Title: Kids, Cops, and Communities.
Series: Issues and Practices
Author: Marcia R. Chaiken, Ph.D.
Published: June 1998
Subject: Juvenile delinquency prevention, juvenile justice
104 pages
238,000 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

National Institute of Justice
Issues and Practices

KIDS, COPS, & COMMUNITIES

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

Janet Reno
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice

Raymond C. Fisher
Associate Attorney General

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General

Noel Brennan
Deputy Assistant Attorney General

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice

------------------------------- 

Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site 
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

-------------------------------

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Kids, COPS, and Communities

by
Marcia R. Chaiken, Ph.D.
LINC

June 1998

-------------------------------

Issues and Practices in Criminal Justice is a publication series of the
National Institute of Justice. Each report presents the program options and
management issues in a topic area, based on a review of research and
evaluation findings, operational experience, and expert opinion on the
subject. The intent is to provide information to make informed choices in
planning, implementing, and improving programs and practice in criminal
justice.

-------------------------------

National Institute of Justice
Jeremy Travis
Director

Richard Titus, Ph.D.
Program Monitor

and 

The Carnegie Corporation of New York
Gloria Primm Brown
Program Officer

-------------------------------

Prepared for the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice,
by LINC under grant #94-IJ-CX-0015. Points of view or opinions stated in
this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the
official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

-------------------------------

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

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NCJ 169599

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Executive Summary

The Most Popular Approaches for Dealing With Juvenile Violence
Haven't Worked

Effective Prevention Approaches Are Integral to National Youth
Organizations

Partnerships Between Police and Youth Organizations

Case Studies of Exemplary Approaches

Bristol, Connecticut

--The Bristol Family Center for Boys and Girls

--The Bristol Police Department

Arlington, Texas

--The Teen Center

--Boys and Girls Clubs of Arlington

--Arlington Police Department

Spokane, Washington

--West Central Community Center

--The Washington State University Family Focus Program

--The Spokane Police Department

What You Can Do to Provide Safe, Constructive Activities for At-Risk
Youth

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Dimensions of Violence Involving Kids

Kids Are Most at Risk for Violence and Serious Delinquency

Kids Are Most Vulnerable to Crime During the Nonschool Hours

The Most Popular Approaches for Dealing With Juvenile Violence
Haven't Worked

Effective Prevention Approaches Are Integral to National Youth
Organizations

Youth Organizations Are Trying to Reach Youth Most at Risk for
Violence

Endnotes

Chapter 2: Crime and Youth Organizations

Youth-Serving Organizations Are Reaching Kids in Economically
Depressed Urban Areas

Youth Organizations Are Reaching Kids Already Involved in Crime as
Victims or Offenders

The More Vulnerable the Kids They Serve, the More Crime the Youth
Organizations Experience

Most Offenders Are Kids

More Offenses Are Committed by Nonparticipants Than Participants

Crime Takes a Heavy Toll on Organizational Resources

Most Steps Taken to Prevent Crime Haven't Worked

Police Responsiveness Is a Significant Factor in the Level of Crime

Endnotes

Chapter 3: Partnerships With Police

More Organizations Ask for Proactive Than Reactive Policing

Organizations Nominated Diverse Exemplary Programs

Approaches Selected for Case Studies Met Important Criteria

Exemplary Approaches Implemented in Three Cities Were Chosen

The Organizations Implementing These Approaches Are Affiliated With
One or More of the National Organizations Participating in the Study

Bristol, Connecticut

--Problems Affecting Youth Have Worsened

--Public Agencies and Local Coalitions Assessed Needs

--Implementing a Collaborative Approach Required Building Community
Support

--The Bristol Family Center for Boys and Girls Is a Comprehensive,
Facility-Based Youth Development Program

--The Bristol Family Center Young Parent Program Helps Pregnant and
Postpartum Teens

--The Bristol Juvenile Diversion Program Is a Collaborative Effort With
Other Agencies

--Police Are Involved With the Family Center in Other Ways as Well

--Community Support and Volunteer Time Are Essential to the Success of
the Family Center

Arlington, Texas

--Crime Is a Concern in Arlington

--Organizations and Coalitions Pave the Way for a Comprehensive
Response to Youth Risks

--The Teen Center Provides Safe Activities 7 Days a Week

--Observance of Rules Is Emphasized

--Staff Are Conscious of the Teens' Home and Neighborhood
Environments

--Staff Provide Opportunities for Teen Decisionmaking and Responsibility

--Boys and Girls Clubs of Arlington Provides a Spectrum of Youth
Development Programs

--The Main Branch in Central Arlington Is Typical of Many Boys and
Girls Clubs Facilities 

Around the Country

--Teens Praise the SmartMoves Program

--School-Based Child Care in Elementary Schools Keeps Younger
Students Safe After 

Classes Are Over

--The Arlington Police Department Is Strongly Involved in Afterschool
Programs

--The School Resource Officer Program Plays a Key Role in the Arlington
Crime Prevention Action Plan

--Patrol Officers Also Provide Ongoing Formal Support for Safe
Afterschool Activities

--The Approach in Arlington Receives Wide Community Support

Spokane, Washington

--Youth Issues Are Identified by a Citywide Youth Commission

--The West Central Community Center's Outreach and Programs Seek to
Break the Cycle of Poverty

--4-H Clubs Are Involved

--Girl Scouts Are Involved

--The Washington State University Family Focus Program Teaches
Family Life Skills

--The COPS West Ministation Binds Neighborhood Adults and Youth to
Police to Reduce Crime

--Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers Are Trained by Police to Help
Prevent Crime

--The Spokane Police Department Spearheads Police-Community
Collaboration

--Police Create a Special Boy Scout Explorer Post

--Successful Efforts in Spokane Benefit From the City's History of
Forming Coalitions to Address Shared Problems

--Spokane Benefits From a Spectrum of Youth-Serving Organizations
That Provide a Range of Programs for Meeting the Comprehensive Needs
of Many Children in the City

Endnotes

Chapter 4: Exemplary Partnerships Between Police and Youth
Organizations

Police Activities at the Three Exemplary Sites Took Many Forms

Coalitions Among Police, Local Officials, Community Leaders, and
Youth Organizations Develop Strategies

What You Can Do to Provide Safe, Constructive Activities for At-Risk
Youth

Endnotes

Appendix: Information Resources

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Foreword

As the President noted in his most recent State of the Union address, most
juvenile crime is committed between the hours of 3 in the afternoon and 8
at night. Especially in the inner cities, but now in many other areas as well,
when children and adolescents are on the street and not in school or at
home, they face many risks-- involvement in drugs, gangs, crime, as well
as victimization.

National youth organizations--such as the Boy Scouts, Girls Incorporated,
and 4-H Clubs--have for generations enabled young people to engage in
wholesome, enjoyable activities after school, with their peers, in safe
places, and under the supervision of experienced adults. They have also
helped teenagers develop teamwork and leadership skills while
participating in sports, games, crafts, and community service activities.
The experience of these organizations is invaluable in preventing
delinquency and victimization among our most disadvantaged and at-risk
youth.

Meanwhile, the Crime Act of 1994 is putting thousands of police officers
into our cities and towns, into community-oriented policing where they
can become involved in crime prevention programs in the neighborhoods
they serve and participate in neighborhood activities. In many places,
officers are getting involved in youth programs, volunteering their time
and skills and becoming known to the young participants as friendly,
caring adults.

The National Institute of Justice, in cooperation with the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, sponsored a study of several national youth
organizations that are focusing their efforts on at-risk youth. The study
looked particularly at the ways police and local affiliates of these
organizations were working together at the neighborhood level. What the
study found, as documented on these pages, holds promise for
strengthening relationships among youth, police, and the communities
they live in. This bodes well not only for the protection of young people
but for their future development as responsible citizens.

Jeremy Travis
National Institute of Justice

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Acknowledgments

Many major contributions to our project and report were made by
professionals and volunteers concerned about the need for safer and more
productive places for children and teens in the nonschool hours. They
include funders, researchers, police, professionals in the field of youth
development, city leaders, and a host of service providers. They
unstintingly shared their support, data, advice, methodological skills,
insights, and time in the hope that the results of this study could help point
to better ways for raising school-age children growing up in our cities. I
would like to thank them for their cooperation and express my
appreciation for their high level of commitment to our Nation's youth. In
particular, I would like to thank the following people for their help. Their
affiliations and titles are identified as of 1996.

Project Sponsors

The Carnegie Corporation of New York: David A. Hamburg, President,
and our Program Officer, Gloria Primm Brown. 

The National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice: Jeremy
Travis, Director, and our Program Manager, Dr. Richard Titus.

Collaborating National Youth Organization Directors and Their Associates

Boys and Girls Clubs of America: Roxanne Spillett, formerly Northeast
Regional Director; James Cox, Director of Urban Services; Frank
Sanchez, Jr., Youth Gang Prevention Specialist. Also Desi Day, Executive
Director, Alexandria/Olympic Boys and Girls Club. 

Boy Scouts of America: Stephen Medlicott, Associate Director of External
Communications. 

Girls Incorporated: Dr. Heather Johnston Nicholson, Director, National
Resource Center; Faedra Lazar Weiss, Research Associate. 

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.: Dr. Sylvia Barsion and Michael Conn, Directors
of Research and Evaluation. 

National Association of Police Athletic Leagues: Joseph Johnson,
(formerly) Executive Director; also, Detective Raleigh Harsley, PAL,
Crime Prevention Unit, Alexandria (Virginia) Police Department.

National 4-H Council: Richard Sauer, President and Chief Executive
Officer; and USDA 4-H and Youth Development Service, Jon Irby,
Director. 

YMCA of the USA: Lowell Overby, Associate Director, Community
Resources; Myrtis Meyer, Director of Research and Planning, and Venetta
Greer, Research Assistant. 

Staff at the national office of Boy Scouts of America, Executive Directors
of Girl Scout Councils, and County Extension Agents around the country
delivered our questionnaires to volunteer leaders selected to participate in
our survey. 

Project Advisers 

Professor Delbert Elliott (University of Colorado), Dr. Dennis Kenney
(Police Executive Research Forum), Professor Wesley Skogan
(Northwestern University), and Dr. Joan Wynn (The Chapin Hall Center
for Children, University of Chicago).

Office of Justice Programs Advisers for the LINC Survey

Virginia Baldau, National Institute of Justice; Michael Rand, Bureau of
Justice Statistics; James (Buddy) Howell, Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention. 

Arlington, Texas

Arlington Youth Services: William Daley, President, Board of Directors;
Penny Roswell, Pat Sutton, and Toni Greenwell, Board of Directors;
Christine Nusser, formerly Executive Director; Susan Herman, current
Executive Director; Gary Givens, Director of Children's Services; Robin
Hogan, Director of Adolescent Services; Archie Marshall, Sports Director,
and Paul Knudsen, Photography Instructor. 

Arlington Police Department: David Kunkle, Chief of Police; Deputy
Chief Bowman; Sgt. Jeff Stapleton; Sgt. James "JW" Lowery, Jr.; Crime
Prevention Officer Janet Thelan; and Rick Smith, Director of Support
Services. 

Boys and Girls Clubs of Arlington: Don Kromer, Executive Director;
Veronica Carter, Director of Prevention Programs; Lucinda Lynn, Raising
Our Cities' Children, Roquemore Branch Director; Jean
Goodwin-Grisham, Southeast Branch Education Director; Carmen Zelya,
staff member at the T.U.R.F. Teen Center Branch; and most especially
Ken Rose, Director of Operations.

YMCA of Arlington: Laszlo G. Szabo, Senior Program Director; Tim
McBride, Childcare Coordinator; and the other YMCA Coordinators and
Afterschool Site Directors. 

City of Arlington: Judy M. Rupay, Council Member.

Bristol, Connecticut

The Family Center for Girls and Boys: Carolyn Thompson, Executive
Director; Kathy Theriault, Associate Director; Linda Rich, Director of
Social Services; Michelle Wingfield, Program Director; Dawn Scriven,
Program Director; Lisa Hanggi, Program Director; and Kerry Walsh,
Dance Program Director. 

Bristol Police Department: Detective James A. Zalot, Criminal
Investigation Division; Youth Officer Tim Ustanowski. 

Department of Education: Dr. Ann Serratore, Assistant Superintendent of
Schools; Daniel Viens, Supervisor of Instruction; Michael Georgen,
Supervisor of Special Instruction; Joann Galati, Assistant Principal at the
Chippens Hill Middle School; V. Everett Lyons, Principal, Bristol Eastern
High School; F. Fred Soliani, Coordinator, School/Business Partnership
Program (Board of Education/Chamber of Commerce). 

City of Bristol Youth Services Bureau: Eileen McNulty, Director; Sharon
Schall, Project Coordinator; Deborah LaBella, Project Coordinator. 

Bristol Hospital Department of Social Services: Carlyn Glaser, Program
Manager. 

Comm-Part/Substance Abuse Action Council: Judy Cowan, Community
Development Coordinator; Marsha Tinella, Executive Assistant. 

Spokane, Washington

Spokane Police Department: Terence J. Mangan, Chief of Police; Cheryl
Steele, Project Coordinator for Spokane COPS; Officer Tim Conley,
Neighborhood Resource Officer in West Central Spokane. Special thanks
to David D. Ingle, Administrative Services Director, who arranged for me
to meet with Melissa M. Sullivan, Consultant; Sandy Richards, Crime
Prevention Practitioner; Officer Robert D. Walker, Volunteer Services
Coordinator; and Officer Larry Lyndskog, Officer Mark Sterk, and Sgt.
Tony Gianetto, designers/directors of the "Every 15 Minutes" Program.

Nevawood COPS: Deborah Wittwer, Chairman/Youth Director and Girl
Scout Troop Leader. 

Inland Empire Girl Scout Council: Judith Edmund, Executive Director;
Nancy Bolt, Troop Leader in the West Central Community Center. 

West Central Community Development Association: Donald S. Higgins,
Executive Director; Don McClosky, Coordinator, West Central
Community Mediation Program; Rick Harris, Recreation Programs
Manager, West Central Community Center. 

Spokane County Cooperative Extension: Dr. Jon Newkirk, Chair; 4-H
Program team members Carolyn Harrelson, Marlene O'Dea, and Linda
Ray; and Family Resource Assistants Brenda Cook, Velma Riddle, Linda
Coustich, and Linette Frye; and a personal thank you to a very special
person, Marilyn Trail, Community Resource Coordinator. Marilyn
personifies commitment to our Nation's children and families. 

Other appreciated contributors in Spokane include, at the Downtown
Spokane YMCA, Mary Harneteaux, Branch Director; Debbie Wagner,
Founder, WINNERS: Making Neighborhood Safe Homes a Reality for
Kids; Marilee Roloff, Project Director, Breakthrough for Families
(Volunteers of America); Valerie Smith, Director of the Foster Care
Services of Lutheran Social Services of Washington and Idaho; Michael J.
Erp, Executive Director, Washington State Institute for Community
Oriented Policing; Joanne M. Benham, Director, Chase Youth
Commission; Steven A. Magallan, Project Director, City of Spokane
Youth Gang Drug Prevention; Barbara Ritter, YWCA of Spokane;
Deborah Ivester, Recreation Supervisor 1, Spokane Parks and Recreation
Department; and Community Volunteer Leader Mel Carter. 

Several colleagues at the Institute for Law and Justice played a major role
in carrying out the survey sample selection, designing and preparing the
questionnaire, and conducting preliminary data analysis; they are Dr. J.
Thomas (Tom) McEwen, Jenny Fu, and Joan Peterschmidt. 

Before joining the U.S. Department of Justice as Director of the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, Dr. Jan Chaiken designed the methods for selecting the
survey sample and constructed the sampling frame using data provided by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Throughout the duration of this project, my colleague, Dr. Shama
Chaiken, acted as a sounding board and provided cogent advice.

Monique Smith of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service
provided invaluable editorial support. Dr. Christy Visher, Science
Advisor to the Director of the National Institute of Justice, offered
significant technical advice during the preparation of this report.

I thank the anonymous program leaders who devoted time and thought to
completing our survey. And finally I send my personal gratitude to the
many children and teens (especially Harmony), who welcomed me to
observe their activities and who provided major insights about secure and
productive places in the nonschool hours. You have made clear that we
can count on you to create a safer world.

Marcia R. Chaiken

-------------------------------

Executive Summary

This report is designed to help law enforcement administrators and officers
understand and institute a strategy to help prevent violence--
community-oriented policing services carried out in collaboration with
youth-serving organizations. Popular police prevention approaches such as
D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), G.R.E.A.T. (Gang
Resistance Education and Training), and the McGruff "Take a Bite out of
Crime" campaigns have helped prepare police officers to work hand in
hand in a variety of ways with local affiliates of national youth-serving
organizations. In a growing number of cities, police are working with
youth groups and finding that violence involving youth is rapidly
decreasing. Some of these approaches are detailed.

