Jesse Salazar knows what gang life is like, even though he's never been in one and he never will be in one.
He grew up in a really bad neighborhood in a city in Wisconsin between Chicago and Milwaukee where his house was burglarized often and he regularly saw street fights. He beat up a nine-year-old at the age of six, started stealing when he was 12 and ended up in a foster home when he was in high school. Most of his brothers have been gang members, one is locked up in prison and his little brother still uses drugs, but somehow Jesse managed to get his life together and is now studying to become a police officer. He also wants to give back to the community and is starting a youth center because he knows there are more kids in poverty that need help and they need a place to go. He knows that teens need positive teen role models and he wants to show them that their life matters.
2. The gang unit/aldermen speak out
Jesse isn't the only one that thinks there's a problem in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There are pockets of neighborhoods that are crumbling fast. With evictions skyrocketing, the closure of numerous businesses, including a Chrysler plant shuttering its doors in October, and people becoming more desperate, gangs and teen violence are on the rise. I followed around a member of the Kenosha Police Department's gang unit, neighbors in several problem areas and an alderman.
3. No snitching -- how Jesse's old neighborhood has decided to take care of their own
And they all noticed the same thing -- these teens aren't talking because they don't want to be snitches. And in a neighborhood one night in Kenosha called Wilson Heights, the same neighborhood where Jesse Salazar grew up -- a woman and her 10-year-old daughter were sleeping in bed one night when their house got shot up and a bullet went through the daughter's leg and into her own leg. People in the neighborhood know who did it... but they aren't talking because no one likes a snitch
