Nov. 20, 2011

PART III - Youth Violence – The Annihilation of a Generation

Effective Strategies in the Prevention of Youth Violence

By Michael Radcliff 

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Louisiana Weekly

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Dr. Ben Robertson, Professor of Social Work at Southern University at New Orleans, whose published works include, “Urban Youth and Programs geared to help them Deal with Conflict Fighting and “Attitudes Towards Violence Among Urban Youth,” discussed Cultural Specific Conflict Resolution at a recent seminar on Youth Violence Interventions sponsored by Southern University at New Orleans.

“All too often, young people engage in aggressive behavior because that is the culture,” Dr. Robertson said. “There was a time when kids would fight and be friends afterwards… Today, however, the culture is different, and we need to teach our young people to handle conflict. And it is crucial that we teach kids by middle school to effect a change. Preventing conflict, or conflict resolution should be a required course in school. Parents as well should also be taught these techniques along with effective parenting skills classes.”

‘He looked at me stupid’ – meaning ‘He stared at me.’

“You would be surprised to find out how many conflicts start because of perceived disrespect,” Dr. Robertson explained. “Young people should be taught that on the streets it’s OK to ignore someone who you don’t get along with… Otherwise it will lead to conflict.

“The number one reason young people fight,” Robertson continued, “is saving face and respect… In the African- American community historically, if a young person, especially a young Black male, was to go home beat up, your mama or daddy would send you back out into the street to fight… to regain your respect.. ‘Go handle your business,’ they might have told you. Today, however, we can’t continue to tell our children to do that, and if you do, you might also want to hug your child and tell your child, ‘This might be the last time I see you.’”

In our ever-changing world, our kids today grow up in an environment thinking you don’t have to care about anyone else, it’s become part of the culture,” Robertson said. “Another rule, in addition to ignoring potentially volatile situations, is that it’s OK to tell your kids — if they don’t know someone… don’t talk to them. It’s not a lesson in etiquette, but it’s a good survival technique. We’ve got to deal with the bullying, we’ve got to deal with the children who want to bully, and we’ve also got to deal with the passive kids who allow themselves to be bullied.

“Additionally, we adults, especially us parents, need to lead by example. If we want a better life for our children, if we want a longer life for our children, we need to teach them appropriate behavior. The days of telling young people ‘Do as I say and not as I do’ are long since over. Young people will look to see what you do, and how you handle conflict… and if your actions are not consistent with what you tell them to do, your advice is simply ignored.”

“And finally, these rules transcend gender and we can’t address these issues without including young women, there’s a growing trend that shows that young women have begin to participate in a level of crime equal to young men.”

Youth violence is not inevitable and youth violence is more than just a public-safety issue. Youth violence negatively impacts communities across the nation on a number of different levels, economic impact, increasing health care costs, decreasing property values, strains on social service and criminal justice resources. On a personal level, because of violence, kids fear going to school, residents live in fear thus reducing the quality of their life causing many of these taxpaying residents to flee to the suburbs for safety.

The Office of Justice Programs uses rigorous research to determine what works in criminal justice, juvenile justice, and crime victim services. According to the Office of Justice Programs, “research and experience shows that when communities engage in multi-disciplinary partnerships and implement objective, data-driven approaches, youth violence diminishes while improving positive youth outcomes.

“Because youth and gang violence are tied to the quality of life and economic health of a community, localities are more likely to be successful when they implement violence-prevention strategies through multi-disciplinary partnerships. Effectively addressing youth violence and crime requires coordination by diverse partners including law enforcement, education, labor, social services, public health, businesses, philanthropic organizations, and faith- and community-based organizations, along with parents and youth themselves.

Additionally, law enforcement agencies recognize that they alone cannot be responsible for solving our communities’ youth violence problems. Arresting our way out of these problems is neither possible nor cost -effective, and is unlikely to garner widespread community support. Promoting the development and implementation of locally tailored approaches that balance prevention, intervention, enforcement and reentry. These strategies should include prevention efforts spanning from early childhood into young adulthood, such as youth development, family support, school and community mentoring, and school-based and out-of-school recreational activities. Such strategies should also include “relational” intervention programs that engage with high-risk and gang-involved youth, as well as reentry programs that plan for returning youthful offenders prior to their release. Such strategies should coordinate closely with law enforcement efforts that focus on the most serious, violent, and chronic youthful offenders and crime “hot spots.”