Descriptions are based on a LINC study jointly sponsored by the National
Institute of Justice and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The
research involved a survey of 579 affiliates of 7 national youth-serving
organizations: Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Boy Scouts of America,
Girls Incorporated, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., National Association of
Police Athletic Leagues, National 4-H Council and USDA 4-H and Youth
Development Service, and YMCA of the USA.* The research also
incorporated onsite studies in three cities whose approaches were selected
by a panel of experts from among those nominated as exemplary by survey
respondents. The experts selected types of approaches most likely to
lessen the risk of kids becoming involved in crime, promote wholesome
development, and provide increased protection from delinquency and
victimization.

The need for effective approaches that will prevent crimes by and against
youth is pressing, as our youth continue to be at increasing risk for
victimization and serious delinquency, with several factors playing
important roles: 

o Age. Early adolescence is the time of life when people experience the
most dramatic increase in violence--both as offenders and as victims. The
rate of violent incidents involving strangers increases, but the main rise is
due to incidents with acquaintances.

o Gender. Until early adolescence, boys and girls are equally in danger
from violence, but thereafter boys are at most risk of homicide and girls,
sexual assault. In early adolescence, from ages 10 to 14, serious violent
acts are committed almost as frequently by girls as by boys, but in later
adolescence girls are far less likely to be violent. 

o Families. Youth who grow up in violent homes are more likely than
other youth to become delinquent. But so are even greater numbers of
youth who are neglected and lack supervision.

o Schools. Children's attachment to school is a powerful predictor of
whether or not they will be seriously delinquent. However, even
adolescents who do well in school spend most of their waking hours
outside school.

o Neighborhoods. At greatest risk for violence and victimization are
children and adolescents who live in high-crime neighborhoods where
deadly weapons are common and readily available.

Children who are frequently exposed to violence at home or school, or--
perhaps most important--to unchecked violence among neighborhood
children their own age, are most likely to become persistently delinquent
and increasingly violent.

Kids are most vulnerable to crime during the nonschool hours when they
are least likely to be supervised by teachers or working parents. Violent
crimes by juveniles are most likely to be committed between 2:30 in the
afternoon and 8:30 at night. Gang-related crimes, too, are more likely to
take place in these hours than at any other time of day or night.

The Most Popular Approaches for Dealing With Juvenile Violence
Haven't Worked

Despite attempts to "deinstitutionalize" children, locking them up in State
and local facilities is still a prime approach. Although these kids
temporarily have the supervision they definitely need, once released,
nothing else has changed. Other currently popular approaches such as boot
camps also just provide temporary supervision. And although curfews
theoretically extend the hours of family oversight, the periods when kids
are most likely to get into trouble are not covered.

Many programs available after school--the prime time for youth violence--
are either ineffective or counterproductive. Simply providing a supervised
place doesn't work (adolescents most at risk for delinquency won't go or
may take over the place if they do). Sports, gang-prevention approaches
that make members more cohesive, and approaches that simply provide
information about the risks or wickedness of delinquency can backfire and
make kids more delinquent.

Approaches that researchers have found to be most promising for
preventing violence and delinquency are relatively long-term, continuous,
comprehensive approaches that involve adults as tutors and mentors who
teach children and teens cognitive and social skills and provide them an
opportunity to cooperatively practice these competency skills. These
approaches are virtually synonymous with the approaches implemented by
national youth-serving organizations.

Effective Prevention Approaches Are Integral to National Youth
Organizations 

Typically, the approaches taken by national youth organizations attempt to
ameliorate more than a single factor associated with delinquency. They
provide a range of activities appropriate for children of specific ages and
different developmental stages, and they continue over the long term. In
today's world, where many single parents have low incomes and less time
to spend with their children and where many schools are literally and
figuratively falling apart, youth-serving organizations can most readily
provide the necessary resources children and teens fail to find elsewhere.
This is especially important in neighborhoods where all essential resources
for children and teens are scarce and crime rates are high.

Youth-serving organizations know that for this at-risk population they
need to duplicate the elements that have for generations appealed to their
adolescent participants:

o An environment in which kids are valued and adolescents are considered
resources rather than problems for their community. 

o Activities that present teens with real challenges and experiences in
planning, preparing for, and publicly presenting projects they and their
communities truly value.

o Ongoing outreach to teens and adults in the community, with messages
that are understandable.

Findings of the LINC survey indicate that affiliates of national
youth-serving organizations are:

o Reaching millions of kids. The Girl Scouts alone have 2.5 million
members nationwide. When all youth-serving organizations are included,
the total is far larger. 

o Reaching kids in economically depressed urban areas. Compared to
organizations in prosperous neighborhoods, each affiliate in a rundown
city neighborhood is serving an average of three times as many
participants.

o Reaching kids already involved in crime as victims or offenders. Girls
Incorporated and Boys and Girls Clubs are furnishing constructive
activities for youth in public housing areas where kids formerly wreaked
havoc on the property and on each other. Boy Scout Explorer Post leaders
are recruiting adolescents in violence-torn neighborhoods and teaching
them to work as law enforcement paraprofessionals. Girl Scout Councils
are reaching girls in extreme need of adult support, including daughters of
women in prison. And 4-H is serving runaway teens, some supporting
themselves through prostitution.

o Experiencing crimes. Among organizations included in the LINC study,
more than half reported that an offense occurred at or immediately outside
the primary program site during the program year beginning in the fall of
1993. Most of these offenses were committed by kids, primarily
nonparticipants in the organizations. 

o Losing valuable organizational resources to crime. Three out of four of
the organizations reporting at least one violent incident or property crime
in the 1993-1994 program year indicated that they suffered economic
consequences, or burdens on staff who had to deal with incidents
involving offenses committed by and against their participants, or
constraints on program operations and activities.

o Suffering defeat. Most preventive steps organizations experiencing
crime have taken, such as putting locks on doors to prevent unauthorized
access to program areas, haven't worked (with the exception of requiring a
responsible adult to accompany participants when they leave the program
site).

The study found that some organizations experienced much lower rates of
crime than one would have expected given their location in rundown
neighborhoods in cities with high crime rates. These are organizations that
reported more police responsiveness to their needs than other
youth-serving organizations. And, as the survey results also indicated, the
primary needs of these organizations for police cooperation center on steps
to prevent crime rather than to deal with crimes already committed.

Partnerships Between Police and Youth Organizations

The LINC study found that partnerships between police and youth-serving
organizations take many forms, from officers providing occasional talks to
youth to officers leading groups on an ongoing basis. They also involve
police at all ranks--from the chief to the newest police officers. 

At the highest level chiefs and top administrators show their support for
strong police involvement in crime prevention activities among high-risk
youth through their participation in youth organization advisory boards.
They provide an example and incentives for their staff members to become
voluntary adult leaders. They also emphasize that support of youth
organizations is part of community policing.

At the request of the youth-serving organizations, police officers are
providing age-appropriate interactive programs that help children and
teens realize what to do when faced with common dangerous situations--
emergencies when they are home alone, threats and pressures from gang
members, "date" rape attempts, or reoccurring violence among family
members. Police at all ranks are volunteering to become Boy Scout and
Girl Scout leaders for kids in high-crime neighborhoods where troops have
been difficult to organize.

Police devote many hours helping to select and monitor juveniles assigned
to youth-serving organizations as part of juvenile diversion programs.

The LINC survey and case studies amply show that in many communities,
police officers routinely drop in to youth centers or participate more
formally in youth center activities. They provide a strong presence that
allays community fears about having so many "at-risk" teenagers
congregating in the area.

Among the most innovative and fruitful relationships between police and
young people have been officers' participation in programs that allow
youth organization participants to do "real" policing, as in one LINC study
site, where boys and girls remind residents to lock their doors, adolescents
conduct overnight surveillance in parks and alleys, and youth carry out
other crime prevention projects under police supervision.

Case Studies of Exemplary Approaches

As part of the survey, respondents were asked to nominate exemplary
prevention approaches carried out by their organizations or other
organizations in their areas. More than 100 approaches were recommended
for further study, with advisers to the study unanimously agreeing that
case studies to be included in this report should focus on organizations
providing (1) collaborative or relatively comprehensive or extensive
community programs and approaches or (2) center-based programs with
nontraditional staff, hours, or participants in cities or neighborhoods with
relatively high rates of crime. All advisers independently used active
recruitment of youth at high risk for violence or delinquency as a criterion
for selecting the programs they nominated.

One approach selected for study is being implemented in Bristol,
Connecticut; one in Arlington, Texas; and two in Spokane, Washington. 

The organizations implementing these approaches are affiliated with one
or more of the national organizations participating in the study. In addition
to their innovative approaches, the selected organizations are
implementing traditional youth development practices that may be just as
or more beneficial in preventing delinquency than approaches designed
solely to prevent youth violence. They are all a vital part of a network of
organizations that together are creating safer and more productive
environments for children and teens in the nonschool hours. 

The innovative approaches can best be understood in the context of the
cities in which they are occurring, the needs of youth systematically
identified by collaborative efforts, the particular needs the organization
was striving to meet, the ongoing collaboration of other youth
development organizations to meet these needs, and the collaboration with
other private and public agencies--in particular, the police.

Bristol, Connecticut

Many of Bristol's families of French, Polish, Italian, and Irish descent have
lived there for generations, but today Bristol's population of 60,000 has
become even more ethnically diverse, and goods-producing industries
have been outnumbered by service industries; the relatively homogeneous
working-class environment has changed. Upscale, middle-class homes are
going up in the outlying areas, and the central city is now marked by areas
of poverty. 

Problems affecting youth have worsened in the past decade. The schools
are finding that while rates of teen pregnancy have remained the same for
a period of years, younger girls--down to middle-school age--are now
having babies. Police and other agencies find that children are committing
crimes at younger ages. 

Information gathered from schools and State and local agencies, including
the Bristol Police Department, led local leaders to the conclusion that
community-based services for youth, including afterschool programs, were
essential and that a multifaceted collaborative approach would be most
effective in bringing these about.

The Bristol Family Center for Boys and Girls

The Family Center is an affiliate of Girls Incorporated. Located on a
downtown street in a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood, it
attracts children from all over the city to its two-story brick building
constructed more than 60 years ago as one of the first Girls Clubs, together
with newer additions built in the 1960s, including a large gymnasium,
pool, and locker room. 

The Family Center is open for activities on weekdays from 6:30 a.m.,
when preschoolers are dropped off for child care, until 9 p.m. when teens
finish swimming, gymnastics, dance classes, or other activities. Two
particular programs carried out by the Bristol Family Center are types of
youth development programs that have been found by past research to
have long-term success in reducing children's involvement in crime and
delinquency.

The first, the Bristol Family Center Young Parent Program, helps pregnant
and postpartum teens by giving them the option of continuing their
education at the center, with trained Family Center staff providing case
management and individual counseling. The Family Center also offers
these teen mothers and the fathers of their children adult mentoring and
peer counseling.

The Family Center's positive support for teen parents is matched by a
second program to intervene in the lives of youth at risk of following a
delinquent path. The Bristol Police Department and the Youth Service
Bureau are the lead agencies in the coalition implementing the juvenile
offender diversion program in which the Family Center collaborates. For
first-time adolescent offenders involved in minor crimes, a common
alternative is restitution through community service; in these cases the
Family Center representative has the option of volunteering to place the
adolescent as an aide in one of the Family Center programs. These
adolescents commonly form a strong bond with staff and stay on as
regular participants after their mandated service is completed.

The Bristol Police Department

In addition to their ongoing Juvenile Review Board actions, officers in the
police department work directly with children in occasional projects
jointly sponsored by youth organizations and the police departments in
neighborhoods where children appear to be especially at risk.

Bristol officers also provide special training for youth organization
participants on such topics as gang awareness and dealing with babysitting
emergencies. Patrol officers regularly drop by youth centers as part of the
Bristol Police Department's "Walk-and-Talk" community policing
approach.

Arlington, Texas

With a population of more than 270,000, Arlington has a wide range of
economic levels within its boundaries. Many of Arlington's new families
have school age children and two parents working to maintain affluent
lifestyles, while new arrivals have also included families living in poverty.
Both long-term residents and recent arrivals are concerned by the city's
precipitous growth, its changing nature, and the consequent strain on
services.

Crime is also a concern. In 1993, for instance, Tarrant County, which
contains all of Arlington and part of Fort Worth, had one of the highest
crime rates in Northeast Texas.

To meet these challenges, an extensive spectrum of public and private
agencies have collaborated in providing more services for at-risk youth
and for children without supervision and developing a specific plan of
action having three primary components:

o Actively recruiting high-risk children and teens to participate in existing
centers, including Boys and Girls Clubs Centers and the Arlington Youth
Services Multipurpose Center--renamed the Teen Center by the
participants who were recruited.

o Creating new centers in unsupervised areas where children and teens
were already congregating in the nonschool hours. Boys and Girls Clubs
of Arlington has taken the lead in this effort.

o Providing licensed childcare in the afterschool hours in all elementary
schools and contracting with the three major youth-serving organizations
in Arlington to administer the childcare and furnish age-appropriate youth
development activities. 

The Teen Center

Active recruitment by two outreach workers has resulted in the
participation of many teens identified by the police and schools as
"at-risk." The vast majority are minority group members, predominantly
African-Americans, Hispanics, and people of mixed race. The program is
characterized by:

o Emphasis on observing rules. All who come to the Teen Center agree to
take care of it, obey all laws, respect the neighborhood, and treat each
other and staff with respect.

o Mediation of peer differences. Part of teens' preference for playing
basketball in the Teen Center is not because of the basketball court but
because adults keep the place safe. They play basketball on the street, but
since there is no staff member on the street to referee when issues of
respect arise, they fight.

o Opportunities for teens to make decisions. Both informally and more
formally--through 3-month positions as Teen Center "youth worker"
employees and through work in the neighborhood--youth are encouraged
to make decisions and take responsibility.

Boys and Girls Clubs of Arlington

In addition to afterschool childcare programs in elementary schools, Boys
and Girls Clubs of Arlington provides programs at six locations in
different parts of the city, where game rooms and quiet areas provide
children and teens with safe recreation. They receive help with school
assignments and engage in skill-building activities that are fun to do.

Arlington Police Department

The Arlington Police Department carries out key and highly visible efforts
to create safer places for school-age children, including more than 25
relatively short, age-appropriate youth education programs covering a
range of issues, as well as more sustained youth approaches such as the
Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program. 

As part of their duties, the police department's "school resource officers"
play a key role in Arlington's Crime Prevention Action Plan. They
maintain contacts with and actively refer children to other community
agencies providing services for children, including the Scouting
organizations, Camp Fire, Boys and Girls Clubs, the YMCA, and Big
Brothers and Sisters. School resource officers are also encouraged to
become Boy Scout Explorer Post leaders.

Patrol officers, too, provide ongoing formal support for safe afterschool
activities, such as carrying out background checks of the youth
organizations' staff before they are hired. As part of their regular patrol,
officers stop in at youth centers when programs are in progress and stay at
least a few minutes to talk to the young participants. At the Teen Center,
they remain to watch and cheer basketball games. They also assiduously
patrol the surrounding neighborhood when large groups of youth arrive
and leave and when the adult staff get wind of incipient violence.

Spokane, Washington

Spokane's population of more than 180,000 includes many new residents
with few skills for surviving in an urban area. Some are members of
minority groups that have been disproportionally affected by poverty,
including Native Americans and African-Americans, and others are recent
immigrants from Southeast Asia and East India.

A "report card" on Spokane area youth sponsored by the Youth
Commission and area businesses found that the city's deficits included
high rates of teenage drug use, unemployment, illiteracy, and teen
pregnancy. In January 1992, based on results of five monthly public
neighborhood meetings convened after several extremely serious incidents
of violent victimization of children, an ad hoc Security Task Force
composed of residents and representatives from schools and city agencies
identified the categories of issues that needed to be addressed to prevent
future crimes involving children: police-community relations,
neighborhood security improvements, security education, and block
networking and organizing.

A comprehensive, multifaceted program is now working on these
problems and issues in two neighborhoods, West Central and
Nevada-Lidgerwood.

West Central Community Center

Spokane's West Central neighborhood is a multiethnic community that has
experienced some of Spokane's worst problems associated with poverty,
including crime. In the first 10 years of the West Central Community
Development Association's existence, the staff concentrated on developing
the West Central Community Center as a facility for implementing
interventions to break the cycle of poverty in which many neighborhood
families were enmeshed. WIC (Special Supplemental Program for
Women, Infants and Children), Head Start, classes to teach parenting
skills, and other community education programs and classes were made
available in the center, as were some youth development activities.
However, according to the center's original and current executive director,
until rigorous outreach was conducted in the surrounding neighborhood--
in large part through the efforts of COPS West and Family Focus--the
programs had minimal participation among those most in need of them. 

Today the West Central Community Center is a beehive of activity.
During school hours, the center is a home away from home for
developmentally delayed adults who are cared for by trained providers
until their primary caretakers return from their jobs. It also provides a safe
and productive environment for children and teens in the hours before and
after school. 

4-H activities take place in the center in the early morning, and then
participants are taken to school in vans. The Girl Scout Council has a
professional staff member who is organizing and leading troop activities in
the center and introducing parents and neighborhood families to the
benefits of Girl Scouting.

