Media Coverage

City seeks solution for teen crime surge

Article Source: The Yale Herald – Monday 16th, 2005

City seeks solution for teen crime surge
After safer decade, recent muggings may be a symptom of funding cuts to urban programs.

BY KELLY BIT

They were approaching me from the back, and in my mind, I just thought, 'Oh God,'" a Yale student said of the mugging attempt he endured on Crown St. on the night of Sat., Sept. 10. "I had this feeling from the way they were looking at me that something was about to happen. They were walking very slowly, like they didn't really have a purpose. They kind of surrounded me while I was walking. One of the guys ran toward me very quickly, jumped on top of me from the side, and tried to get into my pants for my wallet. I pushed him off and started screaming."

DANNY MINDLIN/YH
Though police have temporarily increased patrols, community programs hope to provide a more enduring response to crime.
Once in safety, the student started to reflect on what had happened. "I guess they were looking for trouble, or one of the guys had dared the other, but the other guys just didn't seem that into mugging me. They kind of just stood there and blocked part of the sidewalk behind me. I'm not really sure what they were thinking was going to happen."

Like the shaken student, the Yale community has been searching for answers following a recent wave of local crime. Since Wed., Aug. 31, at least six separate incidents of robbery or attempted robbery in the Yale vicinity have been reported to authorities. On Thurs., Sep. 8, two days before the Crown St. incident, Yale Police Chief James A. Perrotti sent an E-mail to the Yale community in which he acknowledged the spike in criminal activity on or near campus. "During these opening weeks of the semester," he wrote, "we have experienced a disturbing increase in robberies in areas surrounding campus. Several of these crimes have been committed by teenagers who are riding bicycles and who have what appear to be weapons."

Yet according to Perrotti, the recent crimes are not isolated abberations; rather, they offer the latest snapshot of a more protracted trend of increasing crime—a trend that police first identified last spring. "Within the last, probably, six months or more, there's been an upsurge [of these types of crimes]," he said. Jennifer Pugh, deputy chief administrative officer for the City of New Haven, confirmed the trend. "The police department noticed an increase around the time school let out last year," she said. "They noticed that the number of young people on bicycles traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood increased."

In response to these incidents, Perrotti has dispatched police units to patrol each of the recent crimes sites around the clock. Yet the unique character of these attacks—specifically, their frequent execution by teenagers traveling in informal "bike gangs"—suggests the presence of an underlying problem that may require more than increased patrolling to fix. Though overall crime rates in the city continue to hover at the lowest levels in recent history, the recent wave of criminal activity also comes at a time when state and federal funding is being slashed for community policing programs—the same programs that were largely credited for reining in the city's crime woes in the '90s. Now, reports of muggings are again growing, and available funding is evaporating. In this climate, the city government—and its state and federal counterparts—must, on the one hand, answer to critics who say it is failing to provide for at-risk teens, thereby threatening increased violence, and, on the other hand, devise new way to remedy the current situation.

OSTENSIBLY, NEW HAVEN HAS SEEN THIS KIND OF high-profile crime before, during the rough-and-tumble days of the late '80s and early '90s. In September 1988 alone, there were seven homicides in the city. That same year, Park Street suffered a wave of shootings, though crimes on campus were down 30 percent from 1987.

In 1989, Mayor John C. Daniels reported a 40 percent dropout rate of NewHaven youth in public high schools, and the New Haven Police Department released figures showing that incidents of aggravated assault had risen 80 percent from the previous year. That year, too, saw the University's first Security Awareness Week—a direct response to the elevated levels of campus crime. Another wave of assaults hit Yale students in 1990, though overall crime plateaued.

In the throes of this bleak era, Daniels proposed a new policy of community policing. From its inception, the program, as defined by the New Haven Police Department, has served as "a problem-solving partnership between the police and the community," where officers are "jointly responsible not just to catch criminals but to help wipe away the community decay that fosters crime." Its success was virtually immediate. "Training the police force has changed the face of the police and the face of the neighborhoods," Claudia Merson, Public School Partnerships coordinator for the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, said. Indeed, Daniels' introduction of community policing played an integral role in reducing crime—for so long the city's Gordian knot. Rates of reported incidents decreased steadily and dramatically during the '90s. By the end of Daniels' tenure, the number of officers patrolling the streets had tripled and crime rates had begun to improve ["After four years, Daniels cedes City Hall, YH, 11/5/93].

The establishment of community policing in the city, of course, required funding, which, much like today, was unavailable due to budget issues. By January 1990, the the dire status of New Haven's budgets had begun to hamper the city's funding for programs and educational services. A month later, Daniels claimed the city lacked money to expand its police forces. He wasn't lying: From 1990 to 1991, New Haven labored under a $38 million budget gap. When crime surged again in 1992, Daniels pointed his finger at the federal government. "Until the nation decides to pay as much attention to its cities as it does to its position in the world," he said, "this city and other cities are going to continue to produce drop-outs who become young murderers and would-be murderers" ["Daniels responds to surge in crime," YH, 3/27/92].

And though the economy of the '90s funneled ample resources into community programs, today's community leaders have once again identified insufficient funding as the most powerful force plaguing community policing efforts. Dee Linehan, director of the Department of Social Development under the New Haven Board of Education, explained that the manpower necessary to run community policing efforts, including mentoring programs, simply cannot function without money. "Funding for mentoring has been cut," she said. "Our department, for instance, had a grant, and the police department had a grant, but we both lost funding. [The reduced funding] didn't support police officers and administrators of the program," she said. As a result, a number of social programs have either closed their doors or taken an indefinite sabbatical: The New Haven Mentoring Program, a community policing initiative, suffered from empty coffers and has been inactive for six months; the ELERT Crime Prevention Program, designed to prevent drug trafficking, hasn't received state funding for two years; and JUMP, the Juvenile Mentoring Program, has also been inactive for several years. "Money just dried up," Linehan said. "It was a priority of President Bush's, but quietly last year [programs were] unfunded from the feds."

