Ex-gang members draw on their past to stop Fort Worth shootings before they happen
When Rodney McIntosh talks with men in Fort Worth’s east side gangs, he knows what their life is like. He’s from Stop Six, he used to be in a gang and he has been to prison twice — once for drugs and another for robbery. He intimately understands the attraction.
And he understands how to stop them from escalating fights or pulling the trigger.
It’s why he now leads the city’s newly formed VIP FW program with the goal to stop violent confrontations before they begin and to show violent men another way of life.
The program is modeled after one in Richmond, California, which uses ex-convicts instead of police to intervene and mediate conflicts. Violent crime has dropped 70% in the Bay Area town since the program, Advanced Peace, began in the mid-2000s.
“The second the police get involved with the program is the second it stops working,” McIntosh, who is now a church pastor, said recently.
The program was announced to City Council members on Aug. 14, a little more than a year after the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported on a particularly violent 2019 summer. About 10 shootings in one month were tied to a gang feud and three people were killed.
In trying to find a solution to the violence, the Star-Telegram spoke with leaders and participants of the Advanced Peace program.
The newspaper presented its findings to Fort Worth city councilwoman Kelly Allen Gray, who then asked her colleagues to explore establishing a similar program. VIP FW was formed and McIntosh was asked to lead it after he showed up to several council meetings to decry police brutality.
He told council members that he wanted to find a solution. Then he became one.
“If I can save one mother from that pain, if I can save one grandmother, one son from feeling what I felt when my brother was killed ... if I can save a family from that pain, then maybe it’s all worth it,” he said. “My heart is tied to this.”
A solution
McIntosh, 44, will spend the next year building trust in Allen Street corridor and the Stop Six, Eastwood, Meadowbrook, Hattie and Morningside neighborhoods. Fixing the violence won’t happen overnight.
Mentors will rely on residents to tell them when there’s a conflict. McIntosh said he and the two other mentors — Torey Franklin and Marvin Duckett, both 44 — work mostly with adults who are already in the thick of gang life.
“Most programs target troubled kids, or kids who might get into trouble,” he said. “Working with VIP Fort Worth isn’t a job for just anybody because the goal of our program is to look for the most violent young men. Our goal is to start to engage a demographic that other people overlook. We say we need to stop gang violence, but nobody wants to do this work.”
McIntosh said he’s looking for the men who are running the streets so he can show them another way to live. And it’s why police aren’t involved in the program. McIntosh and others in the program have to rely on the trust the community gives them, and if officers work with them, that trust is shattered.
“This is a program that’s a bunch of former felons and former gang members trying to help and do better for our community,” he said. “Since we don’t believe the police can change our streets, let us try. Give us the opportunity to assist and help young men and approach them in a way that the police can’t.”
During his council presentation, Fort Worth Police Deputy Chief Neil Noakes echoed those statements by saying, “We’re not going to arrest our way out of violent crime.” But McIntosh said convincing the city not to involve officers has been a struggle.
“We really have to try this a different way,” he said.
McIntosh said he hopes to help set the men up with educational opportunities, and teach them financial literacy and conflict resolution.
“I want to give them an opportunity to get out of the city of Fort Worth and so they can see what else is out there,” he said. “We want to connect men from the south side with men from the east side so we can show them they have more similarities than differences.”
He asked for the Crime Control and Prevention District Board to approve up to $287,500 for two more outreach workers and fund training, consulting and administrative costs. McIntosh also applied for a Department of Justice grant to help boost funding.
Though the program is still in its infancy, McIntosh and his partners have already made a difference. By the Aug. 14 council presentation, the team had already talked with 175 people, had spent 275 hours engaging with known or suspected shooters and had mediated 25 conflicts. The mentors also interrupted 18 shootings in just a few months, meaning that to their knowledge, threats were not followed through with after they talked with the possible shooter.
“It won’t be easy, but it will be worthwhile,” McIntosh said. “Who better to fix what’s wrong than the person who probably had to do with it from the start? I wanted to find a way to use my past for the better.”
Connecting with today’s men
Duckett grew up in the Butler Place housing project downtown and was selling drugs by the time he was 12 or 13. He had numerous run-ins with police.
He became a mentor about 10 years ago. When McIntosh asked him to get involved in VIP FW, he immediately said yes.
“God spared my life for a purpose,” he said.
His goal with the program is to tackle the mental health, addiction and poverty issues faced by men living in the south side.
“I listen to them, I let their story resonate,” he said.
Duckett connects with the younger men by listening to their music. Knowing what influences the men helps him break the ice into conversations about their lives and struggles.
From there, he and Franklin watch social media to see who is talking about what. Unlike when they were in gangs as kids, fights today often begin behind keyboards.
“You have people literally getting murdered over social media posts,” Duckett said.
While Duckett is in the south side, Franklin focuses on the east side. He grew up in the Cavile Place Apartments with McIntosh and now works in finance.
“I want to show these men that there’s another way,” he said.
This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