The Washington State University Family Focus Program 

The Family Focus Program outreach component in West Central Spokane
teaches family and life skills to parents who lack basic methods for
managing their personal lives or their homes. Family Focus is
administered by the Spokane County Cooperative Extension of
Washington State University (WSU).

The Spokane Police Department 

The exemplary COPS initiatives involving Spokane youth are natural
products of a departmental approach that involves officers in community
collaborations for:

o Identifying problems.

o Analyzing the specific facets of problems that have been identified (who
is involved, when, how, and why).

o Taking logical steps and community action to resolve problems.

o Evaluating the outcomes that have been achieved.

Key to Spokane's community policing approach is the chief's strong
encouragement of officer approaches that go well beyond those used for
traditional law enforcement and crime prevention, particularly for
addressing problems involving Spokane's children and teens. 

As a result of the motivation provided by the chief and supervising
officers, individual officers in Spokane have developed a range of
approaches for creating safer and more creative environments for children
and teens in the nonschool hours. These include COPS West, the
Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers, and a Boy Scout Explorer
preparatory leadership program.

COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) West is a ministation
staffed by community volunteers (many of whom are Family Focus
participants or graduates) a neighborhood resource officer assigned by the
Spokane Police Department, and more recently representatives from a
number of other public agencies, including the Office of the District
Attorney and Adult and Juvenile Probation and Parole.

Both traditional and innovative neighborhood policing techniques are used
by COPS West. Teams of neighbors are trained in dispute resolution and
respond to calls involving conflicts between community children and teens
or other residents, if the police department's neighborhood resource officer
is confident that the confrontation can be handled without violent
responses. Adults patrol the streets before and after school to ensure that
children are safe and that older teens are not harassing each other or
younger children. 

Together with WSU Family Focus staff and the West Central Community
Development Association, COPS West has taken the lead in organizing
events enjoyed by the whole neighborhood, such as the now annual
Neighbor Days when a parade highlights the start of an entire day of
celebration. Integral to the community events are the neighborhood
children and teens, through their participation in youth groups formed at
the Community Center.

COPS West and WSU Family Focus have achieved documented success
in creating a safer community. According to the police department, the
effort resulted in a 40-percent decrease in crime in the West Central
Neighborhood between 1991 and 1994. 

Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers is a core subgroup of one of
Spokane's neighborhood COPS initiatives. Both girls and boys, most in
their midteens, participate. The girls who belong to Nevawood COPS
Youth Volunteers are officially a part of Girl Scout Troop 437. The Girl
Scouts were anxious to take on projects in the community to correct
neighborhood conditions that had become visible problems. Realizing the
changes that the West Central Community had achieved through their
COPS effort, one of the Senior Girl Scouts decided to organize a similar
effort in the Nevada-Lidgerwood area.

One of the first projects was to reclaim their neighborhood park. They
documented and reported graffiti, trash, broken lights, and other unsanitary
and unsafe conditions. They put on summer campouts in the park for
neighborhood children, and the Spokane police and a special group of
adult neighborhood COPS volunteers provided extra patrol.

The Boy Scout Explorer Post was started in 1987 as part of the police
chief's plan to create a volunteer program in which officers carry out youth
development and community development activities with the active
cooperation of neighborhood volunteers. The chief realized that, when
provided with productive opportunities, older teens can be a powerful
community asset rather than a problem. He delegated the creation of an
Explorer Post to a police officer who had prior professional experience in
working with older teens and had been recognized for his previous
volunteer contributions to the community. 

The intent of the post was to involve adolescents who had little or no
previous opportunity for community leadership--not by waiving the
qualifications for Explorer Scouts--but by stimulating younger teens to
meet the requirements for joining the post. A cornerstone of this approach
is the L.E.A.D. (Leadership, Education, and Development) program for
boys and girls in the seventh and eighth grades. It is under the supervision
of the officer who directs the Explorer Post. L.E.A.D. students participate
in an intensive program of training similar to that of Explorer Scouts but
more appropriate for their stage of development.

Successful efforts in Spokane benefit from the city's history of forming
coalitions to address shared problems, among them a citywide youth
commission, coalitions of public agencies and private organizations,
neighborhood-based teams of youth-serving organizations, public agencies
concerned with youth, and neighborhood volunteers. This strong
community support, together with a spectrum of youth-serving
organizations and the innovative participation of the Spokane Police
Department, have resulted in a range of programs for meeting the
comprehensive needs of many children in the city.

What You Can Do to Provide Safe, Constructive Activities for At-Risk
Youth

In their essentials, measures taken in Arlington, Bristol, and Spokane are
similar. Leaders in each city gathered information needed to assess the
status of their youth. They faced hard problems head on and came up with
action plans to address multiple factors that were endangering kids' lives.

Rather than reinventing ways for preventing violence and promoting
wholesome development, they figured out who in the community already
had approaches most likely to be effective. This included the police,
directors of nationally affiliated youth organizations, and other public
youth-serving agencies--schools (administrators, counselors, and teachers),
social services, health and treatment organizations, and juvenile justice
practitioners including judges, district attorneys, and probation officers.

Your city may already have carried out some of the steps described in this
report. However, because violence involving youth has multiple causes,
cities that carry out multiple concerted actions are more likely than others
to bring youth problems under sustained control. The following steps
carried out in the case study sites are offered as a checklist to consider
actions your city might take.

Police chiefs and other law enforcement executives can:

o Get to know the directors of youth-serving agencies and be willing to sit
on their advisory boards and on community coalitions addressing youth
issues.

o Encourage officers to volunteer at youth organizations in the community
and publicly reward them for their efforts.

o Incorporate joint activities between police and youth-serving
organizations into the day-to-day operation of the department.

Directors of youth organizations and agencies can:

o Introduce themselves and their organizations to the police chief and
welcome a police presence on and around their premises.

o Invite police to put on prevention programs with the children and
adolescents they serve and to participate in recreational activities for
youth. 

o Participate in city task forces that deal with youth issues, in
neighborhood coalitions to advocate for safe activities for youth, and in
community antidrug, anticrime efforts.

o Work with police and child protection agencies to identify and provide
services to youth who may be perpetrators or victims of crime.

o Work with police and community leaders in offering their centers as
places where troubled teens can perform community service.

o Advocate for youth among local officials and legislative bodies and
teach young participants to be advocates.

o Work with other youth-serving organizations in joint ventures on a
continuing basis.

o Get to know the educational and religious leaders in the community and
find ways to have fruitful working relationships or to plan comprehensive
solutions to common problems.

Community coalitions and collaborations can:

o Make sure they have a strong police, youth organization, and at-risk
youth presence.

o Talk to police and others to determine the scope of delinquency and the
range of adolescent experiences that contribute to it.

o Find out what services are currently available for at-risk kids.

o Assess the needs of youth for wholesome skill-building activities that
they will enjoy after school.

o Find or advocate for places that can house afterschool programs where
they are the most needed, operated by organizations that have
demonstrated experience in providing them.

Local officials and other community leaders can:

o Find out from the organizations that work with kids what kids' greatest
needs are.

o Find ways public agencies (such as youth-serving and public housing
agencies) can collaborate to keep youth off the streets and in safe
activities.

o Help launch or participate in coalitions dedicated to this goal.

o Wherever possible, promote a comprehensive approach to delinquency
prevention that involves both police and youth-serving organizations and
demonstrated experience in serving teens.

The full report provides more complete descriptions of these steps as taken
by the organization leaders in the three case study cities. Their actions
represent an arduous undertaking, and they willingly shared their
experiences so that this report could be written. They are also prepared to
provide advice and support to you. Their names and information for
contacting them are furnished in the appendix. They will be glad to hear of
your commitment to provide safe, productive places for our Nation's
youth.

*Information on survey methodology and findings is in the full report
from this study, Raising Our Cities' Children: Safe Productive Places in
the After-School Hours, available as NCJ 170608 from the National
Criminal Justice Reference Service, 800-851-3420. Citations for statistics
and studies referenced in this Executive Summary appear in the more
detailed chapters that follow.

-------------------------------

Chapter 1 

Introduction

Alarmed by a precipitous increase in the rate of violent crimes involving
children and teens over the past decade,[1] police, schools, youth-serving
organizations, and other community groups are trying a variety of tactics
to stem this dangerous trend. Not all efforts are effective, and no single
approach has unqualified success. But a growing body of research
suggests that some efforts by police in partnership with other community
agencies are instrumental in creating safer places for youth. While
researchers are trying to sort out particular causes and effects, all agree
that the upwardly spiraling rates of violence involving children and teens
has been checked and in many places has started to decline.

Yet the problem is far from solved. Adolescents are three times more
likely to be victims of violence than adults.[2] Murders of juveniles were
still 66 percent higher in 1995 than in 1985.[3] And communities are still
searching for better ways to prevent violence and promote the sound
development of our kids.

This research-based report has been written to help law enforcement
administrators and officers realize and institute a strategy that has been
found to help prevent violence--community-oriented policing services
carried out in collaboration with youth-serving organizations. In a growing
number of cities, police are coming to realize that youth organizations are
not just for little kids and not just for youth who are by nature good kids. 

With the help of police, in addition to serving the little Brownie Girl Scout
selling cookies door to door, the Girl Scout program is providing
opportunities for former gang members to improve skills for finding and
keeping jobs. In addition to teaching animal care to elementary school
students, 4-H staff are also conducting outreach to runaway teens whose
main source of income is prostitution. While still providing afterschool
activities in downtown centers, Boys and Girls Clubs, Girls Incorporated,
and the YMCA corporations and branches are creating satellites in public
housing and other urban areas where kids have been exposed to day-to-day
violence.

Popular police prevention approaches such as D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse
Resistance Education), G.R.E.A.T. (Gang Resistance Education and
Training) and the McGruff "Take a Bite Out of Crime" campaign have
helped pave the way for police to work hand in hand in a variety of ways
with local chapters of national youth organizations. Community-oriented
policing has created a new opportunity for partnerships with youth
organizations who know how to help kids stay out of trouble and give
them the boost they need to be successful. Together these partners are
creating safer environments for children and teens--many of whom are at
high risk for delinquency and violence. In the following sections, a variety
of cooperative activities are described.

Descriptions are based on approaches recently studied as part of research
jointly sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the Carnegie
Corporation of New York. The research involved a LINC survey of 579
affiliates of 7 national youth-serving organizations: Boys and Girls Clubs
of America, Boy Scouts of America, Girls Incorporated, Girl Scouts of the
U.S.A., National Association of Police Athletic Leagues, National 4-H
Council and USDA 4-H and Youth Development Service, and YMCA of
the USA. As designed, about half the affiliates were located in big cities
with high crime rates. The research also incorporated case studies that
included onsite observations of approaches in three cities: Bristol,
Connecticut; Arlington, Texas; and Spokane, Washington. A panel of
experts selected approaches used in these cities from among those
nominated as exemplary by survey respondents. The selected approaches
incorporate elements that research tells us prevent delinquency and
support wholesome development.

The Dimensions of Violence Involving Kids

National statistics show how pressing is the need for effective approaches
that will prevent crimes by violent youth. Juvenile arrests for murder and
manslaughter increased 60 percent in the 1980s and another 45 percent
from 1990 to 1993.[4] In 1991, juveniles were responsible for about one
out of five violent crimes including rape, robbery, and assault.[5]
Although the rates of juvenile violence began to decline in 1994 and 1995,
juveniles were responsible for a greater proportion of violent crime.[6]

The number of youth who are victims of violence has also increased.
Between 1987 and 1992, the number of children aged 12 to 17 who were
victims of violent crimes increased 23 percent,[7] and one out of eight
children aged 12 to 15 were victims of violence in 1993.[8] In 1992, head
injuries from firearms resulted in more deaths among teens and young
adults than head injuries from automobile accidents and falls together.[9]
Recently more teens have died from firearm injuries than all natural causes
combined.[10] Public places have become extremely dangerous in
communities where firearms are readily available and frequently fired.
Front-page headlines of driveby shootings are graphic illustrations of the
72-percent increase from 1983 to 1992 in fatal traumatic brain injuries
from firearms among young people aged 15-24.[11]

In addition, hidden violent offenses against children are being committed
in the nonschool hours but in less visible settings. About 50 percent of
rape victims are girls in their teens or younger. In 1992, about 17,000
preteen girls were raped--an estimated 16 percent of all rape victims that
year.[12] Countless children have been damaged by abuse and neglect
outside the school setting; more than 140,000 children were seriously
damaged in 1990 alone.[13]

Although 1997 U.S. Department of Justice statistics[14] indicate that
national efforts may have started to stem the violence affecting our youth,
many children and teens realistically view the world as unsafe. They see
violence as normal. Young girls who are sexually assaulted are advised by
their friends to "get over it, it happens."[15] In a growing number of urban
neighborhoods, boys expect to die young.

Kids Are Most at Risk for Violence and Serious Delinquency

Although children and teens around the country view their world as
perilous, a growing body of research suggests that children are more or
less vulnerable to violence and delinquency depending on their individual
characteristics, their family situation, their adjustment to school, and their
neighborhood and community.

Age is one of the most important characteristics that determines whether
or not a child will become a victim of violence or engage in serious
delinquency. Children are most at risk of becoming victims of violence at
two stages--during early infancy and during the adolescent years.[16]
While babies are most likely to be victims of family members and others
in their household, adolescents are exposed to increasing dangers from
strangers and, more substantially, from acquaintances. In 1994,
adolescents aged 12 to 17 were three times more likely than adults to be
victims of violent crimes.[17] While a few children commit serious violent
offenses in the early school-age years, the onset of violence usually does
not occur until the onset of puberty.[18]

In addition to the age of a child, gender plays an important part in
determining vulnerability to violence. Until early adolescence, boys and
girls are equally likely to become victims of the most serious form of
violence--homicide. Thereafter boys are most at risk.[19] However, at the
age when boys become increasingly at risk of violent deaths, girls become
most vulnerable to rape and other sexual violence.[20]

Earlier studies of delinquency suggested that overall, compared to boys,
girls are less likely to commit crimes, and those who are delinquent are
more likely to commit secretive offenses like theft rather than aggressive
or violent crimes like purse snatching or robbery.[21] However, more
recent studies have shown that in early adolescence, from ages 10 to 14,
serious violent acts are committed almost as frequently by girls as by boys,
and in some cities young teen girls commit more violent crimes than
boys.[22] In the later teen years, girls are less likely than boys to act
violently.[23]

Family situations are also major determinants of whether a child will
become a victim of violence or an offender. From birth to adolescence, the
person most likely to assault a child is a member of his or her own
family.[24] Although child abuse has been shown to be a significant cause
of serious delinquency and results in an intergenerational cycle of
violence, recent studies have demonstrated that severe parental neglect is
just as likely to lead to serious delinquency as physical assault.[25] Even
in the vast majority of homes where parents are not abusive or criminally
neglectful, children are more likely to become seriously delinquent if their
mothers, fathers, or caregivers lack good parenting skills or the ability to
provide ongoing supervision.

Schools too play a major role in increasing or decreasing the probability
that a child will become seriously delinquent or a victim of violence.
Several studies have shown that children's inability to achieve in school
and their lack of attachment to school are powerful predictors of serious
delinquency. Since some schools have 10 times more violence than
others,[26] the particular school a child attends makes a significant
difference in the child's exposure to violence. Children who are frequently
exposed to violence at home, at school, and perhaps most important,
unchecked violence among neighborhood children their own age are most
likely to become persistently delinquent and increasingly violent.[27]

Just as violence (particularly violence involving children and teens) differs
from school to school, it varies from city to city and from neighborhood to
neighborhood. Research on urban crime[28] has confirmed the anecdotal
information gathered by experienced law enforcement officers about
neighborhoods most likely to erupt in youth violence. The neighborhoods
are for the most part economically impoverished, and their residents are
likely to be members of minority groups or recent immigrants. An
estimated 46 million people, 18 percent of the population, live in poverty.
Close to 59 percent of these are working families with children who by
definition cannot afford to purchase the basic necessities of life--food,
clothing, and adequate shelter[29]--much less resources to privately
provide supervised neighborhood activities for children. Moreover, studies
in Chicago neighborhoods suggest that residents in high-crime areas do
not have the social skills or social organization needed to demand, as a
community, that children and teens (and adults) follow accepted norms of
behavior in public.[30]

Kids Are Most Vulnerable to Crime During the Nonschool Hours

Growing numbers of teens and younger children are spending more and
more hours out of school in places that are unsupervised and unsafe. Even
children and teens who are rarely absent are in school for a limited amount
of time because school days are short and schools are not in session during
vacations, holidays, and weekends. Children aged 9 to 14 commonly
spend about 60 percent of their waking time outside school.[31] Violent
crimes by juveniles are typically committed in the afterschool hours
between 2:30 in the afternoon and 8:30 at night.[32] 

When children reach puberty, as a normal and necessary part of their
development they seek out group activities that challenge them to take
risks. However, research suggests that adolescents who affiliate with a
delinquent group enter a vicious cycle. They commit more delinquent acts
and begin to believe that these acts are normal. As they seek out other
adolescents with similar beliefs, the number of offenses they commit goes
up.[33] 

While most adolescents seek to belong to a group, relatively few identify
their group of friends as a gang. Most of those who say they belong to a
gang generally associate with gang members for a limited number of
years. However, teens who are in gangs commit more property and drug
crimes than other children their age. Research in one city revealed that
although they constituted less than one-third of adolescents, gang
members committed more than two-thirds of violent crimes by
juveniles.[34] Gang-related crimes too are more likely to take place in the
afterschool hours than at any other time of day or night.[35]

When asked about what they wanted during the nonschool hours, many
children and teens wistfully mentioned places, spaces, and activities that
others take for granted: " . . . safe parks and recreation centers . . . libraries
with the latest books, videos, and records . . . chances to go camping and
participate in sports . . . long talks with trusting and trustworthy adults
who know a lot about the world . . . and opportunities to learn new
skills."[36] Many of these requests have long been met by traditional
youth-serving organizations. Coincidentally, very limited research on
these types of approaches has serendipitously found that they reduce
juvenile delinquency. However, since they were not designed to prevent
delinquency, by and large their crime reduction value has not been
understood.