Finally, addressing youth and gang violence in any community is a collective responsibility that requires collaborative effort. Collaboration can be enhanced by embracing principles of distributed intelligence, the idea that many perspectives are better than one, and by sharing structured data—from databases, case management systems, etc.—in a deliberate, effective, grounded, and ethical manner. Successful sharing of knowledge and data requires the sharing of information and data after a thorough assessment of local risk and protective factors. Thus, to be truly comprehensive, a community’s strategy for data sharing should strive to be inclusive of all stakeholder agencies and integrate a wide range of data from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, law enforcement, education, public health, child protection/welfare, labor, and housing.”

On October 4-5, 2010, at the direction of President Barack Obama, the Departments of Justice and Education officially launched the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention along with participating localities and other federal agencies. Four of the six teams chosen were the cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Memphis, whose representatives met with federal agencies and each other to share information and experience about what works in preventing youth and gang violence. “Each city pledged to develop or enhance comprehensive plans to prevent youth and gang violence in their city, using multi-disciplinary partnerships, balanced approaches and data-driven strategies.”

The Boston Initiative

The Boston initiative plan first clarified their strengths, identified what challenges remained, and determined what focus areas needed to be addressed for the next three years to achieve sustainable long-term reductions in youth violence. `

The plan as outlined included: To create more comprehensive risk assessments that could identify youth for intervention much earlier; provide earlier detection of trends and patterns that could prevent violence and other risky behaviors; expand opportunities for quality information sharing and communication between agencies and with the community; formalize information sharing practices with an emphasis on institutionalizing individual based exchanges; assemble and convene monthly a Community Advisory Board comprised of residents and other leading voices, including youth, from Boston’s neighborhoods most affected by youth violence; leverage existing relationships with the business community, private and corporate foundations, and colleges and universities to increase focus and support for youth violence prevention efforts; create social marketing campaigns to create a culture that does not accept violence as the norm; continue or expand identified prevention, intervention, and enforcement programs and strategies that work; introduce a more coordinated and strategically focused and enhanced alignment of key community policing efforts; continue the mayor’s commitment to summer jobs for youth; continue to prioritize job skills training and employment readiness, apprenticeships, and stipend employment for youth with criminal histories; address need for expansion of mental health needs by advocating and applying for additional resources in trauma response.

The Detroit Project

The top priority of Detroit’s model was public safety. Their strategy focused on building opportunities for youth, with the expressed belief that unless youth have real opportunities that lead to careers, it will be much more difficult to convince them to stay in school, avoid violence and gangs, and commit to creating a more productive life.

A key strength of their agenda was to “focus on reducing youth violence and, perhaps more importantly, ensuring youth have a path out of violence toward a high quality of life through education, jobs and careers. The overarching theme of this strategy was that more enforcement and more young men in prison will not solve the challenges around violence, rebuild neighborhoods, or help restore the greatness of Detroit. Additionally, the plan included a systemic reform strategy which focuses on the Detroit Police Department (DPD), a policy agenda, and an anti-gang strategy.

The strategic principles as outlined was to increase the use of restorative practices to build a culture of respect, inclusion and accountability among youth in the targeted communities; institute Operation Safe Passages — a new effort led by the Detroit Police Department with other law enforcement and community partners to create in-school alternatives to suspensions and expulsions; renew Operation Cease Fire – the violence “interrupters” of the Operation Cease Fire strategy is an effective tool to eliminate violent acts between crews and gangs; utilize the community prosecutor’s program, a widely recognized program which seeks to resolve neighborhood issues that often cannot be addressed in a traditional prosecutorial format; initiate an aggressive marketing campaign, with an emphasis on the use of social media, which fosters the increased use of nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution, connects youth with programs and services, and raises awareness around youth violence prevention; and finally, partner with entities that will provide transportation to after-school activities and/or employment at little or no cost in order to ensure youth are connected with appropriate services and resources. Finally, explore using Detroit Public Schools as Neighborhood City Halls a couple of days a week to bring resources back to the community.”

The Memphis Plan

In 2006, Memphis had the second-highest violent crime rate in the country. In 2009, “more than 54 percent (1,462) of those arrested for committing a violent crime were 24 years of age or younger – with offenders as young as nine years old. Nearly 160,000 Memphis children living in poverty faced multiple risk factors for youth violence, with those at highest risk including children of teen parents, youth 16-19 not in school or working, and youth with no consistently working adult in the home.

