Shootings shake a community, and fear becomes an accomplice

Still, cities are pushing forward with ways to stem what sometimes seems like a never-ending cycle of gang violence. In San Bernardino, Calif., Superior Court Judge Michael Smith helped draft a rule to ban camera phones from courthouses. "We heard in L.A. that gang members would be coming to court with camera cellphones and photographing witnesses ... so the whole gang would know who you were," Judge Smith says.

In other parts of the country, it is not just the quantity, but also the style, of threat. "Gangs are more brazen today. They feel entitled ... [even] to shoot at police," says Brian Sexton, a supervisor in the gang prosecution unit at the Cook County State's Attorney's office in Chicago.

He says over the 10 years he has worked in the gang unit there, tactics have become more violent, in part, because of the money at stake in drug sales. He says cases have gotten harder to solve as gang members pay each other off - often in the millions - to keep one another silent. "Now it's moving into more like organized crime," he says.

The view from the street differs though. In Boston, Mario Rodrigues, a former gang member working with former and current gangs to help members get access to school or jobs, says that tactics are not more aggressive today. Among gang members, he says, problems are dealt with internally. "If someone kills your friend, you'd rather deal with it on your own," he says. "You don't want to be labeled a snitch."

He says witnesses, victims, and gang members feel used by the system. "They [police, prosecutors] want to soak you for information, and then leave you on the streets," says Rodrigues. "They know what's going to happen to you."

Adults do sometimes "turn a blind eye," Rodrigues says, but it's not because of gang intimidation. "There may be some mean faces," he says. But if intimidation were so prevalent, "there would be a lot of dead adults." He says that fear of testifying has been ingrained in the community over the past decade, especially from times like the early 1990s, when gang violence was even more prevalent in this city.

Witness protection programs can not adequately work, experts say, unless cultural norms in the community are addressed, in Boston and beyond.

The fact that witness don't come forward "is frustrating for everybody," says Christopher Sumner, the executive director of the Boston Ten Point Coalition, an ecumenical group formed to help prevent youth violence in communities. He says some feel that matters should be taken into their own hands, while for others there is an unspoken code that sharing information with the police is some sort of violation.

Even as church and government leaders address these norms, the fear is palpable, says Janet Connors, whose son was killed four years ago. "I definitely feel people don't feel safe testifying," though she isn't sure how much of it is based on perception versus reality.

Still, she says, when her son Joel "Jo Jo" Turner was murdered, "things" were said between the friends of her son and the friends of the offender.

The two groups met at a bowling alley once. Words were exchanged, she says, and as the offender's friends sped off from the parking lot, one held up a knife from the backseat and smiled. "That kind of stuff is real."

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