Yesterday we showed you prison inmates enlisted by Senior Superintendent Howell Gillett clearing the bushy lots on Jane Usher Boulevard. The area has been a hot zone for crime recently. Today the police work continued but this time with a different twist: Deputy Compol Chester Williams teamed up with Church pastors to go on a different kind of meet and greet - finding a safe space between policing and praying. We were there and found out more about their message:
Chester Williams - Deputy Compol
"Today we have the Council of Evangelical Churches who are with us today and we are in the Jane Usher, Freedom Street, Loyd Bevans, and Unity Street area. We have three pastors with us today and each of them has an area that they have been assigned to so as to be able to minister to those persons in the area. One of the objectives here is for us to be able to spread the word of God through the pastors reaching out to these young men and hopefully one day we would be at a stage where we would be able to get them into the churches. So, it is a continuing process of our crime fighting strategy for us to be able to reach out to these young men and try to bring them closer to God. Interaction has been excellent. Many of these young men are God fearing persons and one of the only obstacles that they may have going to church is the fact that the church might be outside their zone and they don't feel comfortable leaving their zones. So, what we will be doing is that whenever we invite them to church is that we will be providing transportation to pick them up, take them to church and then drop them back within their respective areas. So, they have been very receptive, Mr. Howell Longsworth has a way with them, telling them his life story and what got him to where he is today and who he could have been apart from what he is today and that in itself is a message for them to be able to look and reflect on themselves and be able to say, 'well, you know what, if Mr. Longsworth could have done it then maybe we can do it too.' It is a multifaceted approached: one, we want to encourage them to go to church; two, we want to get them closer to God; and three, we want them to understand that the lifestyle they are living- fighting with each other or gunning down one another- is not the proper one. You can live your life without doing things like that and try to be more positive. One of the things that we are trying to show them is that positivity does take you a long way in life."
The group did the entire Jane Usher area.
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