Largely due to Memphis’ data-driven policing initiative called Blue CRUSH™, a key Operation: Safe Community strategy, serious crime in Memphis declined by nearly 27 percent. January 2011 saw Memphis’ lowest murder rate in 30 years. In addition to continuing the Blue CRUSH initiative, the Memphis plan promotes increased participation by at-risk families in high-quality prenatal/early childhood programs with a focus on family strengthening and improved parenting skills; building on neighborhood networks, and strengthening the ability of community- and faith-based organizations to deliver high-quality programs and resources for youth (e.g., after-school, mentoring, tutoring, college preparation, internship, teen pregnancy reduction, parenting skills, and similar resources).

Strengthening and working through existing neighborhood networks to improve local environments for high-risk youth. Expand case management and deployment of multi-agency intervention teams to support youth at highest risk for committing violence. Dramatically improve coordination among agencies serving high-risk youth; especially with Memphis City Schools (MCS), by establishing a shared electronic client management system and creating incentives for agencies and providers to participate. Finally, expanding “graduated sanctions” for youth (graduated severity of penalties combined with rehabilitation).”

Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission vs. Ceasefire — Chicago

The two models cited by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu currently being implemented by the city to combat the spiraling murder rate are (1.) techniques utilized by the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission (MHRC) which touts itself as a “multi-level, multi-disciplinary collaborative that seeks to not only improve community safety but also increase the quality of life for all residents.” Yet as of 6/30/2011, according to the MHRC’s mid-year report, “Milwaukee has experienced about the same (actually higher) number of homicides and non-fatal shooting victims as 2010;” and (2.), Project Ceasefire — Chicago, which according to its mission statement, ”CeaseFire uses a public health model to stop shootings and killings. We combine Science and Street Outreach to track where violence is heating up and then cool the situation down.” According to its proponents, “CeaseFire is a unique, interdisciplinary, public health approach to violence prevention.” They furthermore insist that “violence is a learned behavior that can be prevented using disease control methods.”

How does it work?

According to its developers, “Using proven public health techniques, the model prevents violence through a three-prong approach: (1.) Identification and detection. CeaseFire is a data-driven model. Through a combination of statistical information and street knowledge it identifies where it concentrates its efforts, focuses its resources, and intervenes in violence. This data guides the program to the communities most impacted. It provides a picture of those individuals at the highest risk for violence. And, most importantly, it shows the staff how CeaseFire can intervene. (2.) Interruption, Intervention, & risk reduction. CeaseFire intervenes in crises, mediates disputes between individuals, and intercedes on group disputes to prevent violent events. Its staff is seasoned, well-trained professionals from the communities they represent with a background on the streets. In other words, they know who has influence, who to talk to, and how to de-escalate a situation before it results in bloodshed. Most of its program participants are beyond the reach of traditional social support systems. They have dropped out of school, exhausted social services or aged out, and many have never held a legitimate job; their next encounter with the system is either to be locked up behind bars or laid out in the emergency room. Its staff gets in where others can’t, meets the participant where they are at, works to change their behavior and connect them to resources that would otherwise be out of reach. Changing behavior and norms. CeaseFire works to change the thinking on violence at the community level and for society-at-large. For disproportionately impacted communities, violence has come to be accepted as an appropriate—even expected—way to solve conflict. At the street-level we provide tools to resolve conflict in another way.”

On a larger-scale, the traditional approach to violence has been through a criminal justice lens focusing on prosecution over prevention. This framework views success in terms of clearance rates (those captured and incarcerated after the commission of a crime) and measures prevention through a crime-control perspective often termed in military language (“war on drugs,” “war on gangs”). CeaseFire looks to shift the discourse toward the view of violence as a disease and placing the emphasis on finding solutions to end this epidemic.

The Department of Justice report validated the “CeaseFire model as an evidence-based intervention that reduces shooting and killings and makes communities safer. The report found the program “effective” with “significant” and “moderate to large impact,” and with effects that are “immediate. In every program area there was a substantial decline in shootings following the introduction of CeaseFire. CeaseFire Chicago’s effect on shootings and killings included a “41 to 73 percent drop in shootings and killings in CeaseFire zones; a 16 to 35 percent drop in shootings directly attributable to CeaseFire; 100 percent reduction in retaliation murders in five of eight neighborhoods. CeaseFire Chicago also had a direct effect on high-risk youth; 85 to 99 percent of high-risk clients needing help received help from CeaseFire; clients received help in getting jobs, education, drug treatment, and more”, and an impressive “99 percent of clients reported that CeaseFire had a positive effect on their lives.”

“Given the two choices, ceasefire,” Dr. Ira Neighbors, a Doctor of Social Work, concluded, “appears to be infinitely more promising than the Milwaukee model. It fits with the profile of the types of murders being committed here in New Orleans.”