The Most Popular Approaches for Dealing With Juvenile Violence
Haven't Worked

When asked how they would curb violence involving youth, most people
have two solutions: (1) get tough and lock up the troublemakers and (2)
provide education and recreation. In a Yankelovich poll, 79 percent of
adult Americans said that the best way to reduce teen violence was to
provide tougher criminal penalties for juvenile offenders.[37] Currently
the most appealing methods for dealing with troublesome children involve
physical constraints. Despite attempts to "deinstitutionalize" children, in
1993 this country locked up more than 53,000 children in State facilities
and many more in long-term local facilities.[38] We are incarcerating so
many children that 62 percent of those living in long-term juvenile
facilities in 1991 were housed in units operating above their designed
capacity,[39] and in 1995 this increased to more than 70 percent.[40]

Even so-called alternatives to incarceration actually depend on physically
constraining adolescents. Congress has mandated greater use of boot
camps to incarcerate young offenders and rapidly teach them
self-discipline through military drills, even though these approaches
appear to have little or no effect on delinquency unless combined with
community-based approaches.[41] Recently, curfews for banning young
people from city streets, without regard to where they will go and what
they will do, are gaining popularity. Between 1990 and 1994, 33 cities had
longstanding ordinances, and 26 major cities passed new laws restricting
where minors can be after 11 p.m. (and some after 10 p.m).[42] Little at
present is known about their effectiveness; however, expectations for
reducing violence should not be high since far fewer violent crimes are
committed by children and teens after 10 p.m. than in the hours
immediately after school.[43]

As violence involving children has escalated, the failure of current legal
approaches for controlling this violence has become evident. In growing
numbers, children are unsupervised, neglected, abused, and delinquent.
They cannot simply be removed from their parents and assigned to other
adults or institutions. Children who are repeatedly removed from their
homes and made wards of the state have been found to have a high
probability of being delinquent in later years.[44] The most persistent and
violent predatory offenders who terrorize their neighborhoods are
frequently "state-raised" children who were previously placed in juvenile
institutions.[45]

An equally simple but more compassionate popular response to stopping
youth violence is to spend more funds on teaching youth to be less violent
and on providing safe places for them to play. About 73 percent of the
people queried in the Yankelovich poll mentioned earlier were in favor of
more government spending on educational and recreational facilities for
teenagers.[46] In response, numerous Federal, State, and local agencies are
funding prevention initiatives. PAVNET (the World Wide Web site of a
consortium of Federal agencies including the Department of Justice)
provides information about 540 prevention programs, many of them
receiving Federal funds.[47] Typically, each agency provides funds for
education limited to one facet of one specific type of problem. For
example, in its 1995 directory and resource guide, the Office of National
Drug Control Policy listed 50 Federal funding programs mandated to
address different aspects of drug abuse. The programs are administered by
10 different departments and numerous agencies within each department,
yet a substantial body of research indicates that most single-problem,
single-strategy approaches are not effective for reducing delinquency,
much less violence.[48]

While a growing body of research indicates that some forms of prevention
can be effective, the same studies also suggest that many well-intentioned
prevention programs do not have a discernable impact on reducing
juvenile violence or other forms of delinquency, and some may actually
increase delinquency and violence. Types of programs least likely to be
successful in prevention include those that simply provide a supervised
afterschool setting (adolescents most at risk for delinquency won't go or
may take over the place if they do), sports, peer mediation, approaches that
make gangs more cohesive, instructional approaches that depend on
providing information about the risks or wickedness of delinquency, and--
counter to popular thought--approaches designed simply to improve
children's self-esteem.[49]

Approaches that criminologists have found to be most promising for
preventing violence and delinquency are relatively long-term, continuous,
comprehensive approaches that involve adults as tutors and mentors who
teach children and teens cognitive and social skills and provide them an
opportunity to cooperatively practice these skills.[50] These approaches
are virtually synonymous with the approaches implemented by many
national youth-serving organizations, including those described in this
report.

Effective Prevention Approaches Are Integral to National Youth
Organizations

While criminologists have been studying the types of programs that can
prevent violence and delinquency, researchers in child and adolescent
development have been assessing approaches that can best help youth
achieve their full potential. The results have been very much the same. 

A review of several seminal works in the field of adolescent development
has classified six areas in which adolescents need support and
opportunities in the community setting for building competencies:
health/physical, personal/social, creative/cognitive, vocational, and areas
involving communal ethics and citizen participation.[51] More
specifically, adolescents need opportunities to build and practice basic life
skills known to be integral to healthy adolescent development:
"problem-solving skills, planning and decisionmaking skills, cognitive
strategies for resisting peer and media influences, skills for increasing
self-monitoring and self-regulation, and coping strategies to deal with
everyday stresses."[52]

Like criminologists, experts in youth development recognize that children
and teens are shaped in multiple environments. The separate contexts that
are instrumental in determining immediate behavior and the long-term
future of children and adolescents--"families, schools, peers, the media,
the workplace, and communities--have distinct functions, and one cannot
replace the other."[53] However, unlike many criminologists, researchers
in youth development recognize that in the United States afterschool
programs provided by community-based youth organizations have been a
cornerstone of this network for more than a hundred years.

Beginning in the last half of the 19th century, organizations created to
serve children in rural and urban settings included 4-H Clubs established
by the County Extension Departments of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, Boys Clubs (now called Boys and Girls Clubs), Girls Clubs
(now named Girls Incorporated), and settlement houses. With the advent
of urbanization and change, organizations such as the YMCA were
established and dedicated to preserving mainstream religious values, first
among young adults and later among younger children.

As suburban areas developed in the early 1900s, other youth-development
organizations such as Boys Scouts of America and Girls Scouts of the
U.S.A. were imported from England. Troops provided opportunities for
hands-on learning experiences to children who, unlike rural youth, had
little or no involvement in contributing to their families' livelihood and,
unlike children in large urban settings, had limited access to the live arts,
museums, or the rich cultural experience of city streets.

Typically, the approaches taken by national youth organizations possess
the essential characteristics of programs that have been found to prevent
delinquency: (1) They are comprehensive, attempting to ameliorate more
than a single factor associated with delinquency and simultaneously
focusing on multiple problem behaviors; (2) they are appropriate for
children of specific ages and developmental stages; and (3) they continue
over the long term, certainly more than a few months, and often several
years.[54] The approaches bolster the "protective" factors that allow
adolescents to make the perilous transition from childhood to adulthood
without becoming deeply enmeshed in violence and other forms of
delinquency.

As suggested above, protective factors that prevent children from
becoming delinquent include their individual competence, adults who
provide support and safety, productive experiences in school, and--
especially in early adolescence--groups of friends who stay out of
trouble.[55] Although the objectives of traditional youth organizations are
typically stated in terms of positive development rather than prevention of
negative outcomes, promoting these protective factors is integral to the
mission of these organizations.

Many of the activities carried out in youth organizations have been
carefully designed by experienced professional staff to promote
problem-solving skills, intellectual abilities, communication skills, and
self-efficacy--attributes now known to help prevent delinquency.[56] By
providing opportunities for parents or other caring adults to play and work
productively together, whether at YMCA aquatics events, Police Athletic
League ball games, Girl Scout and Boy Scout camping trips, or youth club
community projects, these organizations can help forge closer
relationships between children and adult family members. By creating
supervised settings in which children and teens can meet relatively good
kids their own age and select activities they like and learn from, youth
organizations also help children form friendships with nondelinquent
peers.

The functions of youth organizations go well beyond protecting children
and teens from imminent delinquency. According to professionals most
familiar with childhood and adolescent development, community-based
youth organizations constitute a cornerstone of the institutions necessary
for people to reach their full potential. "Afterschool activities that are
viewed as voluntary and enjoyable provide a developmental transition
between childhood play and disciplined activities of adulthood"[57]
needed by all adolescents--especially those who lack creative play and
supportive adults at home or in school.

In today's world, where many single parents have low incomes and less
time to spend with their children and where many schools are literally and
figuratively falling apart, activities in the community--including those of
youth-serving organizations--achieve increasing importance. Youth
organizations are seen as places in the community that can most readily
provide necessary resources children and teens fail to find elsewhere.[58]
This is especially important in neighborhoods where all essential resources
for children and teens are scarce and crime rates are high.

Youth Organizations Are Trying to Reach Youth Most at Risk for
Violence

Although youth organizations have played a recognized role in raising the
Nation's children, a seminal study by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent
Development found that communities least likely to have the benefit of
youth organizations' afterschool programs are those in which parents and
schools have the fewest resources to devote to children and teens.[59] In
many of these communities, national youth organizations are striving to
pull together the fundamental resources needed to implement afterschool
programs. They are simultaneously struggling to recruit children and
adolescents already involved in crime and violence and to minimize the
costs of crime at their own program sites. 

Recognizing the formidable problems that children and teens in many
communities face at home and on the streets, youth organizations are
developing new approaches to help young participants overcome serious
obstacles to their well-being and to reach their full potential. Youth
organizations are acutely aware of what they need to do to recruit
participants at the age when they are most vulnerable to violence--
adolescence--from economically depressed neighborhoods with high crime
rates and with residents who cannot provide safety for their kids or
collectively solve neighborhood problems.

Youth-serving organizations know that for this at-risk population they
need to duplicate the elements that have for generations appealed to their
adolescent participants:

o An environment in which kids are valued and adolescents are considered
to be resources rather than problems for their community. The
environment includes clear rules for behavior and membership,
accompanied by flexibility in responding to the real crises faced by many
teens. It also includes adults who are attuned to the interests, aspirations,
and values of adolescents, treat them as adults, yet recognize that--like all
children--they still need  protection.

o Activities that present teens with challenges and experiences in planning,
preparing for, and publicly presenting projects they and their communities
value. Presented with enough activities to allow choice, teens are
encouraged to take on activities that will develop their capabilities through
hands-on experience and practice. Prodded, nagged, teased, and loved,
teens are persuaded to meet the challenges the activities present.

o Ongoing outreach to teens and adults in the community, with messages
that are understandable. Outreach activities involve other neighborhood
institutions and people who are integral to the day-to-day lives of the
teens.[60]

At the same time, national organizations and their local affiliates know
that to create these environments, to provide these activities, and to
conduct successful outreach in neighborhoods where youth are at highest
risk for violence, they must deal with the pressing need to deal with crime
that touches participants and staff. Police in some communities are playing
a major role in addressing this issue.

Endnotes

1. Although analysis of several different sets of national data shows an
increase in juvenile arrests for violent crime in the period from 1985 to
1993, calculations of the levels of increase vary depending on the source
of data and the types of offenses included in the category of violent crime.
Two data sets are commonly used to estimate numbers of crimes
committed by juveniles. One is collected by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics about victimizations of persons 12 years and older; these data are
collected in a survey of a national probability sample of U.S. households
(the National Crime Victimization Survey). The other set of data is
collected by the FBI and includes Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data
provided by police departments and other law enforcement agencies; the
UCR data include crime incidents reported to the police and details about
arrestees, such as their age; supplementary data are collected about
homicides. 

2. Sickmund, Melissa, Howard N. Snyder, and Eileen Poe- Yamagata,
1997, Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 1997 Update on Violence,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention.

3. Ibid.

4. Yoshikawa, Hirokazu, 1994, "Prevention as Cumulative Protection:
Effects of Early Family Support and Education on Chronic Delinquency
and Its Risks," Psychological Bulletin, vol. 15, no. 1:28-54.

5. Snyder, Howard N., and Melissa Sickmund, 1995, Juvenile Offenders
and Victims: A National Report, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 

6. Sickmund, Snyder, and Poe-Yamagata, 1997.

7. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, June 1994, Juvenile Victimization: 1987-1992, Fact Sheet no.
17, Washington, D.C. 

8. Bastian, Lisa, 1995, Criminal Victimization, 1993, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

9. Sosin, Daniel M., Joseph E. Sniezek, and Robert J. Waxweiler, 1995,
"Trends in Death Associated With Traumatic Brain Injury, 1979 Through
1992," Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 2273, no.
22:1778-1780.

10. May, John P., 1995, "Taking Aim at Handgun Violence," Journal of
the American Medical Association, vol. 2273, no. 22:1739-1740.

11. Sosin, Sniezek, and Waxweiler, 1995.

12. Langan, Patrick, and Caroline Harlow, 1994, Child Rape --Victims,
1992, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics.

13. U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1995, A Nation's
Shame: Fatal Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States, Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

14. See, for example, statistics on ages of homicide victims in 1994:
Greenfeld, Lawrence A., 1996, Child Victimizers: Violent Offenders and
Their Victims, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of
Justice Statistics, fig. 16, p. 17.

15. Focus groups on violence against women as girls were conducted by
LINC in cooperation with Girls Incorporated, Girls Incorporated of Rapid
City, Pocatello (Idaho) Police Department, and Rapid City (South Dakota)
Police Department as part of a locally initiated police research project
sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (95-IJ-CX-0047).

16. Maltz, Michael, September 1997, personal communication based on
analysis of FBI supplementary homicide reports. 

17. Snyder and Sickmund, 1995, p. 4.

18. Kelly, Barbara Tatum, David Huizinga, Terence P. Thornberry, and
Rolf Loeber, 1997, Epidemiology of Serious Violence, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention.

19. Snyder and Sickmund, 1995.

20. Ringel, Cheryl, 1997, Criminal Victimization 1996, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, p. 4.

21. See, for example, Simon, Rita J., 1975, Women and Crime, Lexington,
Massachusetts: D.C. Heath.

22. Kelly, Huizinga, Thornberry, and Loeber, 1997.

23. Ibid.

24. Greenfeld, 1996.

25. Widom, Cathy Spatz, 1989, "Child Abuse, Neglect, and Adult
Behavior: Research Design and Findings on Criminality, Violence, and
Child Abuse," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 59:355-367. Also
Barbara Tatum Kelly, Terence P. Thornberry, and Carolyn A. Smith,
1997, In the Wake of Childhood Maltreatment, Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention.

26. For example, a U.S. Department of Education survey of teachers
conducted in 1990-1991 estimated that from 2 to 8 percent of teachers had
been victims of violence. However, a Harris poll of a nationally
representative sample of teachers assigned to grades 3 to 12 in 1992-1993
found that 11 percent of teachers reported having experienced violence in
the school setting. And a 1993-1994 survey of teachers in 44 schools in
Lucas County, Ohio, found that in schools serving grades 7 to 12, 2
percent of the teacher respondents had been victims of robbery; 43 percent
had been victims of theft; and 21 percent had been physically threatened.

27. For studies of the development of violence, see Elliott, Delbert S.,
1994, "Serious Violent Offenders: Onset, Developmental Course, and
Termination--The American Society of Criminology 1993 Presidential
Address," Criminology, vol. 32, no. 1:1-22; also David Huizinga, 1997,
"Developmental Sequences in Delinquency," in L.J. Crockett and A.N.
Crouter, eds., Pathways Through Adolescence: Individual Development in
Relationship to Social Contexts, New York: Erlbaum; and R. Loeber and
D.H. Hay, 1994, "Developmental Approaches to Aggression and Conduct
Problems," in M. Rutter and D.H. Hay, eds., Development Through Life:
A Handbook for Clinicians, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 488-515.

28. Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, 1997,
"Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective
Efficacy," Science, August, 277:918-924.

29. National Research Council, 1995, Citro, Constance F., and Robert T.
Michael, eds., Measuring Poverty: A New Approach. Washington, D.C.:
National Academy Press.

30. Sampson et al., 1997.

31. Timmer, S.G., J. Eccles, and I. O'Brian, 1985, "How Children Use
Time," in F.T. Juster and F.B. Stafford, eds., Time, Goods, and Wellbeing.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research.

32. Snyder and Sickmund, 1995.

33. See Thornberry, Terence, Alan J. Lizotte, Marvin Krohn, Margaret
Farnworth, and Sung Joon Jang, 1994, "Delinquent Peers, Beliefs, and
Delinquent Behavior: A Longitudinal Test of Interactional Theory,"
Criminology, vol. 32, no. 1:47-84. 