The anemic New Haven programs, moreover, do not stand alone—all across the nation, community policing efforts are being thwarted by funding crises. "What's different now, as compared to five years ago, is that there has been a dramatic reduction in federal funding. States and local districts are finding that departments have to do more with less," Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), said. Wexler believes one way community leaders can overcome funding problems is to use shorter-term strategies that are less expensive but still effective. "Changing the lighting and environmental factors by using a more visible police presence, telling people to not walk alone but together, and putting cameras in certain locations would help prevent crimes from happening. Police departments have to be more innovative and creative than they have in the past."

BY MANY ASSESSMENTS, THE PRESENT PLIGHT OF these programs, given their history of success, may be a valid explanation for the recent crime surge in the Elm City. A number of individuals, however, question this connection. Some, for instance, dispute the claim that the ineffectiveness—or just plain absence, due to funding issues—of community policing and mentoring programs leads directly to incidents of youth crime. Others feel that alternative factors are equally, if not more, significant.

"It's right to suggest that enrichment efficacy programs are decreasing and the number of children who are becoming involved in entry-level gateway kinds of offenses is increasing," Dr. Steve Marans, professor of Child Psychiatry and director of the Yale Child Study Center's National Center for Children Exposed to Violence (NCCEV), said. "But when adolescents get to the point of engaging in more violent crimes and assaults, such as shootings or stabbings, they are demonstrating the level of difficulty in their development beyond the benefits of after school programs alone." What is needed instead, Marans said, is "psychologically informed supervision of the legal kind, support not based on punishment but recognition of symptomatic disturbance."

Others believe the key to reducing youth violence lies in forging stronger connections between parents and children. "I think the biggest case [of youth violence] is the lack of parent involvement," said Luz Garcia, project manager for the Weed and Seed Program, a federal initiative designed to eliminate crime in target neighborhoods. "A lot of these kids grow up with little structure, discipline, or parent involvement. Parents create an important part of this. If they don't involve themselves in their children's lives it makes our jobs more difficult. It's hard to keep kids off the streets once they reach a certain age."

Charles Williams, New Haven director of Instruction for High Schools, offers a different analysis: He believes the state of the economy is the driving factor behind increased crime rates. "The economy has become extremely tight," he said. "When that happens, no matter where you are, people spend an inordinate amount of time trying to meet basic needs. Each time in history at times like these, when there's been an escalation of crime and crime-related activities, such as armed robberies in the streets, there's also an economic crunch."

DESPITE THE RANGE OF OPINIONS, FEW DISPUTE THE positive effect that community policing and mentoring programs can have on supressing crime rates. Armed with this recipe for success, the challenge now, for both police departments and community programs, is figuring out how to revive these efforts in the absence of support from the public sector.

One organization, the Concerned Citizens for the Greater New Haven Dixwell Community House, more widely-known as the "Q House," has become emblematic of this quest. Founded by leaders of the Dixwell community in 1924, the Q House community center closed over two years ago after programs and services could no longer run due to mismanagement. Though the City of New Haven, United Way, New Alliance Bank, and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven are all funding the reestablishment of the Q House, a committee of 11 people plan to overcome the crisis of insufficient funding by working with a strategic planner, Cornell Wright, CEO of the Parker Wright Group. "We are launching a sustainability effort so we don't have to rely solely on seeking funds," he said. "We are in the development stage of this, but we have hired a strategic planner to go into the community and develop a plan that will involve talking to different agencies, individuals, and will work the community to make this plan."

Following the Q House's projected Thanksgiving reopening, The Dixwell-Yale University Learning Center, a new resource known also as the Rose Center, opens in January. Through university funding, the center will offer youth education programs during the school year and summer. "This fall, [the Center] will take a group of at-risk middle school students for a three-year intervention program," Merson said. "It will start in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and will follow them through high school."

In the meantime, it seems that all local organizations involved in youth outreach programs—the NHPD, the Yale Child Study Center, the Department of Social Development, the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, and others—are weathering a transitional period as they discuss how to overcome the budget crisis amid the recent increase in youth crime. "There has been a series of meetings the [Social Development Department] hosted in the middle of August, with the Board of Education, the Yale Child Study Center, and other social service-type people," Pugh said. "There was an agreement to do what we could to address this issue and in the longer term pull together experts and resources."

In terms of the recent wave of crime, Pugh pointed out that the police are gradually learning how to distinguish the kids who are committing crimes today from those who did in the '90s, so they can respond accordingly. They have already been able to demographically categorize most of these youth offenders by region. "The neighborhoods these kids are from are mostly what is known as the 'Corridor,' which runs from Hillhouse south and north up through Dwight and Edgewood, up to Dixwell, Newhallville, and Southville, up to Hamden, and makes a line through the center of the city," she said.

If anything is certain, it's that the youth of New Haven, like youth everywhere, will always need firm guidance, and the nature of that guidance will always have to respond to the times. "Our work is never done, to be quite honest," New Haven Police Chief Francisco Ortiz said. Pugh, however, remains optimistic. "Anything can spark off interaction, retaliation, and it's important to identify new kinds of activity. Cops on bicycles are starting to engage these kids to talk to them to get a better handle on who they are and what's going on here," she said. "But I don't know that we have all the answers."