It’s the thing most people dread —that telephone call from the police station, the knock at the door by uniformed cops. The message is never good news.

Sometimes the news is truly devastating. The city of Newark was rocked this summer with the murders of three young people and the wounding of one other. Young children of promise, they were just hanging out, enjoying music and each other in a playground behind a local elementary school before taking up their studies at Delaware State University.

Along with the uniformed patrolmen and detectives that swarmed the area around the murder scene, there were members of the police department’s Clergy Affairs Unit, who were given the heartrending task of informing the families of 20-year olds Dashon Harvey and Iofemi Hightower, and 18-year old Terrance Aeriel that their children had been senselessly killed. A fourth victim, Terrance’s sister Natasha, was severely wounded in the shooting, but survived and helped investigators identify suspects in the case.

Sgt. Leslie Jones, Jr. head of the Clergy Affairs Unit, remembers that night of chaos. He received late night calls at home from both the detective on call in his unit and the commander of the precinct in which the shootings took place. There was yet another call about a murder in another location. Racing from that location to the playground, he joined the detective on site, Shakoor Mustafa, to survey the carnage and make arrangements to notify the family.

For a veteran cop – and Jones has been on the force over 30 years — it was a shocking sight. “It was one of the worst cases I have ever been involved in,” he said. “It was very sad to see these young lives snuffed out. From all accounts these were good kids—decent, good students from good family backgrounds doing positive things. One of the young men was a minister. It was a heavy burden on my heart, and it made me ask God how this could happen to such good kids.”

Jones made calls to all the victim’s families to offer assistance in any way they could.

In addition to their presence at homicide scenes, the six-person Clergy Affairs Unit is involved in several initiatives that help keeps streets safe, prevents tragic incidents and promotes healing in its citizens. In addition to Jones, a second-generation minister who co-founded and currently heads the small congregation of Charity Baptist Church , and Mustafa, who is an imam, the unit is assisted by the Police Clergy Allianceabout 100 clergy members from churches around the city who partner with the police department.

“We have an informal, ongoing campaign where new clergy people are constantly hearing about our program through word of mouth and we’re averaging two to three calls a week from people showing interest,” Jones said. The Police Clergy Alliance provides assistance to the community on behalf of the Newark Police Department, assists them in handling civil disturbances and restoring peace and order, counsels officers and their families and responds with homicide detectives on homicide notifications.

One initiative the Alliance has been involved in is the NPD’s clergy curfew patrol, which is currently being revamped. Although Newark has an 11 p.m. curfew for children under 18 not with an adult, and has had a curfew law in place for decades, teenagers and children can be found on the streets at any time of night, subject to being prey or predators. “Hanging out is part of being a teenager,” Alliance president Rev. Steven Davis, who was born and raised in Newark , said. “Every generation has done it. Sadly, the type of individual and situation we’re dealing with now is so much more dangerous than when I was a teenager.”

“It amazes me because when we catch them we try to stress that thet’re endangering their own lives by being out so late,” Jones adds, “but they seem to be totally indifferent to the dangers and insensitive even to their own personal well being.”

Closer attention is being paid to this three-year old program in light of the schoolyard shootings. Three of the six suspects in the incident were juveniles. In the days following the shooting, there was increased activity on behalf of the unit to stop underage teenagers and young people who were out late at night. Rather than taking young night rovers to be processed at police headquarters, unit members took them to a church that is part of their Safe Haven Project. There parents are called and either asked to come and get their children, or told that they would be escorted home.

Davis, who pastors Calvary Gospel Church , has been connected with this department since it was called the Chaplain Affairs Unit of Police Services. He is helping to streamline the process. “Right now, we have put a halt to the curfew operation just to have it work more effectively.” He continued to explain that the Alliance was working in tandem with the Police Clergy Unit and the North Jersey Black Churchmen’s Association to assure that at least one church would be open in each of the city’s five wards. “The bottom line is that we want to get them off the street so that they won’t become a statistic of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The time is also used to find out more about the kid’s personal lives and be a source of counsel and encouragement. “I believe that the curfew program saves lives,” said Davis , “and will also save a lot of our young people from getting involved in things that could be detrimental to them and alter their lives.”

Statistics show that between the hours of 3 and 6 p.m. , the time when most children are out of school while their parents are still at work, unsupervised kids are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, including alcohol and drug abuse. So in addition to taking young people to these churches in the late-night hours, some were open in the early afternoon to allow for safe recreational and educational activities and a secure environment.

These programs are designed not only to keep Newark ’s children safe, they are works formulated to combat what Jones describes as “moral decay. There has been a major shift in values, morals and convictions and crime and violence has gotten worse than it’s ever been,” he opines. “It’s such a deterioration of values on all fronts. Crime, violence and evil has always been with us, but the main thing I can see over the past 30 years or more it has significantly gotten worse.”

The Clergy Affairs Division is currently visiting every school in the city of Newark to let the administrators know the extent of their services and their availability and willingness to mediate student or family situations. “Community policing has always been important to me, as with Sgt. Jones,” says Detective Elyzabeth Tirado-Loneker, a 14-year veteran of the Newark P.D. who is the point person for the unit and the Alliance . She organizes the schedules for the department in addition to being the liaison for the domestic violence response team. She said the emotional payoff from a success story is very gratifying, citing a case of a young man who occasionally visits her she helped through the curfew program. He managed to stay out of trouble and now plans to enter the military. “We get a lot of that,” she said, “and it’s very gratifying because police care; there are so many officer in this department that care about this community and its people.”

“We’re able to help change the negative perception people have of policing, Tirado-Loneker continued. “When people hear of this unit, or see our vehicle, we should be a place people run to, and not run from.”