it's a whole lot more satisfying and economical than a court appearance and jail time.
In 20 years, about 15,000 kids have come through Roca's doors. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation awarded the program a few million dollars a couple of years ago. Roca's practices have been adopted nationally. They're big.
Frank Garvin retired last year. If you're looking for him, you can find the blue-eyed, gray-haired former police chief in jeans and sneakers in a small office in a tan brick building on Park Street in Chelsea.
He works for Molly Baldwin now.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com
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