REALITY VIDEO, ALL TOO STARK

HARTFORD, March 5 -- The rapper Tupac Shakur had a song "Death Around the
Corner" that described the hell of living in a world of drugs and guns, a
world that the Rev. Cornell Lewis and other North End residents here know
all too well.

In their world, young girls like Takira Gaston, 7, who was shot in the face
on July 4, get caught in drug dealers' cross-fire, and men like James
Washington, 76, killed in January for the few dollars in his minimart cash
register, die from bullet wounds instead of old age.

Why is not a mystery: the North End was home to 19 of the city's 27
homicides last year, many of them related to the daily narcotics trade that
Mr. Lewis has watched for years on these bleak and boarded-up street corners.

The difference now is, Mr. Lewis and some of his friends are watching
through the lens of a video camera trained on the drug dealers and their
customers.

"Death could come at any moment," Mr. Lewis said last week after two hours
of drive-by videotaping, done from the passenger seat of a car driven
around the North End by a friend. "Anytime you raise your voice against
oppression, the oppressor will come after you. I just feel that some group
has to do something more than complain and react. You have to expose the
problem."

The problem is not new, and it has long held the attention of the Hartford
Police Department, which keeps a steady presence in the North End. But as
any resident or urban economist will tell you, the police -- especially
Hartford's chronically understaffed and underfinanced police -- cannot stop
as much as impede the drug-related crime that now appears to be on the
upswing, contributing to a 27.5 percent increase in North End burglaries
and four homicides so far this year.

Mr. Lewis and his helpers at the Northend Church of Christ have been
shooting their videos since late January. No one, including the dealers,
who have threatened his life, disputes Mr. Lewis's guts. Whether his tapes
will ever make a difference on the broken, barren streets here is far less
certain.

Driving past the corner of Brook and Mather Streets on a recent weekend,
Mr. Lewis, who had replaced his preppy sweater vest and crimson beret with
a hooded black sweatshirt in a church parking lot, makes eye contact with
three men leaning on pay phones near a storefront. The man in the baseball
cap, staring at the old Toyota, tips his bill once, twice, a plain
invitation to Mr. Lewis and three white passengers -- presumed to be
cruising the mostly black North End to buy drugs -- to make a deal.

It would have made good video, except for the stares. "Keep rolling," Mr.
Lewis told the driver, who did not want to be identified. "The brother on
the right is watching us."

A few blocks away, on Middlefield Street, a half block from where a sign
nailed to a tree announces, "No Loitering -- Police Take Notice," two men
are leaning into a car with two people in it. The driver and one of the men
engage in an extra-long handshake. After ordering the Toyota to circle the
block, Mr. Lewis has the driver stop and aims his palm-size camera at the
scene, narrating as he records. "Now, you tell me that was just a
handshake," he said later.

Passing the Melo Mini Market, on Albany Avenue, the Toyota garners great
interest from a man on the corner, who motions, then yells, for it to stop.
Mr. Lewis nods vigorously to the man. "Keep going," he murmurs to his driver.

Not every young man on a street corner, of course, is peddling dope. But by
recording what he calls "suspicious activity," mostly at the hands of young
black men lingering near pay phones, bodega doorways or cars whose drivers
curiously park in the middle of the street, the reverend wants to send a
message to the dealers and the suburbanites who the police say make up
about half of the dealers' clientele: No more Takira Gastons, not another
James Washington.

"This is an issue of life and death for our community," Mr. Lewis, 52, said
as he prepared another video tour of the neighborhood last week. "They know
they are not dealing with a turn-the-cheek, look-up-at-the- sky kind of
preacher."

Mr. Lewis grew up in the 60's in Detroit's inner city, where, he said, the
all-white police force would routinely round up young black men, him
included, for "fingerprinting" at headquarters -- where everyone was lined
up, punched and sent home. "I always ran to the front of the line, because
they always saved the worst for last," he said. In 1967, when he was 17, he
was convicted of larceny; he said he stole money to buy food and spent six
months in a correctional center for young criminals. Angry at the white
world around him, he traveled to California to meet Huey Newton and joined
the Black Panthers.

His passion eventually turned to spiritual matters, and in 1990 he received
a bachelor of arts from Lincoln Christian College and Seminary in Illinois.
Two years ago, he earned a master's degree in rehabilitation services from
Springfield College in Springfield, Mass. Mr. Lewis's day job is as a drug
and anger-management counselor at a local agency, Hartford Behavioral Health.

He says he is "a known quantity" to the North End dealers and gangbangers.
They know where he lives, and, after Mr. Lewis beat up a mugger who he said
was sent by the dealers, they probably know that the bald man with the
bulging eyes and graying beard also holds a second-degree black belt in
jujitsu. In 1994, after helping rid his Bellevue Street neighborhood of two
local gangs, 20 Love and Los Solidos, Mr. Lewis found a dead squirrel hung
by its neck over a telephone wire outside his stoop, as a warning.

"Cornell is no stranger to the streets," said Hartford's recently elected
mayor, Eddie Perez, who grew up on the same North End corners that Mr.
Lewis now trains his video camera on.

Mr. Perez voiced concern for Mr. Lewis's safety but said if the videos
prompt just one resident to clean up the yard or paint the house, it might
start a trend. "The noise that's being made," Mr. Perez said, "is making
the police and making me pay more attention to the problem."

Since the videos do not catch anyone obviously dealing drugs, said Lt. Neil
Dryfe of the Hartford Police, there is not much his department can do.
Asked last week if the civilian videos would help stop the dealing, Sgt.
Malik Merritt, a 20-year Hartford Police veteran whose territory includes
the North End, shrugged. "The same corners that were hot spots now," he
said, "were hot spots when I was a rookie."

Last Friday evening, Sergeant Merritt was among the 25 people gathered at
the Northend Church of Christ, where Mr. Lewis held a "world premiere" of
his videos, which he edited down to nine minutes.

"This videotape is the latest manifestation of the way we fight," he said,
pushing the Play button. "We cannot depend only on the police."

Afterward, some in the audience asked what they could do to help that
fight. Others, like the church's pastor, James Lane, wondered aloud whether
the shaky images of young black men on street corners would change
anything. "We need help," Mr. Lane said with frustration. "I've done too
many funerals for some of these kids. It's a hell of a business giving a
funeral for a 14-year-old."