Thoughts on the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

Last Tuesday, I attended the meeting of the City Council's Public Safety Committee (available here in its entirety), and what follows are a few observations about the briefing on the City's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (YVPI).

Council members attending were: Tim Burgess, Bruce Harrell, Nick Lacata, and Sally Clark. Other key attendees: Holly Miller (Office for Education), Sid Sidorowicz (Office for Education), Doug Carey (Department of Finance), Jim Diaz (Interim Police Chief), James Kelly (Urban League), Jamila Taylor (Urban League's YVPI administrator), Mark Worsham (County Juvenile Court), Pegi McEvoy (Seattle Public Schools)

The plan as it was initially announced to the public had a 9.2 million dollar budget. According to Doug Carey of the Mayor's office, "because of budget balancing needs and one select program reduction, the Council action resulted in an 8 million dollar initiative over two years."

The intended outcomes of the YVPI are:

• A 50% reduction in court referrals for juvenile crimes against persons commited by youth residing in the Central Area, Southeast Area, and Southwest Area Networks
• A 50% reduction in the number of suspensions/expulsions due to violence-related incidents at Denny, Aki Kurose, Madrona K-8, Madison, and Washington Middle Schools

Councilman Burgess pointed out that for similar programs across the nation, success often means reductions of 2.5% to 20%, which is far less ambitious than the YVPI's.

The Mayor's office announced that, in addition to the middle school "emphasis officers" the YVPI includes, they intend to apply for Recovery Act (stimulus) funds to provide emphasis officers for high schools as well.

Holly Miller, interim YVPI director, said that the plan is a "community-led and community-driven process." She said that "this is not going to be resolved by the government." Her example of how the YVPI is "leveraging community resources," was that somebody from the Seattle Vocational Institute called her the other day and said they have training slots and pre-apprenticeship programs available for youth in the program.

Pegi McEvoy of Seattle Public Schools affirmed that "it is the mobilization at the community level that we're doing with the Urban League that will allow us to be successful."

A potential weakness of the program is that, where "community involvement" is concerned, the government administrators have a bias toward engaging established institutions like nonprofits and educational institutions. The YVPI administrators are overstating the level of community involvement when they think of "the community" only in terms of citizens who have connections with groups like the Urban League.

Under the plan, payment of 10% of the contracts with providers are contingent on meeting performance targets.

Interim Police Chief John Diaz confirmed that the new 6 person Gang Unit day squad will start work on April 15th. They will patrol "the high schools and corridors."

* * *

Last Tuesday afternoon in Council chambers, there was a reassuring air of confidence and optimism among the assembled notables. They lauded their "tremendous group work" so far and expressed "delight" with the "magnificent effort on the City's part and the Police Department's part." There was laughter and thanks for everybody's contributions and a sense of accomplishment that suggests something powerful is in the offing.

I caution humility to all those involved in this promising initiative: across town at Rainier and Othello, not an hour earlier, in broad daylight, there was an execution-style shooting. Until further notice, further congratulations are not in order.

Choice Words from the City Council Prez on Police Staffing

Rumor has it that at the last City Neighborhood Council meeting, city council president Richard Conlin volunteered that, due to a tough budget climate, future hiring for the Seattle Police Department may be on the chopping block.

Here is a good place to say that SPD South Precinct staffing is the number one, slam-dunk priority shared by our community and our local patrol officers. There is a lot we can do and have failed to do as a community, and there is room for debate about what the best approach to solving our youth violence problem in the medium to long term, but there is no question that more police resources are immediately needed on our streets -- a beefed up gang unit, foot patrols in select neighborhoods, more total hours for 911 responders.

By way of reassuring a community member that he wasn't proposing a hiring freeze for the SPD, Mr. Conlin wrote the following:

...we may need to consider slowing down filling the new positions that were added in the 2009-2010 budgets. Since new recruits train for almost a year that would have no impact in the near term on crime issues. It would simply be stretching out the five year expansion plan. Might be better to be cautious now than to hire people spend money training them and then have to do layoffs if the budget picture worsens.

In the rarefied world of city politics, there may be some distinction to draw between a hiring freeze and "slowing down filling the new positions," but for us in the Southeast, where crime and violence are an undeniable commonplace, we take the withdrawal of police resources, however temporary, as an insult.

The South Precinct does not have the personnel it needs to do its job. I hear the complaints and the excuses officers feel compelled to make for not providing the level of service the community needs. I wonder why Mr. Conlin hasn't.

