When District B-3 Police Captain Timothy Murray speaks to a group, often the only other sound is the collective gasp of his audience reacting to the alarming statistics he’s sharing about their community.

     Armed with a Power Point presentation and accompanied by crime analyst Jonathan Siskorski, Murray tries to bridge the generational gap and explain to adult community members not only what crime is happening on the streets, but why that crime is happening.

     “We’re trying to make sense out of all this senseless violence,” he says. “We’re talking to community groups, faith-based groups, and we’re trying to reach parents.

     During a summer community meeting he projects a map of Boston on the wall of the Grace Community Church in Dorchester. He points to the B-3, B-2, and C-11 districts and tells the 33 people in attendance that 75 percent of all gun arrests made throughout the entire city happen in these three adjoining areas.

     With the next still, each gun arrest is represented by a small dot. The area of concern is filled with so many dots that it is almost one solid blob of color. With the next image, Murray shows how many guns have been found abandoned at crime scenes where no arrests have been made, and almost all remaining space between the dots are filled.

     And this scene took place early last month, before the level of violence in the city started to spike.

     Murray took over as the B-3 captain in February, by way of West Roxbury and Roslindale’s District 5.

     So far, he had made an impression on the community with his commitment to addressing problems.

     “He’s one of the first captains that was willing to come to the community group meetings,” says Bill Loesch, the former president of the Codman Square Neighborhood Council. “He’s almost what you’d call flamboyant,” says Dorchester resident Joan McCoy. “He uses these high-tech Power Point presentations, and this community was not used to that.”

     Murray prefers to talk about the crime epidemic in his region rather than discuss details about himself, but he does allow that he thinks his presentations are striking a nerve.

     “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he says. “This tells the people what’s really going on out there…My district now is three square miles, and my last district was almost two and a half times the size of that,” he says. “District 3 made 158 gun arrests where my last district made 9.”

     He asks the crowd at the meeting why they think young people feel the need to have guns. More gasps are heard as he describes a gruesome hypothetical situation where a young man is denied admittance to a party. From the street the subject yells out a derogatory expression to a local gang, and three young men rush out and pummel him. As he lays on the ground almost unconscious, one of the assailants pulls out a gun and kills him.

     “When I present this situation to people over 40, the feedback that I get is that it’s mindless, senseless and almost godless,” he says. “But when I present the scenario to a kid aged 16 to 20 they say that it makes perfect sense, and that the shooter had to do it. These kids say that those boys had to kill that guy because a beef is never squashed, and if you don’t kill your enemy when you have the opportunity to, he will end up killing you.”

     Youths also carry guns, says Murray, because they don’t think doing time is that big of a deal, says Capt. Murray. They also say that it’s better to be caught by a police officer and arrested for having a gun, than to be caught by your enemy without having a gun. But the main reasons he says that people in the age range of 16 to 20 carry guns are for power and for protection.

     Although the community is visibly shocked to hear these details, it seems to make sense to them, and at these community meetings, what inevitably happens after the shock has subsided, is that the participants can start thinking of viable solutions.

     Capt. Murray says that adults used to always suggest gun buyback programs, but they don’t make sense to kids.

     “Why would a kid want to take their gun, that they bought for hundreds of dollars illegally, down to the Police station so they can get $50?”

     But there are signs of improvement in parents’ thinking, according to Murray.

     “We’re actually getting parents calling us up and telling us where guns are hidden,” he says. “One mother, after calling about her son’s gun, told me she would rather visit her son in jail than visit his headstone in a graveyard.”