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"Season of Peace'' opens anew in Boston today

E-mail|Link|Comments () November 27, 2009 02:29 PM

By Maria Cramer, Globe Staff

Peace activists and Boston area law enforcement officials today launched the third annual Season of Peace, the winter campaign that calls on gangs in the city to put down their guns and agree to a "ceasefire" between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.

For the next five weeks, police, ministers, and any young people they can recruit to help will be handing out cards promoting the campaign in schools, in barber shops, beauty salons and convenience stores.

The MBTA has agreed to set up posters advertising the campaign on the backs of 200 city buses.

"It's important to send this message to the street level because that's where the violence occurs," said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, executive director of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, which is organizing the campaign.

Flanked by probation officers, Boston police, and MBTA police, Brown said that in prior years, the city had an average of seven homicides in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, when alcohol-fueled parties can lead to violence and emotions generally run high, leading people to settle scores for past shootings.

In 2007, when the peace initiative was launched, the city saw three homicides. But the following year, the numbers climbed back up to at least seven homicides for that time period. For 2008, organizers set up a link on Facebook.com. They also used Facebook to outline their peace-making efforts this summer.

This year, the number of homicides is on pace to decline more than 20 percent compared with last year at the same time. As of yesterday, there were 44 homicides this year compared with 57 at the same time last year.

At the press conference, which was held at the new Mattapan bus station on River Street, stood Ezzard Turner, the 24-year-old cousin of Soheil Turner, a 15-year-old Roxbury boy who was fatally shot waiting for a bus to school in May.

Turner, who works with troubled middle school age children in Grove Hall, said he was encouraged by the decrease in crime, but still apprehensive.

"That means some of the work we've been doing has been coming to fruition but we still have work to do," Turner said. "I would hate to see another family go through what my family is going through."