I wonder why, when there's not enough police to start with, he thinks it's a consolation that the "slowing down" will only affect us after a year or so when new police don't start work in the South Precinct?

New Information on the Mayor's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

For anybody who might care to wade through 38 pages of the mesmerizing prose government bureaucracies churn out, here is the most fleshed out info I've seen yet about the goals, methodology, and implementation of the Mayor's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. Nothing on specific partners the City will be working with though.

SEDC Approves Statement on Youth Violence

Last night at the Southeast District Council meeting, the group voted to approve the following statement on youth violence:

The youth violence problem in the Southeast Seattle is severe and getting worse. Our South Precinct is understaffed and should quickly be staffed up to the levels promised. The mayor and city council should give the youth violence issue the attention it deserves and sustain that attention until the issues are addressed. The member organizations of the Southeast District Council endorsing this statement pledge to involve themselves directly in whatever way they are able to support SE's youth, schools, and families, and recommend that the city takes neighborhood and business groups into account as the city formulates its youth violence initiative.

All attending groups voted yes except the Othello Neighborhood Association, which abstains on all votes, and the Rainier Othello Safety Association, which considered the statement too weakly worded.

I hope ROSA will make its alternative "statement with teeth" widely available, follow through on whatever action they propose, and lobby other groups in the Southeast and Central Districts to join them. I'm sure other SEDC members will be interested in taking as active a role in confronting our youth violence problem as ROSA clearly intends to.

Fantasy Basketball

Sometime soon, Mayor Nickels will appoint a new police chief. Whether it ends up being Diaz, Metz, or some dynamic outsider, it would be a mistake to pin too many hopes on his choice because no police chief will care enough about youth violence in the Southeast and Central Districts to solve the problem. It’s our kids that are getting killed and we’re the ones who suffer in this atmosphere of insecurity and violence. Looking to somebody from the outside to come in and solve our problems is a recipe for continued disappointment.

The following excerpt, from a story in the Seattle Times on gangs in local schools, illustrates the point:

Because of those hostilities, Garfield, in the heart of the Central District, and Rainier Beach, a south end school, didn’t schedule a basketball game this year.

“We decided it wouldn’t be appropriate at this time,” said Robert Gary, principal at Rainier Beach. He said the concern wasn’t students but “outside elements” who might make students afraid to go to a game at Garfield or Rainier Beach.

Reading this, it’s hard not to click your tongue and think “so it’s come to this?” With this one act, the City, schools, and police showed that the problem is beyond them. Pity a public school or neighborhood or society whose agenda is set by feuding boys.

Read the Full Article

Some Teens are Not Smart

On Tuesdays, I tutor Somali refugee kids in Seatac. I do it for selfish reasons - I get to learn a little about the Somali community by osmosis and the students benefit from my help (unless there's high school math in the mix, in which case they're on their own). It's often fun and always interesting.

I've been intending to write about civic participation by the Somali community in South Seattle. After spending a few months interviewing leaders of Seattle's East African community I started to feel like I was getting press-release generalities. I was asking them to tell me, a stranger, about how their lives work. I'm sure my questions weren't particularly insightful. In short, I got the insights I deserved.

I came to recognize that I couldn't expect to know the Somali community unless I was willing to meet them on their own terms. As a tutor, I have the advantage of not needing or expecting to learn anything in particular. The likelihood of gaining the trust necessary for real sharing between people is increased by my willingness to give up a couple of hours a week to help out.

I snatched up my first gem a couple of weeks ago at the orientation class for new tutors. The instructor offered the following example, from an essay on street gangs written by a high school senior, of the difficulties of cross-cultural communication:

Some teens are smart. Some teens are not smart. That is why they need help not to join gang.

"What did this mean?" she asked. Somebody speculated that the student was making a connection between lack of education and crime. Others danced around this idea that it's stupid people who join gangs. Of course, this was all wrong.

What the student meant was that it's perfectly fine for people to join gangs as long as they know how to handle themselves. Imprudent teens who don't know how to keep themselves out of serious trouble are the ones who need to be saved from the gangs. They'll be the ones going to jail and killing each other. In this way of thinking, gangsterism is kind of like skydiving: it looks dangerous to the uninitiated, but with the proper expertise and preparation, it's perfectly safe.

This explanation met with general disapproval. A fellow trainee raised his hand, "As tutors, if we hear something like this, should we tell them that what they're saying is wrong?" I didn't catch the reply, I was off somewhere daydreaming about smart skydivers.

