A Memphis violence interrupter says kids will remember who didn’t care

What happened

According to a video profile published by The Trace, Alexx Brent is a community public safety specialist at Heal 901 in Memphis, Tennessee. He spends his days checking in on kids and teens who need help and stepping into their cases. The Trace reports he has done this work since he came home in 2020. The piece is part of the outlet’s Violence Interrupted series, which The Trace says looks at community-based violence prevention and intervention work after major funding cuts by the Trump administration.

Speaking in his own words, Brent told The Trace that the young people he serves will have long memories: “They gonna remember who all didn’t care.” The Trace reports that for Brent, prevention means understanding what can push someone toward violence and what can help them choose a different path. He describes one young man with a hard home life whose case, Brent says, began when he stepped in after a woman tried to pull a gun on his mother. “At Heal 901, if we give you our word, there’s nobody gonna break it,” Brent told The Trace.

The Trace reported last month that Heal 901 has only three staff members doing violence intervention, and that requests for help were arriving faster than they could responsibly take on. In 2023, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, reporting independently, identified Brent (spelled “Alex”) as an outreach worker in Heal 901 Cures. That was a six-month pilot overseen by the Shelby County Health Department and funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.

MLK50 reported that the results were mixed. The county health director credited the pilot with stopping nine potential shootings and making 140 job referrals, 68 of them successful. Raw police data for the quarter mile around the apartment complex showed one murder and 165 incidents during the pilot, compared with two murders and 162 incidents a year earlier. Experts told MLK50 that six months was too short to judge, and the county’s funding ended with the pilot. “When funding stops, we understand there’s a dire effect that it has on the community,” Heal 901 founder K. Durell Cowan told MLK50.

Our reflection

Sit with Brent’s warning today. Young people keep records. They know which adult looked at them like a problem to be managed, and which program showed up for a season and then disappeared. A young man whose home was already hard steps in for his mother and ends up with a case. The system keeps a file on him now. He is keeping one on the rest of us.

Some of us were that kid. We remember the teacher who gave up and the coach who didn’t, and that old wound still decides how much we let ourselves care, because caring cost us before. Others of us have simply gone numb. We pass a quiet sentence on a teenager before we know his name and call it realism.

Jesus has a word for that. In Matthew 25 the people the King sends away never shot anyone. They just never came: “I was in prison and you did not visit me.” They are shocked and ask when they ever saw him. That question comes from a heart that had decided some people were not worth seeing. That sin lives in systems that fund hope in six-month pilots. It lives in us too. Because it looks respectable, it rarely gets confessed.

Mark 5 shows the other road. A town had chained a man among the tombs and given up on him. Jesus crossed a lake for him and set him free. When the man begged to leave in the boat, Jesus told him to go home to his own people and tell them about mercy. The man the town wrote off became the one sent back. People who come home and go back to the kids are walking that same road. The church ought to be first in line to pay for that work, and humble enough to sit down and learn from the people doing it.

The honest evidence says this work is slow. Experts told MLK50 that six months cannot prove it either way. What Brent describes is a word that holds. At We The Revolt, our Juvenile Community Violence Intervention work aims to reach young people at first contact, before a record exists. Our re-entry mentors commit to twelve months beside a young person after release, the stretch when support usually ends. Three intervention workers cannot carry Memphis, and no single organization can carry any city.

This week, pick one young person and become someone they remember for the right reason. The steps below are a place to start.

Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.

Mark 5:19

Source: The Trace, “They Will Remember Who Didn’t Care, and They Will Remember Who Pushed Them to a Better Path”