34. Thornberry, Terence P., and James H. Burch, 1997. Gang Members
and Delinquent Behavior, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

35. Sickmund, Snyder, and Poe-Yamagata, 1997.

36. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1992, A Matter of
Time: Risk and Opportunity in the Nonschool Hours, New York: Carnegie
Corporation of New York.

37. Wilson-Brewer, Rene, Stu Cohen, Lydia O'Donnell, and Irene
Goodman, 1991, Violence Prevention for Young Adolescents: A Survey
of the Art Educational Development Center Inc., prepared for the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Council on
Adolescent Development.

38. Rudenstine, Sonya, 1995, Juvenile Admissions to State Custody, 1993.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention.

39. Snyder and Sickmund, 1995.

40. Sickmund, Snyder, and Poe-Yamagata, 1997.

41. Mackenzie, Doris, Ernest L. Cowles, and Thomas C. Castellano, 1995,
"'Boot Camp' Drug Treatment and Aftercare Intervention: An Evaluation
Review. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute
of Justice.

42. Ruefle, William, and Kenneth Mike Reynolds, 1995, "Curfews and
Delinquency in Major American Cities," Crime and Delinquency, vol. 41,
no. 3:347-63.

43. Snyder and Sickmund, 1995. The National Institute of Justice is
currently funding research on curfews in several cities. Reports on this
research are projected to be available in 1998.

44. Krisberg, Barry, James Austin, Karen Joe, and P. Steele, 1989, The
Impact of Juvenile Court Sanctions, San Francisco: National Council on
Crime and Delinquency; also Katherine Hunt Federle and Meda
Chesley-Lind, 1992, "Special Issues in Juvenile Justice: Gender, Race, and
Ethnicity," in Ira M. Schwartz, ed., Juvenile Justice and Public Policy,
New York: Lexington Books, pp. 165-195.

45. Chaiken, Marcia, and Jan Chaiken, 1990, Redefining the Career
Criminal: Priority Prosecution of High-Rate Dangerous Offenders,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of
Justice; also Jan M. Chaiken and Marcia R. Chaiken, 1982, Varieties of
Criminal Behavior: Summary and Policy Implications, Santa Monica,
California: The Rand Corporation.

46. Wilson-Brewer et al., 1991.

47. Information about the number of contacts was provided by J. Thomas
McEwen, Institute for Law and Justice. Information about the number of
programs on PAVNET in October 1996 was provided by John Gladstone,
U.S. Department of Agriculture.

48. See Lipsey, Mark W., 1992, "Juvenile Delinquency Treatment: A
Meta-Analytic Inquiry into the Variability of Effects," in Cook, Thomas,
ed., Meta-Analysis for Explanation, New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
pp. 83-126; also Patrick Tolan and Nancy Guerra, 1994, What Works in
Reducing Adolescent Violence: An Empirical Review of the Field,
Boulder, Colorado: The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence,
University of Colorado. 

49. See Tolan and Guerra, 1994; Brewer, Devon D., J. David Hawkins,
Richard F. Catalano, and Holly J. Neckerman, 1995. "Preventing Serious,
Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offending: A Review of Evaluations of
Selected Strategies in Childhood, Adolescence and the Community," in
Howell, J.C., B. Krisberg, J.D. Hawkins, and J.J. Wilson, Sourcebook on
Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders, Thousand Oaks,
California: Sage Publications; also University of Maryland Department of
Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1997, Preventing Crime: What Works,
What Doesn't, What's Promising, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Office of Justice Programs.

50. See Tolan and Guerra, 1994; also Brewer et al., 1995.

51. Pittman, Karen J., 1991, A Rationale for Enhancing the Role of the
Nonschool Voluntary Sector in Youth Development, Washington, D.C.:
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

52. Hamburg, Beatrix, 1990, Life Skills Training: Preventive Interventions
for Young Adolescents, Report of the Life Skills Training Working
Group, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

53. Based on J. Wynn, 1987. Communities and Adolescents: An
Exploration of Reciprocal Supports, Chapin Hall Center for Children,
Chicago: The University of Chicago.

54. Chaiken, Marcia, and David Huizinga, 1995, "Early Prevention of and
Intervention for Delinquency and Related Problem Behavior," The
Criminologist, vol. 20, no. 6.

55. Hawkins, J. David, Richard F. Catalano, and J.Y. Miller, 1992, "Risk
and Protective Factors for Alcohol and Other Drug Problems in
Adolescence and Early Adulthood: Implications for Substance Abuse
Prevention," Psychological Bulletin, no. 112:64-105. 

56. Bogenschnieder, Karen, Stephen Small, and David Riley, undated,
received at LINC 1992, An Ecological Risk-Focused Approach for
Addressing Youth-At-Risk Issues, Chevy Chase, Maryland: National 4-H
Center.

57. Larson, R., and D. Kleiber, 1992, "Free Time Activities as Factors in
Adolescent Adjustment," in P. Tolan and B. Cohler, eds., Handbook of
Clinical Research and Practice With Adolescents. New York: Wiley.

58. Based on J. Wynn, 1987.

59. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1992.

60. McLaughlin, Milbrey W., Merita Irby, and Juliet Langman, 1994,
Urban Sanctuaries: Neighborhood Organizations in the Lives and Futures
of Inner-City Youth, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

-------------------------------

Chapter 2 

Crime and Youth Organizations

"In January, at about 7 p.m., gunfire started going off behind the building,
scaring all the kids who were inside and outside. Most of the kids ran
home after the first shots were fired. The shots continued for about 45
minutes to an hour. When the police finally arrived, they arrested three
teenagers who live about 150 feet from the building. They were shooting
at the apartments right above the [youth organization]. They had all been
drinking." LINC Survey Respondent

This incident is an all too common occurrence for millions of children and
teenagers living in inner-city neighborhoods, and the time--7 p.m.--is in
the time range when dangerous events involving young people are most
likely to occur. When they are out of school and out of their homes, young
people are most at risk for committing offenses and most vulnerable to
becoming victims of crime themselves.

Today major youth-serving organizations are reaching millions of children
and teenagers nationwide, with the Girl Scouts alone reporting 2.5 million
members. They are targeting this time period--and increasingly the most
at-risk youth--for recruitment into safe, wholesome, enjoyable, and
age-appropriate activities. The organizations studied in the survey
sponsored by NIJ and the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Boys and
Girls Clubs of America, Boy Scouts of America, Girls Incorporated, Girl
Scouts of the U.S.A., National Association of Police Athletic Leagues,
National 4-H Council and USDA 4-H and Youth Development Service,
and YMCA of the USA) are offering safe havens and alternatives to risky,
delinquent behavior for youth in the most "dangerous" hours of the day for
them--from the time school is dismissed until the early evening hours.

Our survey found that during the school year 3 p.m. is the most common
time for youth organizations to begin activities, and 9 p.m. is the most
common time for activities to end.

Youth-Serving Organizations Are Reaching Kids in Economically
Depressed Urban Areas

Our conversations with key staff of the national organizations
collaborating in this study indicated that despite the findings of a seminal
Carnegie Corporation study[1] showing youth organizations to be least
likely to serve those most in need of such programs (young people in
neighborhoods most affected by poverty), these organizations were
committed to providing programs for more children and teens in the most
impoverished neighborhoods. 

Also contrary to the assumption that national youth organizations focus
almost exclusively on relatively well-to-do communities, among all
responding organizations in our study sample of 579,[2] under half were
located in neighborhoods that could be characterized as prosperous (6
percent) or middle-class (40 percent). Most were in communities that were
working class (37 percent) or poor (16 percent). Many neighborhoods
were experiencing some structural decay (26 percent) or extensive
structural decay (12 percent). Although very few organizations were
located in areas that were considered to be unsafe for walking during
daylight hours (8 percent), slightly over half were in neighborhoods
thought to be unsafe after dark.

Local affiliates of Boys Clubs (now named Boys and Girls Clubs) and
Girls Clubs (now named Girls Incorporated) have long been providing
programs for school-age youth in the least affluent sections of cities. More
recently, with the assistance of funding from Federal agencies, both
organizations have made successful strides in establishing centers and
branches in public housing and on the grounds of schools in inner city and
other economically depressed areas. In addition to the solid comprehensive
core programs for guiding children productively into and through
adolescence, both organizations have developed age- and
culture-appropriate (and, at Girls Incorporated, gender-appropriate)
programs for preventing a spectrum of harmful behavior, including
substance abuse and early initiation of sexual activity. Key to the
programs' success is the incorporation of activities that children and teens
not only learn from but greatly enjoy.[3]

Police Athletic Leagues (PALs) and the "Ys" (YMCA corporations and
branches) too have long served urban youth. Under the supervision of
off-duty police officers, PALs have organized baseball leagues for city
boys for many years, and "Y" aquatics programs have become relatively
ubiquitous. In recent years, both of these organizations have reoriented
their primary mission toward providing more comprehensive services to
people in inner cities.

While baseball and aquatics programs remain fundamental activities that
bring youth into PALs and Ys, affiliates now include programs to meet
other needs such as tutoring to enhance academic and employment skills.
In some cities PALs have combined efforts with other youth organizations
to provide more comprehensive services; for example, in Washington,
D.C., PAL has organized boys and girls clubs to sponsor programs staffed
by officers from the Metropolitan D.C. Police Department. Around the
country YMCA affiliates have expanded their mission so extensively that
administrators often repeat a new informal organizational motto: "We are
still the YMCA, but "A'" [for "Association"] is the only letter that still tells
what we are." As with Girls Incorporated and Boys and Girls Clubs, local
Y branches are also providing more activities in inner city locations away
from their traditional buildings.

Inner-city areas do not have many afterschool programs, as the Carnegie
Corporation study made abundantly clear. So it is not surprising that when
a national organization charters an affiliate to provide youth activities in
an impoverished area, school-age children come in droves. On average
almost three times as many participants were being served by each
responding affiliate in a poor city neighborhood as in prosperous
neighborhood. 

Youth Organizations Are Reaching Kids Already Involved in Crime as
Victims or Offenders

In response to the growing involvement in crime and substance abuse of
"latch-key" children and undersupervised teens, all seven national youth
organizations collaborating in our study are implementing programs
designed to help youth avoid "risky" behavior as well as more traditional
programs providing opportunities for constructive contributions. Realizing
that children and teens in inner-city areas are most likely to engage in
harmful activities and least likely to be provided with activities essential
for their wholesome development, all collaborating organizations are
attempting to bolster the ability of their affiliates and charter members to
serve communities where the need is most pressing.

The LINC national survey of youth-serving organizations provided
evidence that actions are being taken to provide more programs for
children and youth in types of neighborhoods that are commonly
underserved. By design, about half of our survey sample of 579 were
nationally affiliated youth organizations in large cities with relatively high
rates of crimes (about 300), with the remainder in small cities and towns
(about 150) or in large cities with relatively low crime rates (about 150).
Contrary to the myth that some of the national youth-serving organizations
confine their services to relatively crime-free towns, all seven of the
national organizations collaborating in our study were providing programs
for children and teens in large cities with high crime rates that were
randomly selected for the LINC survey.

Moreover, almost three-fourths (72 percent) of the reporting organizations
were involving participants during the developmental stages when young
people are most likely to become involved in delinquent acts--early
adolescence through the teen years.

Based on the reported problems involving young participants,
organizations were opening their doors to and actively recruiting children
and teens at risk for delinquency or violence. Twenty percent of
responding organizations reported having taken action in the past year on
behalf of a participant who had been abused or neglected. Over 20 percent
of responding organizations reported that a participant had committed an
offense at their program sites during the past year. Although a relatively
small proportion (2 percent) reported the need to deal with a participant
who had brought a gun, over 7 percent reported having to take action when
a participant brought another type of weapon.

Girl Scout and Boy Scout organizations, too, have implemented a number
of promising initiatives for actively involving girls and boys in urban
neighborhoods where children and teens lack constructive opportunities in
the nonschool hours. Both scouting agencies have supplemented their
traditional activities with programs to help participants recognize
consequences and successfully deal with the harsh realities faced by many
of our youth, such as violence and substance abuse. Led by volunteer
police officers, Boy Scout Explorer posts in neighborhoods where poverty
is rampant and violence is epidemic are successfully recruiting adolescents
to work as law enforcement paraprofessionals. Girl Scout Councils are
reaching out to girls in extreme need of adult support and opportunities for
productive activities in the nonschool hours--including daughters of
women in prison. 

Although 4-H and the USDA 4-H and Youth Development Service may
still be best known for their activities involving youth in the farmlands of
the United States, their services are reaching deep into the lives of children
and teens in urban America. Rather than simply extending traditional
agrarian activities to city locations, programs are based on research and are
carefully designed to promote problem-solving skills, intellectual abilities,
communication skills, and self-efficacy--attributes known to help prevent
delinquency.[4] In some urban areas hardest hit by epidemics of substance
abuse and crime, 4-H and Youth Development staff are among the front
line organizations implementing programs for children and teens with the
highest probability of violent incidents and deaths; for example, in
Washington, D.C., outreach for teen prostitutes is provided from a van that
is dispatched on Friday and Saturday nights to downtown locations.[5]

The More Vulnerable the Kids They Serve, the More Crime the Youth
Organizations Experience

Given the high rates of crime in cities and neighborhoods in which
affiliates of collaborating youth organizations are providing services, as
well as the at-risk status of young participants, it is not surprising that
crime had occurred at many program locations during the previous year.
Among organizations included in the LINC study, more than half (51
percent) reported that an offense occurred at or immediately outside the
primary program site during the program year beginning in the fall of
1993. Vandalism was the most common type of incident and was reported
by approximately 40 percent of the organizations. 

Theft of organizational, staff, or participant property was the second most
common form of offense and was reported by 38 percent of organizations.
Incidents involving violence in the past year were reported by slightly over
20 percent of organizations. Felonious assaults on staff or participants
were somewhat less common.

In general, the less economically prosperous an area served by a large city
youth organization, the more likely the organization was to have
experienced crime--especially violent crime. Crime was a significantly
greater problem at program locations in communities and neighborhoods
where needs for youth services are most pressing. Among organizations
located in large cities with relatively high rates of crime, 61 percent
reported at least one crime at the primary program site in the past year, and
45 percent reported at least one incident of vandalism. Significantly more
organizations in large cities reported an incident involving violence or
threats of assaults; violent (or latently violent) incidents were reported by
26 percent of organizations in large cities[6] and 16 percent of
organizations in small cities and towns.

Within large cities, crime took a greater toll on youth organizations in
relatively poor, minority neighborhoods experiencing many forms of
urban blight. Compared to large-city organizations located in all-white
areas, those serving minority neighborhoods were significantly more likely
to experience vandalism (54 percent compared to 29 percent) and property
crime (64 percent compared to 35 percent); they were almost four times
more likely to be affected by violent crime (38 percent compared to 10
percent). 

Overlying these findings is an additional significant factor the survey
analysis uncovered. The relatively high number of offenses experienced by
organizations serving economically disadvantaged big-city neighborhoods
appears in large part to be a factor of the relatively numerous school-age
children they are serving and the prolonged time periods in which
programs are operating. Responding organizations in poorer
neighborhoods were serving significantly more participants and were
operating more hours each year than organizations in more affluent
neighborhoods. In fact, our study found that the level of crime experienced
by the organizations was more strongly associated with the number of
hours they operated and the number of children they served than with the
economic level of the neighborhood or the presence of minority groups in
the neighborhood. The annual hours of operation and number of children
served by the organization together accounted for approximately 13
percent of the variation in the number of offenses reported by the
responding organizations. 

However, even after controlling for the number of children served and
hours of operation, several aspects of program setting and participants'
characteristics appeared to be significantly associated with the amount of
crime affecting the youth-serving establishments. As could be expected
from a large body of past findings, age and gender of participants were
significant factors associated with the overall level of crime. Organizations
serving more boys than girls reported higher levels of crime, as did
organizations serving children of a mix of ages including adolescents
(compared to those serving exclusively younger children or just teens).
Program location was found to be associated with a small but significant
variation in the number of offenses reported--organizations located in less
affluent areas in youth club settings had higher rates of crime, independent
of the number and characteristics of youth served. Together number and
characteristics of participants, number of hours in operation, and setting
accounted for more than 20 percent of the variation in the number of
offenses.

Gender of participants and the relative economic level of the neighborhood
were the factors found to have the strongest correlation with the number of
incidents involving violence that reportedly took place. After controlling
for the number of hours in the program setting, which explained a
significant but small variation in violence, gender and socioeconomic level
accounted for additional variation in the level of violence. Together these
three factors accounted for only a relatively small amount of variation
between organizations. In fact, there was little variation to be explained
because, in general, youth-serving organizations appeared to be
sanctuaries from violence--and for staff and adult volunteers, sanctuaries
from all types of victimization.

Most Offenders Are Kids

Independent of where they were located and whom they were serving,
organizations affected by crime during the past program year
preponderantly reported that offenders committing these crimes were
children or teens rather than adults. Approximately 32 percent of
organizations affected by crime reported that offenses had been committed
by an adult, and about 66 percent reported that offenses had been
committed by a child or teen.

