Nearly every morning for the last month, Jay has been waking up before sunrise to drive around the streets of Lincoln Heights, patrolling neighborhood bus stops to make sure children are getting to school safely.

“We have a very tight community, so all of our kids, they know us,” he said.

But for anyone outside the community, Jay’s presence might be a mystery. He wears a face covering along with tactical vests, and Jay is not his real name, which he asked not to use to prevent harassment from hate groups.

He’s a member of the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch program, an initiative that started shortly after Feb. 7, when a neo-Nazi group waving swastika flags and shouting racial slurs demonstrated on a highway overpass just on the edge of this majority-Black community about 30 minutes north of Cincinnati.