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Newark Police Director Samuel DeMaio

(Star-Ledger file photo)

After a heartbreaking string of seven killings in Newark over the holidays, Police Director Samuel DeMaio is feeling the heat.

The city hasn’t been this rattled since the summer of 2007, when a group of college kids were lined up against a brick wall in a vacant schoolyard and executed by gang members for no reason but to prove they could do it.

The recent killings made 2013 Newark’s deadliest year in more than two decades. What worries DeMaio is that we might not have seen the worst of it yet.

"I’m going to be blunt," he says. "People are not realistic about crime."

The big mistake is expecting police to solve this on their own. DeMaio is a tough street cop, a Newark native who joined the force at age 19 and worked his way up handling drug cases, robberies, murders, the gamut. He is not about to throw up any white flags.

But he could use some help. When he talks about crime, it is with the sober perspective of a man who has spent his life on the front line and has no political ax to grind.

Liberals are right to press for gun control, he says. And conservatives are right to bang alarms about the decay of family.

"We recovered 786 guns in Newark last year," he says. "Do you know how many were purchased in Newark? Zero!"

The supply chain starts at shops and gun shows in states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. New Jersey can’t stop that without building a wall around the state.

"People will rant and rave about the killings, but do nothing to get guns off the street," he says.

Ask about the breakdown of families in Newark, and you can see that DeMaio and his crew are unnerved at what they are seeing. In one of the two Christmas Day shootings, police say a 15-year-old boy shot and killed two teens, one of them a sweet-hearted 13-year-old girl who happened to be taking out the trash. A third teen was shot in the neck, but survived.

The shooter, police say, was angry because a rival teen had flirted with his pregnant girlfriend, who is 14. Where do you even begin to untangle that mess?

Another case: On the first day of school, a 14-year-old was shot dead. Police found 30 bricks of heroin in his room, along with a loaded gun and ammo. Police say he had been dealing only 50 feet from his apartment, in full view of his mother.

"No way his mother didn’t know what was going on," DeMaio says. "And as with the vast majority of these kids, there was no father figure."

Another bugaboo for DeMaio: His officers made 30,000 arrests last year, often grabbing the same drug addicts over and over. Yet overwhelmed treatment centers in the city routinely turn away addicts seeking help.

Police layoffs are another big problem. Thanks to budget cuts under former Mayor Cory Booker, DeMaio has only 1,038 officers, down from 1,317 in the year after the schoolyard shootings.

He used to have 250 officers assigned to a "safe city" task force. When violence erupted, buses would drop extra officers on foot patrols in the hot zones. That’s gone now.

"You can’t say having more cops would not help," he says. "That’s definitely a big part of it."

At Metropolitan Baptist Church in the city’s Central Ward, the Rev. David Jefferson is organizing a daylong conference set for late February to hammer out solutions.

"Obviously we could use additional police support, but the community has to come together and play its role, too," he says.

He wants to pack his auditorium with young people and ask them how to fix this. He wants to engage the schools. He wants to embrace the broken families.

"There is a spiritual component to this," he says. "The lack of authority in the home has now spilled out onto the streets."

Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers University, says part of Newark’s challenge is that many successful African-American families have moved to the suburbs, leaving children in the city with fewer role models and connections.

"I am a child of the civil rights movement, which means I grew up at a time when I was given the navigational instincts and tools to enable me to stand on my grandparents’ shoulders, and parents’ shoulders," Price says.

Many kids in Newark don’t have that, he says.

"They are coming of age at a time when jobs are leaving, housing is being imploded, neighborhoods are being devastated, and in which drugs are not only a source of income but a source of individual decline."

So as Newark turns to face this beast, let’s hope DeMaio’s efforts are just part of a tapestry. Overall shootings are down, so this is not hopeless. But the city needs more police. And it needs more drug treatment, sane gun control and some kind of rescue line to the broken families.

Jefferson's church held the funeral for the students shot in the schoolyard back in 2007. He thought that tragedy might spark change. But the continuing violence has left a long trail of broken hearts since then.

"What we failed to do is leverage that as a turning point," Jefferson says.

Will it be different this time? That is the life-and-death question Newark will soon answer.

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