1. Maurice Miller’s life tells the
story of conflict and redemption
on Rochester’s west side
BY MARY STONE
DISPARATE
TIMES...
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EVE LYONS

3. hough seldom considered, success has no
universal measurement: It is a concept as
relative and radically varied as any.
To a young male in Brighton, for example,
the landscape of success is broad and lush,
and above all - generally attainable. But to
a young man in the 19th Ward or the Plym-
outh-Exchange neighborhood some eight
when basic survival is such a consuming occupation.
Maurice Miller, who spent most of his high school years living
on Flint St. on the city’s west side, is a rare exception. At 24,
Miller already has led two careers and earned respect and suc-
cess in both, even though their agendas were at extreme odds.
“I could live a double life in the daytime, you know, I’m a
preacher,” Miller said. “In the nighttime, I’m a street pharma-
cist, and it was like for a minute it was okay, it was working. It
was working.”
Released from Monroe County Jail last October, Maurice Mill-
er, since the age of 21 has survived countless armed and un-
armed confrontations, two shootings, 18 months in prison, and
most traumatic of all, the murder of his best friend. For those
facts alone, however, Miller’s story is not exceptional: Murder
rates in Rochester are some of the worst in the state, and they
show little sign of improving.
a 16 percent increase to 36 homicides for the year, according
to the Rochester Police Department’s year end crime-report.
Shootings, meanwhile, were up 52 percent, from 143 in 2011
to 218 last year.
The RPD’s third-quarter report, released in October, noted
that of the total non-fatal shootings from January to Septem-
ber, 68 percent were gang-related, up from 66.3 percent in
2011. Among homicides, 62 percent were gang-related for the
to blame as much as they might seem to be. In fact, their impor-
tance has decreased since the 1980s and ‘90s. Gang members
are not always active, but the label follows them - even though,
in many ways, it does not carry the same weight it once did.
Gangs are less organized in Rochester now than in previous
decades, which in some ways could be adding to the violence
in Rochester. Without strong leaders, for example, it is more
-
ders, director of Pathways to Peace, a Rochester youth violence
intervention and prevention agency. Gangs at least have a code,
he said: no children and no elderly. Youths today, Saunders
humiliation without resorting to violence.
DEEP ROOTS
The reasons for that go back far and deep, from generations
of poverty and addiction to abysmally low graduation rates,
crowded class rooms, and ongoing joblessness.
In Rochester, for example, only 9 percent of black males grad-
uated from high school in 2010 - the lowest graduation rate
in the country, according to the Schott Foundation for Pub-
lic Education’s 50-state report on public education and black
males. Only 10 percent of Latino students graduated that year,
according to the report released last fall. If minority youths do
graduate, teenagers face high unemployment rates as Roches-
ter’s economy shifts away from manufacturing to health and
services jobs that often require higher education.
According to a Brookings Institution report from 2007, Roch-
ester, with 10.10 percent unemployment rate, had the 16th-
highest unemployment rate among the 100 largest U.S. cities.
That same year, over 22 percent of Rochester children were in
families with no parent in the work force - the third-highest level
amongst the 100 largest U.S. cities, the Brookings study found.
Taken together, the obstacles are overwhelming to young people.
Negotiating one disadvantage after another makes them snap,
like it would make most people snap, said Janelle Duda, as-
sistant director at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center
for Public Safety Initiatives. Kids who joins gangs, for example,
usually are just trying to get their needs met. Often they want
protection, she said. They want someone to provide for them,
to feel a sense of belonging.
VIOLENT TYPES
Miller, now 24, said there are three types of violent men in
Rochester. The man who grew up with limited resources, living
in cramped quarters, nursing anger and a disaffection for life.
The two other types, Miller said, are motivated by a desire to
prove themselves, or they want fame. Miller said he was both.
“Those are the guys that do a lot of violent things, because you
are put in situations where the guy just doesn’t care. Has no
[respect] for life, because nobody - he feels nobody has respect
for his life.”
A shooting can result from stepping on someone’s shoes or
spilling a drink at a party, Duda said. CPSI, where Duda works
at RIT, provides evaluation and support services in addition
to other resources to agencies such as Pathways to Peace and
Teen Empowerment Inc., a Rochester organization that lever-
ages the experience of local youths to make street-level, politi-
cal, and legal change.
Doug Ackley, TE’s director of Rochester programs, said people
shoot people over a few dollars. “They’re not settling major
drug deals where there are thousands of dollars involved. This
he said.