The high school essayist, who no doubt would fit neatly into the "at risk youth" category, was conveying some real, insider wisdom about the calculus of gang membership. But upstanding adults, always ready with our wisdom and righteousness, aren't prepared to hear it. We'd like to edit the faulty reasoning out of a term paper, as if that will make it disappear from the world.

Instead of answering gang violence with repression and violence, Seattle has settled on watching certain kids as much as possible to make sure they're not doing wrong, dissuading them from joining gangs, co-opting them with better alternatives. The idea of hanging out with teens more and reasoning with them informs every part of the the Mayor's $9M "Youth Violence Prevention Initiative". What's missing, I think, is a real understanding of the course of action we're trying to lure them away from.

Short of following the rabid advice of the readers of our local newspapers - encouraging young men to kill each other, shipping them all to Venezuela - solving our gang violence problem is going to require of us adults the humility to sit down with surly, hormonal teens and learn the math that puts them in a gang.

A Blight of Dullness at Dearborn Park

Neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.

-- Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

In all our visits, my three-year-old son and I have never seen more than a couple of other people at Dearborn park. Just four blocks from my house, it's convenient but feels shunned by the neighborhood for no obvious reason. Over time, I've come to discount it as a "bad park," and on sunny days tend to venture further afield to ones we enjoy like Powell Barnett or Mt. Baker.

When I heard that a week ago a man abducted a women in Renton, and drove her there to sexually assault her, I began to wonder why a rapist might consider Dearborn park a destination worth a half hour drive when so few local residents choose to walk there.

The prominence of the play equipment and soccer field suggest that children accompanied by adults are the primary intended users. When I ask my boy if he wants to go to the park, the answer is always a resounding yes, but Dearborn doesn't really count in his book. The park means open-ended play -- running from one interesting diversion to another, mixing it up with other kids, navigating varied terrain, excitement!

A funny thing I've found about standard children's park equipment -- the swing and Jungle Gym-style play set -- they have little interest in themselves. Kids know that they are for sliding and swinging and monkeying around, but they will use them only as enthusiastically as the surroundings merit. For lack of excitement, our play sessions at Dearborn are halting, and quick to end. If I don't guide each bit of the action, my son might actually request to go home -- something that has happened at no other park.

But enough of my kid, already -- what about me? The park has little to offer adult tag-alongs in the way of views or other areas where a person might pleasurably linger (unless you're the lurking sort, but more on that below). The walking path around the lower soccer field is only good for a five minute circuit and, as visually uninteresting as it is, only bears a single go round. There are no restrooms on site, which can also make lingering unattractive for families.

Thinking through the overall plan of Dearborn park, I came to the strange conclusion that privacy was the over-arching design consideration for this public facility. It's impossible to get a sense of who is there or what there is to do from the street entrance because the interior is blocked by a large mound. Walking through the park, the view into each successive area is partially or completely obscured by trees.

The path that runs down from the playground is completely secluded in the trees until it pops out into the lower field after some twenty-five yards. It continues on, encircling the play field (which I've only seen used in the fall for soccer) and leads back out to the entrance for a stretch, shaded by more trees. I was bemused when I saw "hiking trails" among the park's features on the city's web listing for Dearborn. I remember seeing what looked like a couple of overgrown deer paths and confirmed by a satellite view that there is a goodly splotch of woods. I never thought of the wooded area as even being part of the park!

Lonely, shaded, and secluded, Dearborn park is ideal for the kind of public activity that is best shielded from the general public view. Come at the right time and you'll see the evidence -- the condoms, the beer bottles, the gang graffiti. It's hard to imagine a better setting for lurking, hooking up, hiding, or indulging in your favorite controlled substance.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this "hiking trails" business, I dug a little deeper and found this enthusiastic review of the park, which declares it a "pleasant pocket of nature in the city." It further explains that the park "was developed by schoolchildren and staff from adjacent Dearborn Elementary School, and Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land, EarthCorps and other groups."

The private setting that makes the park seem forlorn at best and menacing at worst during off hours, makes perfect sense if you consider it as an adjunct to Dearborn Park Elementary's grounds. Indeed, according to Dearborn Park Elementary's website, their teachers are "specially trained in Project Wild environmental curriculum to use the woods and wetlands as a classroom."

It's designed for school use, with all the built-in supervision and regimentation that implies. Of course there's no restroom -- there are plenty of them inside the school! Private grounds disconnected from the surrounding streets make city schools feel secure. But when the kids and staff go home, so does all the structure and supporting facilities and liveliness that make it a good place to be.

Without the school, the park is an empty shell and the neighborhood treats it accordingly, abandoning it to "users" like the one who made his way there from Renton last Sunday night.