Yesterday, I wrote about how I stumbled onto Mayor Sam Adams' closed-door, unannounced summit on gang violence—a meeting where gang outreach workers, religious leaders and other prominent members of the African-African community were invited to share their frank thoughts about the problem with the mayor's staff and Portland police commanders.

Today, I finally spoke with someone willing to talk about the meeting on the record—and why it was held away from public eyes. The meeting, held in City Hall, was scheduled earlier this week, after a fatal gang shooting downtown over the weekend. The effort was supposed to be kept quiet, says Bishop A.A. Wells, founder of North Portland's Emmanuel Temple Church, so that all parties could speak freely about the issue without fear of having their words or ideas misrepresented.

"The idea was trying to deal with the trust factor, so we can get on a better page to make a difference in healing this city," says Wells, who acknowledged that all Portlanders, not just those in the room yesterday, have a stake in how the discussions turn out. Still, he said, "Trust is a big thing that the silence is trying to accomplish."

Wells declined to speak in particulars or comment on whether the huddle ever grew heated. But he did confirm some of the details about the talk's frameworks, especially that some in the room passionately sought assurances that any strategy also include a focus on the roots of gang violence: poverty and educational disparities.

"Many of these people in the room have been working and involved in and addressing the issue of gangs in the city since they materialized in the mid-1980s," he says. "They have a healthy perspective as to what should happen and what should not happen."

That said, trust will take time to build.

"Those of us who did attend, our perspective is simply that the mayor appears to be trying to make a difference," says Wells. But "now that you're meeting, are you listening? Are you calling us here to listen to you, or are you calling us here to listen to us?

"To the degree that happens, then that will determine whether we'll experience success."