President Donald Trump responded enthusiastically Wednesday to a Cleveland-area minister's surprise comment that "top gang thugs" wanted to meet in Chicago to help reduce the city's gun violence.
"That's a great idea because Chicago is totally out of control," the president told the Rev. Darrell Scott at a Black History Month event at the White House.
But the idea was greeted with skepticism by Chicago anti-violence groups, which saw it as likely to fail and out of touch with longtime gang dynamics.
In an interview Thursday night with the Tribune, Scott, a strong Trump supporter, said a former Chicago gang member who knew of his ties to the president reached out asking for help with the violence. He said he hopes the president can attend the "sit-down" with gang members, tentatively scheduled for Feb. 15.
"The thing about Mr. Trump is that he is an attention magnet," Scott said. "His association will bring a lot of attention to it. A lot of it is going to be positive attention."
The pastor's comments at the White House meeting produced another perplexing moment in the president's continuing focus on Chicago's rampant gun violence.
At the morning meeting, Scott said that the gang leaders in Chicago had committed "to lower that body count" in return for added social programs from the federal government.
"If they're not going to solve the problem — and what you're doing is the right thing — then we're going to solve the problem for them because we're going to have to do something about Chicago," the president said. "Because what's happening in Chicago should not be happening in this country."
Scott said of the Chicago gangs: "They want to work with this administration. They believe in this administration. They didn't believe in the prior administration. They told me this out of their mouth. But they see hope with you."
"I love it," Trump said.
But those who have been doing anti-violence work in Chicago for years said the idea of an outsider coming to Chicago to untangle gang conflicts was suspect.
"The idea is great, but trusted insiders are really crucial because you need that understanding of what both sides are dealing with," said Charles Ransford, director of science and policy at Cure Violence, which has mediated gang conflicts for more than 15 years in Chicago but was forced to scale back drastically over the past two years due to funding cuts.
Ransford and others said Scott's plan also seemed out of step with Chicago's gang structure, which long ago splintered into smaller neighborhood divisions that are offshoots of the once-larger, more organized super-gangs that had powerful leaders.
"Chicago no longer has the gang hierarchy it used to have," Ransford told the Tribune. "It's much more a block-by-block clique system. How can I say this? They would need to call a lot of people to the table to really be able to cover all the different cliques and gangs. There is not just a handful. There is a lot of them."
Scott would not be the first outsider with hopes of fixing Chicago's violence problem with a gang summit.
In 2013, a Los Angeles-based minister who grew up in Chicago's crime-plagued Cabrini-Green housing project ran an event intended for gang members citywide to gather at a Far South Side church, but hardly any gang members showed up.
In the Tribune interview, Scott said he agreed to help out the former gang member after checking out his credentials with NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown, founder of Amer-I-CAN. He said Brown and boxing champion Floyd Mayweather might be involved in his efforts to fight Chicago's violence.
Scott said he raised the issue for the first time with Trump at the public meeting Wednesday because it was his first chance to do so.
Before he took the idea to Trump, Scott said he had asked the former gang member if he could bring current gang members "to the table."
"He said yes," Scott said. "… I am there by invitation. It is not like I am trying to come in, (not like) I am the savior (or) some big civil rights activist.
"I want to help dispel this notion that Chicago is Dodge City. It is not," he said. "The people in these communities all want the American Dream just like everybody else."
Trump's comments marked the third time in the first two weeks of his presidency that he has singled out Chicago for its surging violence. Homicides exceeded 760 last year, the worst in two decades, and violence remained stubbornly high in January as homicides and shootings kept at about the same levels as a year earlier.
The president stirred much speculation last week by tweeting about Chicago's violent January, saying if city officials can't address it, "I will send in the Feds!" Some took the comment to mean he might be considering bringing in the National Guard, a move criticized by policing experts as a Band-Aid measure that wouldn't deal with underlying causes and would exacerbate already tense police-community relations.
