Moms Bring Back Englewood Patrols In Response To Gang Threat
(CBS) -- In Englewood, community leaders are on alert after learning of a gang threat on social media. Police have an ally, mothers who patrol the streets with a smile.
CBS 2's Jim Williams reports they have an impressive track record.
Tamar Manessah is bold. "Pull up your pants," she tells the young man. An order accepted with good cheer.
"I never stop," Manessah. "They love me because I love them. They all listen to me. These are my kids."
Kids Manessah is trying to save from violence.
"We can't go backwards, we can't have it all destroyed," Mannessah said.
The effort she started this summer, enlisting other mothers to walk these streets, patrols, not with weapons but sandwiches.
In five weeks in a stretch of 75th Street, there were no shootings. Manessah stopped the patrols on Labor Day. But now a source tells her social media posts show a gang fight is brewing. So Manessah and her allies are back.
People who live here say it's much safer now than it was in summers past.
Today children are playing outside their homes. For Tamar Manessah, the hope is to keep the momentum going.
"We have to be more proactive and less reactive," she said. "It's too late want to react to it in someone's gone another mother has lost her child it is too late, so we have to really start getting in front of these things."
Tamar Manessah, who's a writer, calls her group Mothers Against Senseless Killings -- or MASK. Though she grew up in the area, she doesn't live there now. Still, she returns and promises to be "back on patrol" until the current gang threat is over.