NYC forms task force to combat black-on-black violence

Back in the 1980s when he was the city's first black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward caught a lot of criticism when he said black-on-black crime was the minority community's "dirty little secret."

On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and a group of black clergy talked openly at a news conference about the effect of crimes committed by blacks against each other as they announced a task force to combat violence.

"We are tired of black-on-black crime," said Bishop Gerald Seabrooks, of Brooklyn's Rehoboth Cathedral International. "We are killing ourselves with black-on-black crime.

"We buried too many children and counseled too many going to school with negative and poor images about our people," Seabrooks added.

Police statistics show that more than 67 percent of homicide victims this year in the city were black, as were 74 percent of shooting suspects. Kelly said young black men were 12 times more likely than whites to be homicide victims.

Kelly, Seabrooks and other clergy plan to meet and work jointly with police to help build relationships. They said they hope to hold more gun buyback events at churches, team female NYPD brass with grandmothers raising troubled kids and engage street gang leaders in dialogue to stop killings.

"A lot of [gang] leaders want to call a cease-fire, but don't know how," the Rev. Dan Craig of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Brownsville, Brooklyn, told Newsday.

Craig acknowledged that gangs were a fact of life in black communities.

"They [gangs] are there and we are going to have to deal with them," said Craig, who added that he believed trust between the clergy and gang leaders has to develop.