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."

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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?