VAST CHASM
People who want to solve the situation want to bring people to-
gether, Ackley said, but at this point, the chasm between adults
and youths is so vast, it seems in every way irreparable.
Ackley and others admit they are discouraged. Those youths
who show the most promise go to college and move away, or get
shot before they have a chance to. Teenagers talk about how
adults are afraid of them, said Jennifer Banister, TE’s develop-
ment and collaborations manager. As a result, no one reaches
out to youths, Banister explained.
T
37

5. The root cause for the city’s low graduation rate, she said,
stems from a legacy of intense disparity and denial. “I think
since the beginning of the African-American migration here
and the Latino migration to Rochester it has been like hide
them away in this really dilapidated housing, it’s a history,”
Banister said. “I think Rochester falls into the same category
as a lot of cities with legacies of not dealing with the levels of
disparity and access to opportunity, which are part of a com-
pounding problem.”
And as the problems compound, the pressure builds. The re-
spect youths do not get from their community they in turn de-
mand from their peers.
as the son of a prominent gang member, Miller was entitled
to respect. As a teenager, his family later moved to Rochester,
which Miller saw as an opportunity to make a name for himself.
MORE THAN POWER
For Miller, as for his peers, respect is not just about power, he
said. As a teenager, Miller could not tolerate disrespect - not
because it mattered to him, but because any toleration of disre-
spect is a strategic error: It is an invitation for the abuse to get
worse. As a teen, Miller sought to get respect another way and
avoid provocation whenever possible.
Miller felt safe inside the walls of East High; he never had a
violent confrontation there. Outside those doors, he said, it was
a different story. “I just thank God that now I can go anywhere
in Rochester, and I don’t have the same problems,” Miller said.
“It used to be where if I was anywhere off the east side of
To go home right after school was never possible. If he did,
Miller said he would have found a group of boys waiting in his
a provocation, Miller explained, he is ill-advised to ignore it.
“It’s like they say, ‘OK, ignore it. He didn’t do nothing to you.
He just called you names, sticks and stones they break your
bones,’” Miller said. “But where I come from, the environment
that I live in, you can’t let things like that just slide, because they
become monumental.”
If it’s tolerated, the name-calling quickly escalates. It may start
by picking on a boy’s shoes and advance to insults. The next
time, someone might throw something at him, Miller said, or
take his things. “The old saying ‘nip it in the bud,’ is because
otherwise, you won’t live comfortable after that,” Miller said.
“It’s another reason why when I was younger, I wanted to make
that image, [get] that love and fear from people so I wouldn’t
have to go through those things.”
LEVERAGING RESPECT
Miller leveraged that respect to do some good.
As a junior in high school, Miller beat out some
500 applicants for a job as a youth organizer at
Teen Empowerment. His mission was to organize
events, speak publicly, and develop ways to steer
inner-city youths from street life.
Miller’s experience in other cities where he lived,
he said, gave him perspective that a lot of his
peers in Rochester lacked. Having associated with
people who were both privileged and impover-
ished, he said, gave some balance to his perspec-
tive on life.
Youth organizers such as Miller are sought based
on multiple criteria but especially for their ability
to strike a chord with the at-risk youths Teen Em-
powerment most wants to impact. Banister said they provide a
skilled and necessary service to the community; that does not
mean they have not been or are not involved in street life.
“We’re looking for qualities that are dynamic and deeply root-
ed in experience - knowledge and ability to communicate what
they’ve been through and where they see themselves going and
where they see the community going,” TE’s Ackley said. “It
happens over the time they’re hired, but you see some seeds of
it in the interview process,” he added.
SENSE OF PURPOSE
Miller was an example of what TE looks for. In addition to a
sense of purpose, Teen Empowerment gave Miller structure.
Between high school and a strict father, Miller did not get in
trouble until he graduated from high school. “See, with my dad,
even though he was exposing me to a lot of negative things, he
kept me structured and contained. It wasn’t too positive, but it
was a little bit of positive reinforcement,” Miller said.
Still, it was a balancing act. “So now it’s like every day after
school I’m going to work at Teen Empowerment, and I’m be-
ing exposed to this new life, so to speak, dealing with politics
and senators and policemen and things like that, but yet on the
weekends we don’t work. Every weekend I’m still with the same
guys,” he said.
Ackley said without full-time work it is hard to resist the sur-
rounding lifestyle. “They share a street; they’re trying to hustle
and make money. It’ll end up from hanging out late at night,
drinking, smoking weed, to everything from stealing cars, to
robbing people, dice games, petit theft here and there, breaking
into houses,” Ackley said.
