Shamise Jacobs has noticed a change in the six years she’s lived in Baltimore’s Park Heights neighborhood. The area is quieter, and streets feel safer.
She attributes that, at least in part, to the work of Safe Streets violence interrupters, the workers clad in orange T-shirts who mediate conflicts and who Jacobs said “are recognized almost like superheroes around here.”
Three of Baltimore’s 10 Safe Streets sites recently marked a year without a homicide in their “catchment zone,” the city’s term for the sites’ boundaries. Streaks continue in two of the three, Belvedere and Park Heights, which have not experienced a homicide since June 27 and July 30 of last year, respectively. The third, Franklin Square, went more than a year between killings until an early morning July 4 fatal shooting.
For Jacobs, owner of the R.V.A. Project, an event planning and life coaching business, “it means I can go outside more,” she said Friday at a celebration held at the Belvedere site, along Park Heights Avenue.