Gang members and drug dealers cruised the streets on motor scooters carrying SKS semiautomatic rifles in broad daylight. Gunfire erupted almost daily.
At first glance, the Brightwood neighborhood in this central New England city would seem to have little in common with war-torn villages in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But when two Massachusetts state troopers, Michael Cutone and Thomas Sarrouf, returned to their jobs here after deployments with a Green Beret unit in Iraq, they noticed troubling parallels.
Like the residents of Avghani, the small northern Iraqi town where the two had helped establish and train a local police force to combat insurgents, many families in Brightwood, a low-income, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in the North End, lived in fear.
Gang members and drug dealers cruised the streets on motor scooters carrying SKS semiautomatic rifles in broad daylight. Gunfire erupted almost daily.
Perhaps the only sentiments that ran higher than the residents’ fears were their apathy and distrust of the police, who swooped in to make arrests but did little to involve themselves in the community.
Before their deployments, Cutone and Sarrouf might have been similarly distant. But their experience overseas changed their perspective, convincing them it was futile to fight a war without gaining the trust and support of those most affected by it.
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