are calmer now at Crotona Pool, since young men have volunteered to watch up to 1,400 visitors a day.

By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ

He is known by the name tattooed on his left arm: Scorpio. He favors diamond earrings and designer sunglasses. He takes pills to control his angry outbursts, and sometimes carries a pistol .
On this day, on the street outside the Crotona Pool in the Bronx, where hundreds of children wait to get inside, he wears the earrings and sunglasses, but does not have a gun.
“Don’t move!” he shouts when a boy in navy trunks tries to tiptoe to the front of the line of rowdy children, some wrapped in towels, others wearing neon flip-flop sandals. The boy gets back in line.
Scorpio is Terrance Carpenter, 26. He is one of a dozen or so young men who volunteer unofficially each week at the pool, which sits amid an area long fractured by hostilities among gangs like the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings. Some of the volunteers are gang members, but others have turned their backs on crime.
Crotona Pool opened in 1936, but went into steep decline starting in the 1960s, as middle-class residents fled the surrounding neighborhoods and poverty and violence took hold. Today the area has come far from its worst days, thanks in part to the efforts of these young volunteers .
The volunteers have no enforcement powers; their duties are not clearly defined. But they provide extra help for the officials charged with maintaining order.
“This is my block,” Mr. Carpenter said. “It’s my love. It’s my family.”
The informal partnership began eight years ago when Mike Bunce, 50, a parks department employee who helps supervise the pool and whom several of the young men said they considered like a father, called a few gang members to his office and told them: “This is your neighborhood. This is your pool.”
Mr. Bunce had watched as the pool he played in as a youngster deteriorated. He was fed up with the fistfights along the streets and drug deals out front.
“Year after year, we’d hear the same thing,” Mr. Bunce said.
“‘Crotona Park? Uh-uh. I ain’t sending my kids there.’
When the gang members, in response to his request, started dropping in for a few hours each week, the pool and the neighborhood began to change. Violence fell, pool officials said, and the Olympic-size pool, the largest in the Bronx, became the place to be on muggy summer days.
The pool’s manager, Kevin Walker, called the volunteers role models. “If kids see they’re doing the right thing,” he said,
they’ll follow their example.”
The presence of the men at Crotona Park has prompted little concern. Pool regulars said they could point to only one instance when gang members fought, and extra police officers were called in.
Bam Bam Jr., 17, who refused to give his real name, said that he had served time in prison for shooting the man he believed had killed his father. He said the pool was a neutral area, where gang rivalries were left outside.
On a recent day, he rushed over to one of the pool’s patrol officers to report that a group was about to throw a girl into a shallow part of the pool, putting her in danger of hitting her head.
With the girl safe, he slapped hands with his fellow volunteer, Mr. Carpenter. “We’re all brothers here,” Bam Bam said. “If you violate the rules, you get punished.”