But unlike the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, hustling is no longer eco-
nomically viable. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Ackley said, it was pos-
“I’d rather go to
bed hungry before I go
back to that life.”
39

6. sible to make some money from hustling and use it for college.
Now, people are just getting by, and because of that, they get
stuck in the lifestyle. Essentially, Ackley said, people end up
robbing each other. The same dollars get recycled, and no one
gets ahead.
CREWS
RIT’s Duda said gangs do exist here, but they are not like por-
trayals of gangs in popular culture. In Rochester today, gangs
are loose groups that form because kids live on the same street
-
ment is gangs, but she thinks of them as crews. “They’re neigh-
“Crew” is how Miller and his friends referred to themselves.
They lived near each other and liked to rap together, Banis-
ter said. “They became a de facto gang only through others’
-
other groups of youth who wanted to challenge them and their
popularity, etc.”
As they slipped into the roles, the lines got blurry, Banister said.
Today, there are roughly 2,500 gang members in Rochester,
according to the last count at Pathways to Peace. The list, how-
ever, includes many inactive gangs that never get removed from
the list. Determining exactly how many active groups there are
are not the problem, he said. Youths in Rochester generally
respect gang territories. “As small as Rochester is, we got kids
on the west side that have really never really gone to the east
side,” he said.
Other mid-size cities, by contrast, have “super gangs,” Saun-
ders said, which represent a larger gang body that runs op-
erations. That kind of organization does not exist here. Gangs
started 15 years ago, it was more of a situation where gangs
that had sustainability usually grew into a situation where they
-
ing for no reason,” Saunders said.
Saunders said. Meanwhile, he added, everybody knows every-
body, which provides ample opportunity for misunderstandings
and perceived disrespect. “We used to be able to handle being
humiliated at some point,” said Saunders, adding that youths
and come back.
NO CODE OF CONDUCT
Fractured families due to homicide or incarceration, single-
parent homes, years of trauma, generations of poverty and ad-
diction leave gaps where role models ought to be. Research at
CPSI shows that, in certain parts of the city (zip codes: 14605,
14613, and 14621), one out of four black males between ages 20
to 39 is on probation, on parole, in jail, or in prison, Duda said.
predictable. “There are a lot more young guys on the street
now that have less connection with positive male role models.
That being the case, they’re taking their cues from their peers a
least teaching some of the young guys the rules of the streets.
There were certain rules that were adhered to, whereas now
these young guys don’t adhere to anything.”
A desire for power and a feeling of connection drive youths
to join gangs. One reason they are less structured now, Ban-
ister explained, is because the hierarchies have collapsed over
the years for some of the same reasons their families fell apart.
Drugs are the common factor. “My guess is that part of what
happened is that with the crack and drug-trade increase in the
1980s, more people than before got involved in the gang-life
“opportunity” with clear power structures to run [and] control
the business,” Banister said. As gang leaders got locked up, as
they stepped away or got killed, power vacuums were left at a
-
lar culture, Banister explained.
The saying today is “TFL”, or “thug for life,” she said. As a
result, kids today are more focused on the image that goes with
taking on a thug lifestyle than they are with the infrastructure
they would have to institute to run underground illicit markets,
Banister explained.
FEW OPTIONS
In this environment emotions are so high, Ackley said, that
even if you try, without the structure and distraction of a job,
staying removed from street life is nearly impossible.
Miller said that Teen Empowerment was keeping him on the
straight and narrow without him even realizing it. “That posi-
tive reinforcement every day was keeping me from actually
taking both feet and crossing over, so it was like I was teeter-
tottering,” he said. “Some days I was a little worse; some days
I was a little better.”
By 21, Miller felt like he missed his chance to start a new life.
He had aged out of TE, he was talked out of joining the mili-
tary. He wanted to start his own business, go to college, but he
was intimidated. “I didn’t think college was ever an option for
me, because I struggle with spelling and grammar and things
like that, and I was always told that college is nothing but a
whole bunch of essays,” Miller said. “So it was like, ‘What else
am I going to do?’”
To make matters worse he was battling a criminal charge pend-
ing from when he was 19.
He told Ackley he was unhappy with himself and wanted to
change. But then circumstances took over. Miller was becom-
ing a case in point to the kids he was trying to steer away from
his lifestyle as he continued careening through it.
