witnessing firsthand is the fact that baltimore has been coming together to clean up and it s been very inspiring to see and i want to introduce you to two men, pastor cory barnes and greg gingham, a church in federal hill in baltimore city and they have been out today on the front lines with people that you organized, cory explain to me what your first reaction was to getting people together? why did you want to get people out today? it s really simple. our city needed us and our community wanted to know how can we help. we said meet here in sand town and help us clean our city. that was what we wanted. you were kind enough to let us come along with you today and we got really great images and also the fact that there was arab by from a local synagogue that led the prayer service. explain the point as we talk about racial division here between the haves and havenotes in baltimore, the unique
here and created a family like environment. it s the outsiders that come in and that plant the seeds that grow into cancers. and our own people do the same thing. but we can t contain to be measured by our worst moments. it s time like this where we rise to the occasion to bring forth an image of who they are. it all depends on perception and if you choose to believe what the media puts out there, and that identity then you ll have a misrepresentation all the time of what baltimore city in particular sand town really is. it s up to us. people that were born and raised in community, to emerge as leaders and to use our tragedy as the platte foormform not allow
like sand town and neighboring communities here in cleveland, really deprived and stole millions of dollars of wealth out of our cities and our urban core which were already needed and in the midst of that while we fight for individual institutional justice, when we think about individual justice for those families that are struggling with losses due to violence that they experience every day. the personal tragedies and so for all of us whether we re serving in city councils whether we re serving in churches we ve got to begin to look at violence in a very total and comprehensive way because when we do that we realize that there are root causes to some of the individual acts that we see and many of them are institutional. commissioner, i m sorry, commissioner boynton, gun violence. how are you, reverend? to stop in chicago. we ve had a lot of issues. i even moved into an apartment on the west side. we worked with our group there and around the country. you re pushing tougher pena
we see their military presence throughout the inner harbor. we didn t see that when i was out in sand town the area of freddie gray and his neighborhood in west baltimore. i did not see militarized or national guard presence but i did see a lot of courageous hopeful diverse faces out with rakes and shovels and trash bags and delivering bottles of water to each other and trying to clean up the mess in the city last night and very hopeful we re not going to see a reair of that type of violence we re hopeful. and people are of both minds, don t know if tonight will be peaceful or more violent. folks talking about why did they send the students home today? a lot of students i hear were out with their principals cleaning up the violence. so some good coming from that. back to you. that s great to hear. thank you so much for your reporting there in your hometown and tour e will stick with us for the hour. back with us today, former nypd