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Every year, hundreds of thousands of victims of violent crime turn up in hospitals. Often, they're patched up and sent home right back to the troubles that brought them to the hospital in the first place. Too often, they return with new injuries, and sometimes they don't make it. In Baltimore, the city health department has pitched hospitals a bold way to stop that revolving door. NPR's Andrea Hsu reports.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: The idea built on the city's Safe Streets program which hires ex-offenders to step into other people's conflicts. Violence interrupters, as they're called, use their street cred and deep social ties to talk sense into people and settle fights.
Now, the health department is saying to Baltimore hospitals, give our Safe Streets guys access to patients who have been shot, stabbed or beaten up. Let them get to work before the patients go home. The idea comes from Chicago, where the group's CeaseFire is already working in four hospitals. And it's something Safe Streets piloted seven years ago with Johns Hopkins Hospital.
DANTE BARKSDALE: We had Johns Hopkins IDs. I would walk through the hospital like I was an employee. It was good.
HSU: Dante Barksdale is now Safe Streets' outreach coordinator. At the time, he was one of a handful of violence interrupters trained to work as hospital responders. Here's how it worked - someone would get shot and show up in the ER. The hospital's social work team would call Barksdale. He'd head over and try to talk to the guy, sometimes just as he was coming out of surgery.
BARKSDALE: I'm trying to get him to buy into talking to me because most of the time, people know who shoot them. They know what they did. They know if they wronged somebody. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to get information, so I can be calling back out to my outreach workers, like, look, find such and such.
HSU: As in, go out and find whoever else was involved. Get them to resolve their issues before someone retaliates. Now, Safe Streets does not work with the police. And that's part of the reason guys on the street talk to them. Barksdale says in that moment, the guy in the hospital almost always talks. After all, he's just been shot.
BARKSDALE: That right there has them vulnerable, ready to talk. And then they see a familiar face - oh, that's one of them Safe Streets dudes. He know I possibly been shot, been to jail, shot somebody. So I can relate to him as opposed to the chaplain, the doctor, the people who don't know nothing about their world.
HSU: Carol Stansbury is director of social work at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She puts it this way - we don't live in the neighborhood. The Safe Streets guys do.
CAROL STANSBURY: They brought the love of their neighborhood and the love of their community that we could not bring to that.
HSU: Now, the Hopkins' Safe Streets collaboration was short-lived. The work was never funded. Some of the guys who were trained as hospital responders left their jobs. I asked Stansbury if she ever have reservations about granting hospital access to guys with criminal histories.
STANSBURY: No, no. It makes sense to me as a social worker to have people that have walked the walk, who certainly understand what the issues are and the troubles and the barriers and obstacles that people face, that they only help me do my job better.
HSU: Today, the health department is trying to revive the concept in a bigger way. They want to get six or seven hospitals on board and hope eventually the hospitals will pay for it. For each of those hospitals, the cost would be somewhere around $100,000 a year. That would cover two violence interrupters per hospital and someone to oversee the program.
They've gathered research showing that efforts like this do pay off by reducing repeat injuries, although the studies are pretty small. And they are making inroads with people like William Jaquis. He's head of emergency medicine at Sinai Hospital.
WILLIAM JAQUIS: Well, I think what we find is we spend the resources anyway, and so it's starting to look at how we spend them.
HSU: In fact, Sinai already has informal ties to the Safe Streets operation in the neighborhood of Park Heights. A hospital staffer used to intern there, so he'll call over to his old co-workers when someone from the neighborhood turns up.
That's what happened last December when a 23-year-old guy named Mike was shot in the head. Safe Streets asked that we only use his first name because he's at risk of being harmed again. Mike points to a scar several inches long on his right temple.
MIKE: The bullet went in right here. It ricocheted off my scar. They had to cut in and pull the bullet out. It was still sitting in there.
HSU: Mike said he was caught in the crossfire of someone else's beef. Albert Brown of Safe Streets took the hospital's call.
ALBERT BROWN: I was surprised that it was Mike out of all the people getting shot.
HSU: He's known Mike most of his life, says he's a good kid. Now, even though Mike wasn't targeted, Brown says there was a conflict that needed mediating, so he got to work. And on the day we talked, Albert Brown had been back to Sinai to see someone who'd been stabbed. His colleague was out trying to get the perpetrator's side of the story which Brown needed to take back to the guy in the hospital.
BROWN: It's a time thing because he's in the hospital. He should be released - you know what I'm saying? - any day, so the best thing to do is to hurry up and try to get on top of it before he goes back home and any retaliation or anything like that happens.
HSU: He says his goal is to get the two men to sit down in a room and talk. And the sooner, the better. Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
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