Then on a nationally televised interview, Trump said that two people were shot and killed during then-President Barack Obama's farewell speech Jan. 10 in Chicago. The Tribune first reported, however, that police records showed no one was fatally shot in Chicago for about 24 hours before or after the speech.
Ira Acree, a West Side community leader and pastor of Greater St. John Bible Church in the Austin community, said if Scott could change the minds of young gang members, then "God bless him." But he said that even if Scott is talking to ranking or former gang members, they no longer hold the sway on the street to influence the thousands of young gang members in fractured groups.
"I hope he doesn't think meeting with some renegade gang leaders is going to impact this epidemic of violence significantly," Acree said. "They just don't have that kind of control. ... The paradigm has changed."
Corey Brooks, pastor of New Beginnings Church in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, said he spoke with Scott for 45 minutes Wednesday. He said he was asked to call Scott in a text message from Omarosa Manigault, the reality TV show participant who works for the Trump administration and attended the White House event Wednesday.
Scott confirmed that Brooks would help organize the Chicago meeting with current and former gang members — "people of influence," as Brooks put it. Brooks, who is perhaps best known for camping out on the roof of an abandoned South Side motel for three winter months in 2012 in a campaign to raise funds to demolish the building, said he expected a "representation" of gang members from the South and West sides and elsewhere in the city.
According to published reports, Scott has said a televangelist introduced him to Trump in 2011 and that he had since visited Trump Tower "about a thousand times."
During a Fox News broadcast featuring Trump in a town hall-style meeting in September from Scott's church facility in Cleveland Heights, Trump referred to Scott as "my pastor."
His position as a conservative and unabashed Trump supporter soon drew national attention and also rankled other black pastors who accused him of abandoning their core issues.
During the campaign, Scott was the organizing force behind a scheduled meeting at Trump Tower in New York with the real estate mogul and a nationwide group of 100 black pastors. The meeting was abruptly canceled after many pastors became upset because they thought Scott had just asked them to meet with Trump but instead it was billed as a group endorsement.
Scott later took the blame, telling The New York Times it was a "miscommunication" on his part.
Several profiles on Scott over the years have detailed his story of redemption after a troubled youth growing up in an impoverished neighborhood on Cleveland's East Side. According to a New York Post profile last year, Scott started selling drugs at 13 and spent much of his teen years "snorting cocaine, breaking and entering, stealing cars, even bringing his father's 9mm gun to school at 16 — and getting expelled for it."
Scott said he found religion in 1981 while in his mid-20s, after his then-girlfriend had come back from a friend's church "speaking in tongues," according to a lengthy 1998 profile by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Two weeks later, he said he agreed to go with her and wound up running home to flush $3,000 worth of drugs down the toilet. He was baptized later that night, and he and Belinda were married a month later.
The couple went on to found their own church in Cleveland Heights in 1994. Initially a congregation of four, today the New Spirit Revival Center has thousands of members.
Even as Scott and Trump were discussing their own solutions at the Washington event, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson was at the Englewood District station Wednesday morning for a news conference outlining part of the department's crime-fighting plans for 2017.
Johnson first addressed the disappointing crime statistics from January. Violence remains stubbornly high. By the department's count, Chicago recorded 51 homicides in January, one more than a year earlier. And 299 people were shot, eight more than a year ago.
Much of the violence remains concentrated in three police districts — Englewood on the South Side and Harrison and Austin on the West Side — where half of the homicides took place in January.
In compiling its total, the department does not include shootings on expressways, police-involved shootings, homicides in which a person was killed in self-defense, or pending death investigations.
When those are included, there were 55 homicides in January compared with 57 by the same count in January 2016, according to data kept by the Tribune. There were 310 people shot, compared with 297.
While Trump's latest comments had not yet been made public, Johnson was asked about the president's repeated commentary about the city's violence woes.
Putting a positive spin on the issue, Johnson said he welcomed the president's attention to the problem.
"I like the fact that he recognizes Chicago has some challenges," he told reporters.
Chicago Tribune's Katherine Skiba contributed.
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