Adult offenders were significantly more likely to victimize organizations
located in relatively poor areas than ones in more prosperous
neighborhoods; among those affected by crime, 36 percent of
organizations in poverty areas and 41 percent in working class areas
reported being victims of an adult offender compared to about 22 percent
in middle-class and 1 percent in affluent neighborhoods. Adult strangers
were more likely to commit offenses in or immediately outside the
program locations than adults related to participants or well known to staff
or than adults who were known by sight to the staff. About three-fourths
(76 percent) of organizations affected by adult offenders reported that the
offenders were strangers, compared to about one-third who reported being
victims of well-known adults (32 percent) or recognizable adults (31
percent).

More Offenses Are Committed by Nonparticipants Than Participants 

In general, among organizations reporting offenses by juveniles,
nonparticipants were more likely to be the offenders than participants;
42.3 percent reported that offenses had been committed by
nonparticipants, 21.4 percent by participants, and 36.3 percent by both
members and nonmembers. The balance of young insiders or outsiders
committing offenses did not differ significantly across neighborhoods with
different economic levels. However, significant variations in the
membership status of youthful offenders were found between
organizations in different settings and between organizations serving
youth with different characteristics. 

Not surprisingly, organizations exclusively serving young children were
most likely to report that juvenile offenses affecting their organization
were committed just by outside youth; 67 percent said that nonparticipants
were responsible for all juvenile offenses, whereas only 32 percent of
organizations serving adolescents reported that nonparticipants were solely
responsible for offenses. Among organizations serving more boys than
girls, just 22 percent blamed outside youth alone for crimes affecting the
organization.

Crime Takes a Heavy Toll on Organizational Resources

Administrators of national youth organizations point out that crime is a
serious barrier to providing programs for children and teens in inner-city
neighborhoods and in other areas with high rates of poverty and violence.
According to these experienced directors, not only is crime costly in terms
of organizational and staff property lost or stolen, but parents and
guardians need to know that their children are safe--otherwise they don't
want them to participate. The children and teens themselves are anxious to
find afterschool locations where they are not in danger.

Yet unlike organizations that expel troublemakers to prevent crime, in
collaborating youth organizations administrators note that young
participants, especially adolescents, are more likely to participate
voluntarily if program sites both literally and figuratively have an
open-door policy. Organizations that are highly selective may eliminate
some troublemakers, but they also eliminate youth most in need of
delinquency prevention and youth development activities. By being
selective they can earn a reputation among neighborhood youth for being
unfriendly or, worse, for being elitist and therefore justifiable targets for
vandalism and other hostile acts. 

Findings about the relative personal safety of program directors (under 10
percent reported personally being victims of a crime in the program
setting) are not likely to dampen their concern about the effects of crime
on their organizations. Among the organizations reporting at least one
violent incident or property crime in the 1993-1994 program year, more
than 75 percent indicated that the organization suffered in a definable
manner as a consequence. Economic consequences were sustained by 57
percent of organizations; for example, 43 percent of organizations
reporting any crime had more than $100 worth of property purposely
destroyed.

The second type of consequence most likely to result was the burden on
staff who had to deal with incidents involving offenses committed by and
against their participants. Close to half (48 percent) of organizations
reporting crime also reported that staff were involved in activities directly
related to dealing with crime incidents. Staff were just as likely to be
reacting to incidents in which young participants had been victimized
outside the program environment as to crimes that had taken place at the
program site. For example, staff in organizations experiencing crime were
just as likely to be taking action on behalf of children abused or neglected
at home as they were to be actively engaged in dealing with participants
who were abusing other members at the program site.

For about one-third of the organizations (33 percent), crime also had
discernible negative consequences for program operations and activities.
Fifteen percent had started to limit the hours the program operated to times
when they thought participants and adults could be most safe when
traveling to and from the program location. About an equal percentage had
to curtail some activities because equipment or other necessary materials
had been maliciously destroyed. Fear of crime made it difficult to recruit
staff and participants for 12 percent of the responding organizations.

Most Steps Taken to Prevent Crime Haven't Worked

Whether or not they reported crimes during the 1993-1994 program year,
practically all organizations responding to our survey had instituted at
least one approach that they hoped would create a safer environment for
their school-age participants.

The most widely used approaches simply involved using locks on doors,
gates, cabinets, and closets to prevent unauthorized access to program
areas (reported by 60 percent of organizations) and organizational
equipment (reported by 67 percent). These were also among the crime
prevention approaches most recommended by the responding program
directors. Preventing access to organizational equipment was found to be
associated with lower rates of car or van theft. However, in our analysis,
locking doors to program areas was not found to be significantly related to
lower rates of any type of crime; moreover, unless doors can be locked to
prevent entrance but not exit from the program area, this measure presents
a fire hazard.

Another widespread and highly recommended approach involved
requiring a responsible adult to accompany participants when they left the
program site. The findings of the study support this recommendation,
since this was the only measure that was found by itself to be significantly
correlated with lower overall rates of crime.[7]

Approaches that were gaining in popularity involved conducting
background and criminal record checks on staff and volunteers; from 1993
to 1994, 10 percent of all responding organizations had instituted checks
on volunteers and 6 percent had checked on staff. This measure was
recommended by more than 80 percent of program directors; however,
fewer than half of responding organizations were conducting these checks
at the time of our survey.

Measures that were used by the fewest organizations and recommended by
the fewest program directors involved conspicuous distrust of youth; in
particular these were practices for denying participation to youth who were
most likely to be delinquent (implemented by 4 percent of organizations
and recommended by under 10 percent of program directors) and installing
metal detectors (implemented by under 1 percent of organizations and
recommended by 8 percent of program directors).

Other approaches that were recommended by many program directors but
used by fewer than half of organizations included programs to help youth
avoid becoming victims of crime, programs to prevent participants from
becoming offenders, approaches that actively involve youth in crime
prevention activities, and collaborative efforts with other organizations to
prevent crime.

While these approaches may be effective in preventing crime in other
settings, they may be more a reaction to high levels of crime than effective
ways to prevent crime. The survey results showed that the more crime an
organization experienced, the more preventive measures it adopted.

Police Responsiveness Is a Significant Factor in the Level of Crime

The study did, however, find one factor that appeared to be strongly
associated with less crime. Police responsiveness to organizational
requests was strongly and significantly related to lower levels of overall
crime experienced by the reporting organizations.[8] The next chapter
describes ways police responded to the needs of the organizations.

Endnotes

1. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. 1992, A Matter of Time:
Risk and Opportunity in the Nonschool Hours, New York: Carnegie
Corporation of New York.

2. Six hundred organizations responded to the LINC survey; 21 were
eliminated from the study because of incomplete or otherwise flawed data
in the returned questionnaires.

3. See for example, Chaiken, Marcia, 1993, The Girls Incorporated Teens
for Teens Project: How It Works, New York, N.Y.: Girls Incorporated.

4. Bogenschnieder, Karen, Stephen Small, and David Riley, undated
(received at LINC 1992), An Ecological Risk-Focused Approach for
Addressing Youth-At-Risk Issues, Chevy Chase, Maryland: National 4-H
Center.

5. Cooperative Extension Service for the District of Columbia, 1995,
private communication in response to snowball survey conducted by LINC
under subcontract to the Institute for Law and Justice for the Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Grant 95-JN-X-0010.

6. The percentage of organizations in large cities reporting violent
incidents was the same regardless of the crime rates.

7. Once other factors (including the number of children served each year)
were held constant, this relationship was no longer significant.

8. Police responsiveness was a subjective measure ranked by responding
program directors who had called the police department for any reason.
Despite concern that the measure might be capturing dissatisfaction with
police among victims of crime, the study found no significant association
between respondents' personal experience with crime and their ranking of
police responsiveness.

-------------------------------

Chapter 3

Partnerships With Police

LINC survey responses from directors of youth organizations indicated
that the police played an important part in the success of these
organizations' efforts to provide safe havens and to provide alternatives to
dangerous activities and delinquency, and youth organizations for the most
part are prepared to reach out to their police. Like police in the
communities described in the three case studies below, police in many
cities in which survey respondents were located worked hand in hand with
youth organizations in a number of ways.

Two out of three of the organizations responding to the survey had called
police at least once during the 1993-1994 program year. Among
organizations experiencing an incident involving violence, theft, or other
property offense, 18 percent called to report a crime in progress, 20
percent to report a crime involving a participant, and 37 percent to report
another type of crime that had already occurred at the program location. 

Many organizations--28 percent of those that said they had experienced at
least one offense--did not report these crimes to the police, primarily
because they did not consider them to be crimes. Among the organizations
that did report crimes, close to half said they only reported some incidents,
about a quarter reported most incidents, and the rest said they reported all
incidents. Eight out of 10 of the organizations said the departments were
"very responsive" to the calls. Most of the rest termed the police
"moderately responsive," and only 1 percent said police were
"unresponsive."

Significantly, organizations asking for help from a police crime prevention
unit reported more success in obtaining a response than those requesting
the attention of a patrol unit. However, calls for help because of a crime in
progress or other crime-related matters generally received a good
response. In addition, organizations that reported police were very
responsive were more likely to have low rates of crime than those who
reported that police were moderately responsive or not responsive. These
last two groups reported more than twice the number of offenses at their
program sites than those reporting that their police were very responsive.

More Organizations Ask for Proactive Than Reactive Policing 

Contacts with the police were more likely to be initiated by the
youth-serving organizations to prevent crime than to report crime. In fact
only one in four of all the organizations that called police during 1993-
1994 called to report a crime. About a third called to report another type of
emergency. Many more called to ask the department for help in preventing
violence and other crimes involving participants, as shown below by the
survey responses:

o A substantial proportion (nearly 72 percent) wanted an officer to give a
one-time talk to youth participants about drugs, crime, child abuse, or
other crime-related topic. 

o About 55 percent wanted pamphlets or other information about crime
prevention. 

o A similar proportion (51 percent) asked the department to provide a drug
prevention, crime prevention, or other program the police had developed
for youth.

o About 50 percent wanted to arrange a field visit to the police (or
sheriff's) department. 

o A substantial proportion (nearly 21 percent) called to report suspicious
people in the area who might be about to commit a crime.

o About 24 percent requested police or sheriff's surveillance when
participants were arriving at or leaving the program location.

o A smaller proportion (about 16 percent) asked for a specially trained
youth officer to be assigned to work regularly with youth.

As can be seen from these findings, many of the organizations (half) asked
for more than one of the types of prevention approaches specified above.

As part of our survey, we asked respondents to nominate exemplary
prevention approaches carried out by their organization or another
organization in their area that they recommended detailing in this report.
More than 100 approaches were recommended for further study. Although
many respondents nominated efforts in which they were personally
involved, quite often respondents recommended an approach implemented
by another organization. Police programs such as D.A.R.E. and
G.R.E.A.T. were among programs nominated as exemplary. 

Organizations Nominated Diverse Exemplary Programs

Based on brief descriptions provided in the completed questionnaires, the
programs and approaches were categorized as follows:

Type A: Collaborative or relatively comprehensive or extensive
community programs and approaches.

Type B: Center-based programs with nontraditional staff, hours, or
participants.

Type C: Workshops and 1-day programs provided for youth by youth.

Type D: More traditional programs provided by law enforcement officers.

Type E: General, more traditional programs and activities provided by the
nationally affiliated youth-serving organizations.

Type F: Videos produced by a national organization--their utilization and
youth group discussions of them.

Type G: More traditional community programs such as Neighborhood
Watch and "block homes."

Approaches Selected for Case Studies Met Important Criteria

Project advisers were asked to help select three of the many interesting
programs nominated by the survey respondents for further study. The
advisers unanimously agreed that case studies should focus on
organizations providing collaborative or relatively comprehensive or
extensive community programs and approaches (Type A) or center-based
programs with nontraditional staff, hours, or participants (Type B) in cities
or neighborhoods with relatively high rates of crime. 

All advisers independently used active recruitment of youth at high risk
for violence or delinquency as a criterion for selecting the programs they
nominated. Although many survey respondents nominated traditional
police programs such as D.A.R.E. or programs designed to prevent
delinquency such as Boys and Girls Clubs' "Smart Moves" and Girls
Incorporated's "Friendly PEERsuasion," advisers also independently
recommended a focus on approaches that went well beyond delinquency
prevention programs and nominated organizations that provide
collaborative or comprehensive community programs or nontraditional
center-based programs.

Realizing that safe places are a critical concern of youth and their families,
one adviser examined program descriptions for a mention of police
cooperation. Also considered were respondents' assessments of the
responsiveness of police to the youth organizations' requests. Based on
previous studies conducted in a large number of cities, one adviser
recommended against several approaches involving police departments
that "on paper look good but are not really happening." The adviser
recommended sites that appeared to be making advances in community
policing.

Another adviser assessed the extent to which the programs reportedly
provided resources and opportunities likely to foster childhood and
adolescent development, especially those culturally appropriate for
minority youth. As previously discussed, research in child development
strongly suggests that adolescents require a range of activities that
challenge them to solve problems, plan and make decisions, resist negative
peer and media pulls to risky behavior, and deal with everyday
frustrations. The adviser nominated approaches that described
opportunities for adolescents to develop these important skills.

Based on the large body of research showing that delinquency prevention
is best accomplished by reducing multiple risks and promoting multiple
protective factors in adolescence, another adviser focused on the extent of
arrangements for cross-agency collaboration available to comprehensively
meet these needs. This adviser selected approaches that described active
collaboration between public agencies focused on children, families, and
communities on one hand and nonprofit youth-serving organizations on
the other.

Exemplary Approaches Implemented in Three Cities Were Chosen

The recommendations for approaches for further study were based on
different criteria yet were remarkably congruent and led to the selection of
four approaches carried out in three cities. One approach selected for study
is being implemented in Bristol, Connecticut; one in Arlington, Texas; and
two in Spokane, Washington. 

Followup calls to survey respondents in these sites further suggested that
all three cities provide an opportunity to research exemplary collaborative
approaches. These three cities also offer wide variation in terms of
geographic location, economy, history, and culture. Spokane and
Arlington both have relatively high rates of crime, and in all three sites the
approaches are being carried out in the types of neighborhoods our survey
found most likely to be affected by crime--working-class neighborhoods
with sections where residents were living in poverty.

Two of the approaches, those provided by the Family Center for Girls and
Boys in Bristol and the Teen Center in Arlington, involve facility-based
youth development programs with special outreach to and activities for
adolescents facing threats to their current and future safety and well-being.
The primary program sites are settings our survey found most likely to be
affected by crime--centers entirely devoted to programs for children. Both
the Bristol and Arlington centers are noticeably free of graffiti, vandalism,
and other evidence of structural decay evident on other buildings in the
nearby vicinity. Activities in both centers are carried out with the active
support and collaboration of police. 

Typical of many of the surveyed organizations serving children in less
affluent neighborhoods, the centers in Bristol and Arlington are providing
activities 6 or more days each week for relatively high numbers of
school-age children and teens. However, many of the adolescents being
served in these centers are not typical of those who most frequently
participate in youth centers. 

The Family Center in Bristol includes among participants teen parents and
their babies, young offenders assigned by the Bristol Juvenile Review
Board to carry out community service, and children who are physically
challenged. The Arlington Teen Center actively recruits and provides
productive activities for adolescents with diverse ethnic backgrounds and a
spectrum of gang affiliations. The neighborhood from which participants
are drawn had been experiencing a surge of youth violence, and a
relatively large number of participants have previously been involved in
some of the most serious incidents, including homicides. 

Thus the Bristol and Arlington programs offer approaches that hold
special promise for providing wholesome alternatives for at-risk youth
during the afterschool and early evening hours.

The two approaches in Spokane--Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers and
the Washington State University Cooperative Extension Family Focus
Program--are taking place in two neighborhoods in which the Spokane
Police Department is carrying out one of the most innovative community
oriented policing services (COPS) efforts in the country. Both the COPS
youth volunteers in the Nevada-Lidgerwood (Nevawood) area and Family
Focus in the West Central Spokane communities are integral to
comprehensive COPS efforts. Before Family Focus and COPS West,
Central Spokane was known as "felony flats." The contiguous Nevada and
Lidgerwood neighborhoods were never among the highest crime areas, but
before the COPS efforts were initiated, the community reportedly began to
experience increasing rates of crime, including more burglaries, more
vandalism, and more youth violence. The approaches in Spokane are
distinctive because they so greatly involve the police in all aspects of
dealing with the youth served.

The Organizations Implementing These Approaches Are Affiliated With
One or More of the National Organizations Participating in the Study

The Family Center in Bristol and the Teen Center in Arlington are both
affiliates of Girls Incorporated. The Nevawood youth volunteers are
organized as a troop associated with Girls Scouts of the U.S.A., and the
Family Focus program is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture 4-H
and Youth Development Service. 