BRUSH WITH DEATH
brother the day before. Before he could reach for a gun his
explode in front of him after it grazed his thigh on the way
by. The second bullet remains lodged in his leg today. “All the
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7. 41

8. dust and everything was everywhere, and I took another step,
vroom. Another shot, boom. It grazed my leg [again], vroom,”
Miller said. “I was trying to go, but I got stuck because there
was a fence. And I looked back, and I seen the guy like take
cover, like a cop would, and go from one wall to another wall.”
Miller ran to a house nearby until
it was over. Later that day he was
put under house arrest.
Miller said he was carrying a gun
that day for protection after a pre-
vious shooting by a still-unknown
attacker. The man was not wear-
ing a mask, and while Miller did
not see him, he suspected the at-
tacker thought he did. The inci-
dent traumatized Miller, whom,
fearing for his life, got a gun and
carried it everywhere, even while
on house arrest.
On May 25, 2010, as Miller
stepped out of his house, with
permission from his house- arrest
monitor, he was approached by a
half-dozen men accusing him of
jumping their friend. Miller in-
sisted he did not. His brother ap-
proached and nearly escalated the
situation, he said. Miller told him
he had a gun, but that they had to
get out of there.
Shortly afterwards, the group
was stopped by Police and Citi-
zens Together Against Crime
Program. PAC-TAC is a crime
prevention initiative by Mayor
Thomas Richards that assigns
volunteers to patrol neighbor-
youths gave PAC-TAC Miller’s
description and said he tried to
rob them. PAC-TAC radioed the
description to police. “The po-
lice came off the expressway, 30
minutes later, and maybe like an
hour later I’m downtown facing
the charge,” Miller said. “I was
already facing one felony, which
they had given me as a cop out to
make it a misdemeanor.”
But under Miller’s agreement, he had to stay out of trouble.
With the gun charge, the deal was off the table. Miller went to
county jail for 18 months. In the end, it all worked out in his
favor, he said, but not in the way he hoped.
heard about his best friend’s murder.
Miller’s friend was on the way to the mall, after having been
spotted in his car counting what looked like a large sum of drug
money. He was jumped and then shot in the back while he was
trying to escape, Miller said. They tried to take his shoes, he
said, but in the end, they did not even get that. “They just killed
him for no reason,” Miller said.
His friend was supposed to visit Miller in jail the next day.
When he found out by phone that he was gone, Miller nearly
blacked out.
FRESH START
The day of his funeral, Miller’s friend came to him in a dream.
It was a warning, he surmised, not to return to his former life.
“Now, I just can’t do it. Like there’s nothing - like I’d rather like
starve now. I’d rather go to bed hungry before I go back to that
life,” Miller said.
When he got home from jail, he had nothing he said, save for
two pairs of shoes and pants. “Before I went to jail, I had every-
thing I ever wanted - clothes, car, jewelry, women, cell phones,
computers, games, all that,” Miller said.
He decided to get a job, continue volunteering, and dedicate
himself to his dream: opening a combination barber and tattoo
shop. “I love cutting hair, and I love to draw and do tattoos, so,
if I could combine both, I feel why not. I mean it’s doing what
I love,” he said.
For now, he works at the Rochester Riverside Convention Cen-
ter and on an assembly line at LiDestri Foods Inc., and contin-
ues to volunteer at Teen Empowerment. Everyone, he said, is
because of the way the society is set up, there’s so many things
thrown at you on a day-to-day basis that you get stuck in the
day-to-day hustle of life,” Miller said. “It’s because, like I said,
most people aren’t born in the privileged situation that they
can devote their adolescence to making their skill actually into
something that could make money.”
Banister said people need to stop ignoring the disparity in the
community and examine it. “As a white person, I think it’s real-
ly important for white people to think about whether they want
to continue down this road of denial and not owning [up to]
the levels of opportunity that have been given to white people
and that have been denied to black people over time,” she said.
Miller said that in his experience, people are desensitized to the
city’s shootings. The city used to shut down when someone was
murdered, he said. Now, he said, locals say “I just saw him the
other day” and then go about their business.
Miller is trying not to be that way. That is what makes him a
success, he explained. Not for living two lives and getting what
he wanted, but for letting go of the lifestyle that almost killed
him. Success, he said, is keeping busy and working hard to
avoid feeling frustrated and tempted to backtrack. “This may
be an arrogant thing to say, but I feel as if I deserve way better -
I deserve way much more,” Miller said. “And I’m just not going
to stop until I get that much more, but I don’t feel I have to do
what I used to do to get it.”
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