Aurora Police Chief Daniel Oates summed up Leon Kelly’s gang-prevention program in these words.
“The best I’ve ever seen.”
That includes the years Oates spent in the New York City Police Department.
“I rely on him,” Oates said of Kelly. “He has tremendous credibility. He knows the streets, and he relates well to power brokers.”
So when investigators released a report last week on the controversial fatal police shooting of 20-year-old Jamaal Bonner, Oates made sure Kelly worked as a liaison with the community and the family.
Against that background of respect and results, it seems ridiculous that Kelly must beg for volunteers and money for Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives. But that’s what it’s come to.
A two-year, $300,000 federal grant for the program allowed it to grow and keep more kids out of gangs. Since the grant ran out in July, Kelly has struggled to maintain the expanded effort.
“We have so many kids now,” Kelly said. “I hate to ask anybody for money.”
But he is. If you have private or public funds for a program that saves lives and tax dollars in the long run, Kelly hopes to hear from you. If you have an hour a week you can donate to tutoring and mentoring kids in Open Door’s after-school program at Wyatt-Edison Charter School in Denver, he’d be happy to hear from you too.
“Check our CSAP scores,” Kelly invited. “Come visit.”
To help, call 303-893-4264 or 720-364- 6084.
So much for the commercial. Now, for the reality check. Kelly is a preacher. Since 1988, he has buried hundreds of young people. He has saved many more.
“I tell my kids they can deal with me as a teddy bear or as a grizzly bear,” said Kelly, a tall, solidly built former college basketball player whose muscles and long, plaited hair belie middle age.
During a lunch Monday to honor Open Door, two children in the after-school program rose to “represent.” They took turns spelling out the values and warnings they learn:
Attitude, focus, respect, pride, discipline, caring, consequences, dignity, responsibility, accountability, violence and penitentiary.
T-shirts used to promote Open Door send an honest, if grim, message. “Join a gang. Get pushed around” is stenciled just below a drawing of a teenager hurt so badly he’s in a wheelchair.
The lessons aren’t all ugly.
Children moving from class to class at Wyatt-Edison wave and smile at Kelly as he stands in the school’s gigantic two-story lobby.
Kelly’s after-school program at Wyatt- Edison “means everything to us,” said principal Kay Frunzi. Without it, “our kids would be on the street.” And, she added, Kelly really can be a grizzly bear if he needs to scare kids straight.
Open Door means just that to Kelly.
“I’m a Republican, but I believe it takes a village (to raise kids),” said Open Door supporter Carol Chambers, the district attorney for suburban Arapahoe and Doug las counties.
Denver’s gang cops regularly visit Open Door to read to youngsters or listen to them read.
“Once they get by the Batman utility belt (pistol, bullets, Mace, Taser and flashlight), they’re usually OK,” Detective Les Perry joked. Kelly’s program is a place “where you can see a police uniform in a different light. We don’t come as the Gestapo. It allows us to do the education piece. It allows us to teach and mentor.”
That, in turn, keeps down gang violence that Kelly said is increasingly spilling out of tensions between African- American and Latino kids. Make no mistake, Perry said, that violence affects everyone, not just the poor and minority communities.
“All too often,” said Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier, “we just focus on reaction.”
Guys such as Leon Kelly understand the folly and, ultimately, the failure of that thinking.
“It is,” he said, “much easier to mold a kid than to repair an adult.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