In addition to their innovative approaches, the selected organizations are
implementing traditional youth development practices that may be just as
or more beneficial in creating safer places in the nonschool hours.
Although the specific activities carried out by participants vary from
approach to approach, each is deeply rooted in a fundamental youth
development perspective and incorporates basic youth development
processes including:

o Providing a choice of age-appropriate activities that are mentally and
physically challenging and have been enjoyed by generations of children
and teens under the supervision of mature adults trained in child and
adolescent development.

o Creating ongoing opportunities for school-age participants to share
responsibilities and learn from each other, at the same time creating
similar opportunities for parents, neighbors, and community organizations
to work together in raising children.

Moreover, and perhaps most important, although the approaches involve
staff and activities that can effectively promote wholesome development,
as programs provided by many affiliates, they also demonstrably and
observably are enjoyed by the young participants as well as the adults.

Some processes integral to the selected approaches are less common
among other youth-serving organizations. These involve the remarkable
extent to which they are reaching out into the community to involve
children, teens, and adults who could greatly benefit from but are not
already involved in these types of activities--actively recruiting them and
when necessary modifying times, locations, organizational rules, or
content to meet special needs. The organizations selected for study also
seem to have an uncommonly clear recognition of the limits of any one
organization's ability to serve all children in the community and to meet all
the needs of the children who are being served. They are a vital part of a
network of organizations that together are creating safer and more
productive environments for children and teens in the nonschool hours. 

The directors of the organizations selected for study were working hand in
hand with other local youth development agencies affiliated with national
organizations--more specifically affiliates of the YMCA of the USA in
Arlington and Spokane, the Boys and Girls Clubs in Arlington and Bristol,
and the Boy Scouts of America in Spokane.

This recognition and participation in a network of agencies is due as much
to the communities in which they were located as to organizational
direction. Each community had launched a comprehensive effort to
identify and meet enduring and emerging needs of young people in the
city. The innovative practices being carried out by the organizations were
developed to address specific concerns about the safety and wellbeing of
children identified through these systematic community efforts. All are
adaptations of more typical youth development practices to meet the
realities and constraints faced by school-age children and families living in
their city.

Therefore the innovative approaches selected for study can best be
understood in the context of the cities in which they are occurring, the
needs of youth systematically identified by collaborative effort, the
particular needs the organization was striving to meet, the ongoing
collaboration of other youth development organizations to meet those
needs, and the collaboration with other private and public agencies--in
particular, the police.

The three case studies that formed a core complement to the LINC survey
follow. They describe programs in the old town of Bristol, Connecticut,
the growing city of Arlington, Texas, and the inner-city neighborhoods of
Spokane, Washington.

Bristol, Connecticut

Bristol is located in the rolling hills of central Connecticut. The city was
first incorporated in 1785 but was founded before the Revolutionary War.
Like numerous New England towns that began as agrarian English
settlements and rapidly developed into urban manufacturing centers,
Bristol shifted early in its history from farming to clockmaking and then to
production of other metal goods. Over the centuries, Bristol attracted new
immigrant groups to provide the manual labor needed for industrial
growth. Today Bristol's population of 60,000 has become more ethnically
diverse. However, unlike larger cities that have gone through successive
waves of ethnic and racial change, many of Bristol's families of French,
Polish, Italian, and Irish descent have lived there for generations.
Goods-producing industries have been outnumbered by service industries,
and the relatively homogeneous working-class environment has changed.
The central city is now marked by areas of poverty, and upscale
middle-class homes are going up in the outlying areas. Yet Bristol proudly
maintains its distinctive red brick 18th and 19th century structures and its
blue-collar origins.

As in many New England cities and towns, honor is given to residents
who can claim they are lifelong residents or Bristol natives, and prestige is
earned through contributions to organizations rooted in the community
rather than ones having national or State affiliations. 

Many business owners were raised in Bristol, attended Bristol schools, and
now contribute time to the schools as part of the Bristol Mentor program;
in the 1994-1995 school year, through a school-business partnership, more
than 300 people committed an hour each week to support students in
schools.

Problems Affecting Youth Have Worsened

Educators and administrators of youth-serving organizations believe that
many problems have intensified in the past decade. "Our city used to be
more like a stable small town," one educator commented. "Now we have
many children from split families moving back and forth between Bristol
and other cities, new families moving in to escape big city problems but
bringing big city problems with them: children who are abused, neglected,
malnourished, and lacking basic medical care." Information from Bristol
Hospital indicates that a growing number of such cases involve single
mothers raising children in public housing. Because of mental illness,
many are having great difficulty coping with their children. The schools
are finding that while rates of teen pregnancy have remained the same for
a period of years, younger girls--even those of middle-school age--are now
having babies. Police and other agencies find that children are committing
crimes at younger ages. 

Public Agencies and Local Coalitions Assessed Needs

For two decades the City of Bristol Youth Services Bureau, one of 69
bureaus formed by the State of Connecticut more than 20 years ago, has
been assessing the needs of children. Specifically mandated and funded
jointly by the State and municipality to be an administrative coordinating
unit for all community youth services, as well as a direct service provider,
the Youth Services Bureau functions to meet the needs of all the city's
children and teens as well as those with special needs, including youth
who have come to the attention of the juvenile justice system. Although
the core professional staff is relatively small (three professionals in 1995),
the agency was instrumental in the formation of the Greater Bristol
Community Leadership Team (GBCLT). This is an organization of local
officials, representatives of community and business groups, and directors
of public and private agencies and service organizations whose mission is
to link the public and private sectors of the greater Bristol community to
maximize opportunities for families and individuals. Based on a survey of
youth and family service needs, GBCLT has designated public safety a top
priority and considers organizing neighborhoods and improving access to
services to be integral to its mission. 

In addition, other information gathered from schools and State and local
agencies (including the Bristol Police Department) led local leaders to
conclude that community-based services for youth, including afterschool
programs, are essential for community and personal problem solving,
public safety, and community development. In particular, afterschool
approaches were seen as necessary to:

o Counter peer pressure to engage in harmful behavior and counter the
availability of alcohol, drugs, and other temptations.

o Build children's positive self-concepts by providing them with
opportunities for rewarding activities.

o Divert youth from the juvenile justice system.

o Help parents, children, and teens cope with changes in family structure.

o Alleviate boredom among some adolescents and meet children's and
teens' need to have fun.

Given the range of youth issues recognized in Bristol, the Youth Services
Bureau and cooperating agencies realized that a multifaceted collaborative
approach would be most effective in resolving them. Identified as essential
were approaches for children and adolescents already experiencing
difficulties, as well as programs for promoting personal growth and
development among all Bristol youth.

Implementing a Collaborative Approach Required Building Community
Support

Bristol used several approaches for gaining and maintaining widespread
support for creating safe places for youth in the nonschool hours:

o Preparing community leaders for collaboration to meet the needs of
children and teens.

o Actively engaging many city officials and directors of influential
organizations.

o Broadening the base of support by reaching into communities to achieve
strategic objectives. 

The primary means of implementing these approaches was through: 

o Community workshops on human service activities, community change,
networking on several levels, and effective youth programming.

o Experiential programs, such as the city's "Challenge Course," a facility
for carrying out activities that build community teamwork and teach
cooperative problem-solving skills.

o Neighborhood outreach and focus groups that targeted eight
neighborhoods for training on how to bring about systematic change.

Support building led to the development of a multifaceted center that
incorporated a focus on supporting families and preventing delinquency.

The Bristol Family Center for Boys and Girls Is a Comprehensive,
Facility-Based Youth Development Program 

The Family Center is open for activities on weekdays from 6:30 a.m.,
when preschoolers are dropped off for child care, until 9 p.m. when teens
finish swimming, gymnastics, dance classes, or other activities. On
Saturday it is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition, other events, limited
to adolescents in specific grades--such as the sixth grade Friday night
socials--are held on a regular basis. In the nonschool hours there is
typically a stream of children and parents coming and going, groups of
parents talking quietly while waiting for participants to finish activities
and, not infrequently, a parent who is trying to convince a young
participant that "it is really time to leave now." Neighborhood families
with children are encouraged to use the playscape equipment when it is not
in use for Family Center activities, and, barring rain, a few parents or other
supervising adults are usually sitting outside the center.

As in most Girls Incorporated settings, center staff have both academic
degrees and experiential training for providing the types of instruction and
emotional support children and adolescents need to try challenging new
activities--and to try again if initial attempts are not successful. A
relatively high number of staff are themselves Girls Clubs of America
"graduates" and consider their lives enriched and their decisions to enter
the youth development profession shaped by their early and ongoing Girls
Clubs experiences.

Members of the board and trustees for the Family Center are
representative of the breadth of public and private sector representatives
who have been involved in providing services for youth in the nonschool
hours; they include an assistant superintendent of schools, the president of
one of the leading industrial companies, a CPA, an insurance company
administrator, an employee of a city department, an investment manager in
a local branch of a major bank, and several retired residents.

Two programs in particular carried out by the Bristol Family Center are
also types of youth development programs that have been found to have
long-term success in reducing children's involvement in crime and
delinquency. One involves outreach and services to adolescent parents and
their babies. The other diverts first-time juvenile offenders from the justice
system and into productive youth development programs.

The Bristol Family Center Young Parent Program Helps Pregnant and
Postpartum Teens

For many years, clinical services for pregnant adolescents were provided
by a local hospital. To help prevent the growth in inadequate child care,
Girls Incorporated was asked to provide a once-a-week parenting class for
adolescent mothers and fathers at the hospital clinic. However, it became
evident that a more comprehensive approach was needed, given the
90-percent school dropout rate of pregnant teenagers. Many pregnant teens
did not show up for scheduled physical exams and frequently missed
parenting classes at the hospital. In addition to clinical services, the young
mothers needed daily support both during their pregnancy and after
childbirth to ensure that their own educational, health, and emotional
needs were met in addition to the needs of their babies. Given its
long-term affiliation with Girls Incorporated and its experience in
supporting the comprehensive development of girls and teen women, the
Family Center seemed the logical choice to coordinate efforts to meet this
need.

Under the direction of Family Center staff and in collaboration with
Bristol public schools, pregnant and postpartum teens now have the option
of continuing their education at the center. School classes are held during
school hours, with individual instruction available since the classes are
relatively small. Instruction is given in infant development, child
psychology, nutrition, and other topics integral to good parenting. Not
only do the young parents lack the skills for child rearing that come with
maturity, but many do not have good role models to imitate because their
own mothers and fathers may never have had the opportunity to learn good
parenting skills.

A room directly across the hall functions as a nursery staffed by
experienced childcare workers. During breaks between classes in the
Family Center and in the schools, the childcare providers encourage the
young mothers and fathers to play with their babies, change them when
necessary, and discuss sleeping and eating patterns and other concerns.

Frequently, typical adolescent stresses come to the fore--emotional
stresses such as the need to establish an independent identity leading to
conflicts with their own mothers and fathers; social affairs involving boy
friends, best friends, and dating; and academic subjects involving future
career choices. To address these concerns, trained Family Center staff
provide case management and individual counseling. Close and ongoing
coordination between the clinical staff in the hospital, the teacher assigned
by the school, and the Family Center program coordinator helps ensure
immediate attention to these problems. Home visits by the Family Center
staff in the nonschool hours also help.

The Family Center recruits and trains adult mentors who provide the
young mothers with additional support in the form of advice and
friendship. Mentors are volunteers--usually parents themselves--who
receive 12 hours of training before they are matched with pregnant teens.
They commit at least 6 months to the program and provide between 1 to 4
hours' encouragement each week to the young mothers. More than half the
matches are successful and lead to an ongoing supportive relationship that
lasts throughout the perinatal period. 

The program has added a peer counseling component to help strengthen
the young parents' resolve to delay further pregnancies until they are older,
more educated, and financially independent. Young parents who have
returned to school provide information to their peers about pregnancy
prevention.

According to the assistant superintendent of schools, although pregnancy
rates among students have not declined, the percentage of teen mothers
who complete school has increased from about 11 percent to 85 percent,
and the number of teen mothers having second babies has greatly
decreased. Bristol Hospital officials say very few cases of child neglect or
abuse are now found among the teen parents.

The Family Center's positive support for teen parents is matched by its
involvement in the lives of youth at risk of following a delinquent path.

The Bristol Juvenile Diversion Program Is a Collaborative Effort With
Other Agencies

The Bristol Police Department and the Youth Services Bureau are the lead
agencies in the coalition implementing the juvenile offender diversion
program in which the Family Center collaborates. The coalition also
involves the Bristol Public Schools, other youth development
organizations, the Department of Probation, and both public and private
agencies providing clinical services for school-age children and their
families.

Representatives from these agencies meet on a regular basis to review
cases of juveniles who have been detained by the police. Representatives
who attend the Juvenile Review Board meetings are generally "hands-on"
practitioners who have ongoing contact with a relatively large number of
school-age children in Bristol. All information discussed during review
board meetings is confidential.

First, a juvenile officer provides detailed information about the incident
leading to the arrest of a juvenile, including information about all children
directly or indirectly involved. During the meeting members of the board
can often provide additional information about the family and background
of the children involved in these incidents. Since those attending include
juvenile officers from the police and probation departments, school
counselors, directors of afterschool activities for adolescents, and staff
from local agencies providing psychological counseling, a multifaceted
view of the young offenders can be developed.

Board members discuss alternative options for a plan of action for each
child, with options ranging from essays to be written by the young
offenders about the consequences of their offenses for their own future and
for people affected by the crime to prosecution in adult court. For
first-time adolescent offenders involved in minor crimes, a common
alternative is restitution through community service; in these cases the
Family Center representative has the option of volunteering to place the
adolescent as an aide in one of the Family Center programs.

Adolescents who perform community restitution in the Family Center
must sign a contract with the Juvenile Review Board that specifies the
number of hours they are to work in a set calendar period. They are given
the Family Center telephone number, the name of a staff contact, and
instructions about how to call and set up their work schedule. If they do
not contact the center staff or fail to complete their contract, the review
board is notified and the case is brought up for review again. 

The only Family Center staff members who know which young program
aides are providing involuntary service are the one that served as the
representative on the review board and the participant's contact in the
center. They make a special effort to provide extra opportunities for
counseling that will help the adolescent choose more constructive,
productive actions on an ongoing basis, including continuing to spend
nonschool hours as a regular participant.

Police Are Involved With the Family Center in Other Ways as Well

In addition to their ongoing Juvenile Review Board actions, police officers
work directly with children in occasional projects jointly sponsored by
youth organizations and the police departments in neighborhoods where
children appear to be especially at risk. During activities such as antidrug
poster-coloring contests, officers talk with the children and have an
opportunity to learn about drug activities, family abuse, and other threats
to the children's well-being. Although such intelligence about illegal
neighborhood activities is investigated and can result in law enforcement
actions, officers more typically respond to problems in the family by
referring the family to a local agency with programs or services
appropriate for helping resolve specific problems.

Bristol officers also provide special training for youth organization
participants on such topics as gang awareness and dealing with babysitting
emergencies. Patrol officers regularly drop by youth centers as part of the
Bristol Police Department's "Walk-and-Talk" community policing
approach. In their community outreach, officers have reportedly changed
the focus of Neighborhood Watch from complaint sessions to proactive
citizen activities for monitoring gang and drug activity and organizing
block parties and other productive activities for children and teens. The
police department helps obtain small grants for these parties.

Community Support and Volunteer Time Are Essential to the Success of
the Family Center

The Juvenile Review Board and the Young Parent Program are two
examples of the coalitions formed in Bristol to ensure that children and
teens receive the services they need to avoid becoming involved in crime
in the nonschool hours. Another is the Child Protection Team coordinated
by the Bristol Hospital Department of Social Services and composed of
representatives from the Family Center, the Department of Mental
Retardation, a sexual assault crisis intervention organization, the visiting
nurses association, the Bristol Board of Education Special Services
Administration, and the Bristol Youth Services Bureau. The team assesses
cases of abuse or neglect that come to the attention of any of the
collaborating agencies, takes appropriate action, involving other agencies
if necessary, and conducts followup assessments.

Volunteer activities are encouraged by both the public and private sectors.
Students are given credit toward high school graduation for community
service. More than 300 students each year work in the nonschool hours as
volunteer aides in the Family Center, the local hospital, the library, and
other community organizations. Each school in Bristol has been "adopted"
by a business that encourages its employees to meet with an individual
student during the work day. Employees of city agencies are also
encouraged to become mentors.

In other words, Bristol has successfully mobilized a variety of community
resources to meet agreed-upon needs for support for teen parents and
positive experiences for children to counteract a variety of risk factors for
youth in this changing community.

Arlington, Texas

With a population of more than 270,000, Arlington, Texas, is in essence
the newest and largest city involved in the case studies and the city with
the widest range of economic levels. Located between Dallas and Fort
Worth and within sight of the tall buildings in both central cities,
Arlington is the home base for several major corporations including
American Airlines, Arlington General Motors, and the electronic firm
Tandy's Incredible Universe. The faculty of the University of Texas at
Arlington, located in the center of the city, have helped boost the
educational level of residents to one of the highest in the Nation. Business
at hotels and restaurants is supported by their proximity to the
Dallas-Forth Worth Airport, the theme park Six Flags Over Texas, and a
new baseball park. 

