‘Nobody kill anybody’ ceasefire underway in Baltimore
RT.com
5 Aug, 2017
A woman, who witnessed her first murder on the streets of Baltimore when she was 12, has started a 72-hour event aimed at creating conditions of non-violence in her Baltimore neighborhood.
Erricka Bridgeford came up with the idea for a weekend ceasefire called ‘Nobody Kill Anybody’ when her 19-year-old son alerted her to the recent spike in violence in Baltimore. Bridgeford knows the violence on Baltimore’s streets all too well, as her brother and step-son were both victims of murder.
“We have created a system where you arrest and punish people, but you do not heal the traumas that you caused,” Bridgeford said in an interview with RT. “America has a system that only believes that you can lock away problems and so that strategy does not really work. People need to be healed from inside out and locking them up does not do that.”
Bridgeford, joined by other activists, handed out flyers about peace to residents of the city. She asked them to commit to the ‘Nobody Kill Anybody’ truce and to pledge not to accelerate the violence that already exists in Baltimore.
Some laughed at her upon hearing the idea, but the majority of people were interested, she said. Many people spread the word, and soon gang leaders and members started to call her to tell her they would participate.
The city government and police department told NBC News that they support the initiative, but Bridgeford says that she chose not to reach out to them because people living in dangerous neighborhoods in Baltimore don’t trust the authorities.
“If you look all around this country and see that the way business is done is that some people have opportunities, some people never even know [they] exist” she told RT.
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