If Kevin stays straight, it may be due in part to the efforts of the Boston Streetworkers, a publicly funded program that works with 1,500 troubled youths. It is one of many different types of “violence intervention” programs being tried around the nation. All seek to stem the escalating pattern of teenage rage, frustration and violence found on so many American streets. While there are occasional downturns in the mayhem and the murder, the numbers today have never been more discouraging. “The rage is real,” says Richard Green, a Brooklyn, N.Y., community organizer. “These kids are like chemicals. If they collide, they’ll explode.”
The experts who toil for solutions face a Sisyphean task. In the schools, in the streets and in what’s left of homes, they want to try something–anything–to reach a population that’s on the verge of being lost. “For the last 20 years politicians have said that we need to crack down on criminals,” says Indianapolis Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Medisett. “But crime keeps going up. Especially with children, we’ve got to make sure our resources are directed to where they can do the most good.”
No one thinks that they’ve discovered a magic bullet; program directors speak with becoming modesty about their success rate. But still they keep trying because the alternative is so bleak. There is, for example, the shock approach: the prosecutor’s office in Cook County, Ill., has come up with a graphic anti-crime video that has footage from the morgue. There’s the big-brother approach: an organization called Mad Dads, centered in Nebraska, which mobilizes men in a community to be role models. And there are even lawyers in Los Angeles who volunteer to spend time with young parolees coming out of the California Youth Authority; with all that aggression they could all grow up to be Arnie Becker.
The goal of many programs is to teach kids how to resolve disputes and vent anger in a nonviolent way. In Los Angeles, Conflict Busters is a public school program, beginning in the third grade, that trains students to be mediators. They’re not supposed to offer solutions to their peers but teach them to figure out ones of their own. “Cases” range from sandbox fights to interracial gang disputes. “We’re teaching kids skills that most adults don’t have,” says Rich Mills, a school psychologist who founded Conflict Busters.
The best time for intervention is between elementary school and junior high, according to one study of inner-city youths in New York and Baltimore. Edward Seidman, a New York University psychologist, concludes that early adolescence is the worst time to move kids out of the controlled and personal environment of grade school. “Junior high is bigger, more anonymous,” he says. “Classes change every period. There are different teachers. We find self-esteem deteriorates and schoolwork suffers.” Seidman points with approval to school experiments aimed at making classes more personal.
In New Haven, Conn., police and clinicians have teamed to identify another category of at-risk youths–direct and indirect victims of trauma. Earlier this month, for example, a group of boys watched in horror as a motorist knocked their 7-year-old buddy off his bicycle and killed him. When a co,,) showed up and saw the faces of the boys, he immediately called a child psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine. The clinician arrived within 10 minutes.
The Child Development Community Policing Program, the first of its kind, began in 1991 and has now trained 150 of New Haven’s 400 officers. A clinician is always on call to come to any crime scene, hospital or precinct. “It’s very much a prevention program because when children are exposed to violence…they run the risk of becoming overwhelmed,” says Steven Nagler, a Yale social worker -and later repeating the aggression.
The schoolyards and the streets are full of random acts of violence. But it is gang warfare that most terrorizes inner cities. In Boston, the Streetworkers seek out the toughest gangbangers. Tracy Litthcut, the leader, works a no man’s land between cops and gangs. He wears a beeper and he’s regularly called by both sides to wage some peace. Says Litthcut: “We stop a lot of things from happening.”
Like Kevin, in the South End, from retaliating. He’s still got problems, facing an attempted-murder charge from a stabbing that he says was self-defense. But Kevin seems to get it, professing no more interest in the Hornets. “I joined for the money the drugs, the girls,” he says. “But what good is all that if you’re dead?”