Arlington residents are offended by those who refer to the city as a
bedroom community for Dallas and Fort Worth, pointing out that
Arlington was established as a trading post more than 150 years ago.
However, as with many Texas cities, the development of the settlement
into a major urban area was primarily a post-World War II phenomenon
made possible by 20th century transportation. Residents are fond of
pointing out that Arlington has an established reputation for good schools,
high-quality living, and a flavor distinct from either of the two large
bordering cities. Arlington has grown rapidly in the past decade precisely
because of those characteristics and has attracted a spectrum of new
residents, including commuters who are building large homes in new,
well-to-do neighborhoods. Many of Arlington's new families have
school-age children and two parents working to maintain affluent life
styles.

New arrivals have also included families living in poverty who are trying
to escape the severe difficulties, including early deaths, common to the
economically depressed areas of the larger cities. Large apartment
complexes have been designated as assisted housing and are themselves
ethnic enclaves of primarily African-American or Hispanic residents
within the larger confines of Arlington. Both long-term residents and
recent arrivals are concerned by the city's precipitous growth, changing
nature, and consequent strain on services.

Crime Is a Concern in Arlington

Arlington's history of problems involving crime and delinquency are well
documented by studies sponsored by city, State, and nonprofit agencies. In
1993, Tarrant County, which contains all of Arlington and part of Fort
Worth, had one of the highest crime rates in Northeast Texas, surpassed
only by adjacent Dallas County. The area had a relatively high availability
of guns; Tarrant, Dallas, and adjacent counties had more than 9,000
dealers legally licensed to sell firearms.[1] This may help explain why in
Tarrant County in 1993, more than 70 juveniles were referred to court for
violent crimes, including 25 for murder.[2] But a recent study by a senior
faculty member at Sam Houston State University suggests that Arlington's
overall efforts to reduce crime are having a demonstrable impact. The Fort
Worth-Arlington metropolitan area had the second highest overall crime
rate among all metropolitan areas in Texas in 1984, but in 1993 it ranked
15th. Although the rate of violent crime increased, the increase was less
than in the majority of other Texas metropolitan areas.[3] Moreover,
perhaps due to vigorous substance abuse prevention efforts in the
Arlington area, Tarrant County has had a relatively low rate of
drug-related arrests.[4] Gang prevention also seems to be paying off.
Police officers report that Arlington youth who identify themselves as
gang members do not appear to be connected with gangs in other cities but
belong to new, transitory groups that borrow gang names and symbols
described in newspapers and on television from Los Angeles, Chicago,
and other cities. 

Organizations and Coalitions Pave the Way for a Comprehensive
Response to Youth Risks

Crimes affecting youth are a special concern among the many civic
associations committed to preserving quality of life in Arlington. They
gathered information, analyzed it, and drew up recommendations that
eventually became a specific plan of action. Steps along the way included
the following:

o The United Way of Metropolitan Tarrant County organized an effort to
assess community problems and to identify the resources needed to
address the most serious. Under the direction of the United Way's 1990
Priorities Committee composed of executives from corporations, volunteer
organizations, and public agencies, an indepth study of community
problems was launched. Findings regarding youth and their families
accounted for 8 of the 10 problems given top priority by the Priorities
Committee. They were school dropout; chemical misuse and dependency;
family distress, stress, and life crises; illiteracy; lack of child care; youth at
risk (of not making a successful transition to adulthood); teen pregnancy;
and violence and victimization. Lack of child care and youth at risk were
identified as focal issues to be addressed through collaborative community
effort. 

o Citywide task forces, spurred by a City of Arlington Crime Prevention
Action Plan designed by 100 residents and community professionals,
carried out research in the areas of violent crimes, education and youth,
business, and neighborhoods. What they found led them to recommend the
creation of afterschool and summer programs as well as greater
availability of existing programs.[5]

o Arlington Human Service Planners (AHSP) convened a group of citizens
and youth service professionals to explore the dimensions of issues
concerning children in the city. In addition to a staff member from the
agency funding AHSP (United Way of Metropolitan Tarrant County), the
AHSP Committee included representatives from seven voluntary
youth-serving organizations and representatives from city agencies that
deal with youth (including the police department, the public library, and
the department of parks and recreation). The school district provided
information about the precipitous increase in the number of children
entering Arlington schools in the past decade and showed the extent of
problems such as the number of pregnant and parenting teens in school
and school dropout rates. The police provided information about the
number and types of arrests of youth, and the Department of Child
Protective Services pinpointed neighborhoods most likely to report child
abuse. The AHSP Committee recommended the establishment of a
permanent city-sponsored citizens commission on youth and families.

These collaborative efforts led to a specific plan of action for providing
afterschool programs for as many school-age children in Arlington as
possible. The plan had three primary activities:

o Actively recruiting high-risk children and teens to participate in existing
centers, including Boys and Girls Clubs Centers and the Arlington Youth
Services Multipurpose Center.

o Creating new centers in unsupervised areas where children and teens
were already congregating in the nonschool hours. Boys and Girls Clubs
of Arlington has taken the lead in this effort.

o Providing licensed childcare in the afterschool hours in all elementary
schools in Arlington and contracting with the three major youth-serving
organizations in Arlington to administer the childcare and furnish
age-appropriate youth development activities. The three agencies involved
are the YMCA, Arlington Youth Services, and Arlington Boys and Girls
Clubs. The three organizations have divided the schools more or less
equally, and fees for childcare are based on a sliding scale depending on
the family's income. 

The Teen Center Provides Safe Activities 7 Days a Week 

The Teen Center was opened in 1992 by Arlington Youth Services (AYS)
as part of its ongoing adaptation of services to help address concerns about
high-risk youth. AYS itself was established in 1976 as the Arlington Girls
Club, and within 3 years a second Arlington Girls Club center was opened.
While retaining its strong programming for girls, the organization began to
add additional services in the early 1980s, with coeducational activities
provided in the new Multipurpose Center (renamed the Teen Center in
1992 by the adolescent participants).

The Teen Center occupies a medium-sized, one-story concrete building in
one of the older city areas in Southeast Arlington. This is a neighborhood
of small homes surrounding the block containing a large elementary
school, the Teen Center, and an adjacent small building housing an AYS
meeting room and a storage room.

The primary areas in the Teen Center consist of an entrance area with a
check-in desk, a separate section of administrative offices and meeting
room for the AYS staff, a gymnasium/basketball court, a photography
darkroom, a kitchen, and a large game room. The game room has an area
with computers, another with multipurpose tables used for arts and crafts,
and a third with a couch and chairs, all surrounding centrally placed Fooz
Ball and pool tables.

The Teen Center is open 7 days a week. On weekends it is open from 10
a.m. until 6 p.m.; teens typically start drifting in around noon. On school
days it stays open until 9 p.m., except on Wednesday, when it is open until
10 p.m. (with only the teens 15 and older permitted to stay). The Teen
Center commonly attracts up to 100 participants each day. (The
unduplicated count of teens who participated in center activities between
January 1, 1995, and March 15, 1995, was 552. Over 50 percent of
participants in January through March were aged 15 or older. The vast
majority--(83 percent) were minority group members, predominantly
African-American, Hispanic, and mixed race.) Active recruitment by two
outreach workers has resulted in the participation of many teens identified
by the police and schools as at risk. Participation is limited to youth aged
11 to 18 who follow the center rules formally endorsed by the teens.

Observance of Rules Is Emphasized

Participants agree that all who come to the Teen Center will take care of it,
obey all laws, respect the neighborhood, and treat each other and staff with
respect. Participants who smoke in the building, leave trash for others to
pick up, or refuse to cooperate with staff are asked to leave the building.
Instances of stealing, property destruction, threats, violence, or possession
of illegal substances result in calls to police and legal action.

An additional rule that the teens decided was critical is the prohibition of
gang symbols. Although many of the participants claim gang membership,
the Teen Center is considered neutral territory. Signs, colors, gestures, and
other representations of gang affiliation are not welcome. Weapons of any
type, including sticks and metal objects, are by agreement not brought into
the center.

Given the large numbers of teen boys in the center and many past
incidents involving violence (in other settings), all staff members are
vigilant and constantly monitor all areas. Except for restrooms and the
photography darkroom (used only under the supervision of the instructor),
there is agreement that doors to all rooms occupied by participants must
stay open at all times. Participants are allowed to bring their own audio
equipment as long as they use earphones, but another unwritten rule is "no
loud music."

Staff Are Conscious of the Teens' Home and Neighborhood Environments

Because many participants live in neighborhoods where respect is difficult
for adults to achieve, they are sensitive to challenges from other teens,
which usually occur during competitive sports. Alert staff typically take
immediate action in such situations, first by breaking the tension with a
simple take-charge action like blowing a whistle or making a time-out
sign, then by talking quietly to the two participants involved in the
challenge and demanding an instant replay. No one is blamed, everyone
saves face, and respect is maintained. 

The majority of participants have been recruited through outreach to teens
who have already been experiencing difficulties, including contacts with
police, in neighborhoods where most teens never previously had the
opportunity to participate in constructive activities in the nonschool hours.
One critical barrier to participation--the need to get safely to and from the
center--has been overcome by vans owned by Arlington Youth Services
and operated by staff. These make frequent runs between participants'
neighborhoods and the center immediately after school is over and at the
end of specific blocks of planned activities. 

Teens interviewed have made clear that part of their preference for
spending many hours playing basketball in the Teen Center was not
because of the basketball court. "We play basketball on the street," they
say. But there is no staff member on the street to referee when issues of
respect arise. "Archie, he knows when to say 'chill.' On the street, there's
no Archie to say chill, so we fight."

Some of the staff are considered more than just "OK." The physical
education instructor, who has a rich experience in working with delinquent
youth, is admired as much for being fair as for his height and obvious
skills on the basketball court. He recognizes the dreams the teens are
playing out on the Teen Center court, and while he doesn't discourage
these dreams, he takes opportunities to sit on the bleachers and talk to
them about more realistic ways of achieving success as adults. The
photography instructor, a professional who has spent many hours
convincing photo supply shops to provide equipment to the Teen Center,
has sparked great interest in capturing the world of the center and the
participants' neighborhoods on film. He has instructed and inspired a large
number of teen "hot shots" to produce artistic photos that are rightfully
applauded by residents throughout the city.

To ensure that girls and younger teens are not excluded from the
basketball court, some hours are set aside exclusively for their use. To
facilitate development of the more advanced skills of the older teens, the
court is reserved on Wednesday nights from 6 to 10 p.m. for their use, and
at 8 o'clock the younger teens must leave the center. 

Staff Provide Opportunities for Teen Decisionmaking and Responsibility

For the most part, the staff provide guidance by asking about future
schedules and needs for supplies. "Are you guys going to want to do
anything special for Easter? If you want to make baskets or something like
that for the kids at home, you need to give me a list of stuff you need--like
eggs or whatever." Or, "They say it's going to be nice this weekend. Do
you guys want us to get hot dogs or meat and charcoal so you can cook
stuff for lunch on Saturday?"

More formal opportunities are provided for 3-month positions as paid
Teen Center youth workers. Only four paid positions are available at any
given time for teens aged 14 years and older, so the jobs are actively
competed for by the teens. The teens must fill out formal applications and
are provided with a complete job description listing all tasks required of
aides--from washing out trash cans to introducing new members to the
rules of the Teen Center and to other youth. Applicants are interviewed,
and those hired receive performance reviews. Although the teens see this
as a good way to earn money, the staff are more interested in teaching
good work habits. Because the youth workers are responsible for keeping
the Teen Center clean and tidy, they, rather than the staff, are the ones
most likely to make sure that the other participants obey the rules about
taking care of the center and not leaving trash for others to pick up.

Participants are also organized for carrying out work in the neighborhood
such as gardening for elderly residents. According to one of the staff, the
younger participants who do not yet qualify for paid employment are those
most enthusiastic about such opportunities. Organized activities that are
more likely to hold the older teens' interest include programs dealing with
concerns teens are facing on a day-to-day basis, such as substance abuse.
Pool tournaments, poster contests for events such as Black History Month,
and activities involving science and math puzzles appeal to them. 

Teens in all three groups independently offered the same suggestion for
what they wanted changed in the center--longer hours on weekends, until
10 or 11 p.m.

"We like this place. We learn how to do nice things for each other." 

"Before I was always in trouble. Here I have good stuff to do and someone
to break up fights." 

"Other places kick you out--not here." 

"In school I always fail. Here I do good."

Boys and Girls Clubs of Arlington Provides a Spectrum of Youth
Development Programs

Girls Incorporated is one of several national organizations providing
center-based afterschool programs in Arlington. Boys and Girls Clubs of
Arlington provides programs at six locations in different parts of the
city.[6] It fully demonstrates the characteristics of seasoned youth
organizations delineated earlier (fiscal and administrative knowhow,
professional staff knowledgeable in child development, and the ability to
involve children in activities that develop leadership skills). Organized and
incorporated in 1959, its motto is "Leading Arlington's Youth for Today
and Tomorrow." The mission of the organization is "to help all youth, with
special emphasis on youth at risk, develop to their maximum potential."

The Main Branch and the Southeast Branch are housed in buildings owned
by Boys and Girls Clubs. As an outgrowth of an afterschool program, one
branch was created on the grounds of a school. One center limited to youth
13 and older is located in a city shopping mall. Except for this relatively
new program exclusively for adolescents, all branches serve boys and girls
from the ages of 6 through 17 during nonschool hours on weekdays and
Saturdays.

The Pebble Creek Branch and the Parklane Branch operate in space
provided by the owners of apartment complexes where many single
mothers receiving housing assistance live with their children. The manager
of the Parklane Apartments interviewed for this project was enthusiastic
about the onsite branch and its effect on the children. She described the
destructive behavior of the children, especially the 9- to 12-year-olds,
before the branch opened, pointing out that "with 300 children around and
nothing for them to do, of course they were getting into fights and
destroying property." She excitedly pointed out areas that in addition to
being vandalism free are now clean and neat. "They all love getting the
awards for doing cleanups," she said.

The Main Branch in Central Arlington Is Typical of Many Boys and Girls
Clubs Facilities Around the Country

In addition to a gym, the Main Branch has a large game room furnished
with a counter where the staff welcome and check members in as they
arrive and welcome and record information about guest children who
accompany members. The game rooms are equipped with a number of
pool tables and Fooz Ball tables, which are in high demand and provide a
social focus for children and teens.

As at the Main Branch, facilities typically have another relatively large
room furnished with long tables and chairs and several individual stations
with computers. Here children complete homework assignments, receive
tutoring, work together on quiet projects such as newsletters, and
participate in programs that involve discussion groups and written
materials.

Except for computers, which are typically the newest equipment,
furnishings are commonly long-lasting, sturdy, and utilitarian, and the
floors (other than the high-gloss gym floor) are swept and polished clean
but often scuffed with many years of use. Walls are frequently adorned
with drug and crime prevention posters furnished by national
organizations; bright splashes of color are provided by the artwork of the
younger children, posters for community events made by the older
children, and trophies and awards for the many "bests" earned by club
members.

Branches in public housing apartment buildings are more likely to consist
of a single large room divided by furnishings into areas for different
functions. Members of the smaller branches are driven on one of several
club vans to use the gym at the Main Branch.

Staff use sanctions for breaking rules in a way that can help children take
positive actions to redeem themselves. For example, since rule breaking
frequently occurs when children become overexcited and lash out verbally
or physically, "time out" is used to discipline a child whose behavior is
disruptive. Staff are unambiguously instructed to locate a time out close to
the activity in which the infraction occurred. During the time out, the
disciplined children are required to sit quietly with their legs crossed and
their hands folded in their laps until they are calm enough to rejoin the
activity.

Teens Praise the SmartMoves Program

"SmartMoves," the Boys and Girls Clubs comprehensive primary
prevention program, provides small-group discussion about temptations
many children entering their teen years face on a daily basis, including
alcohol use and premature sexual activity. The program helps adolescents
realize how they can refuse to take serious risks without seeming "not
cool" or becoming social outcasts.

Feedback from the teens indicates that they first came to the local club
because it was there and they had nowhere else to go. They stayed because
the club "hires good staff people--people who go out of their way to do
things for kids." Favorite activities are carwash fundraisers, volunteer
work in nursing homes and at community cleanups, and field trips to
places they have never been before.

When asked what approaches they thought should be replicated
throughout the country for all teens, teens have praised the SmartMoves
program for the effects they said were visible among the participants in
their neighborhood, especially on attitudes toward sex and drugs and
subsequent behavior. They have recommended that all adolescents
participate in the program, which they are quite sure helps "the younger
kids" be safer in the nonschool hours.

School-Based Child Care in Elementary Schools Keeps Younger Students
Safe After Classes Are Over

The three organizations that provide school-based childcare (YMCA,
Arlington Youth Services, and Arlington Boys and Girls Clubs) have
different independent functions and call their afterschool programs by
different names. However, they have established essentially the same
policies and practices. All hire University of Texas students majoring in
relevant fields as onsite staff for the programs. All are qualified to provide
academic tutoring. Staff hired by all three organizations prepare weekly
"lesson plans" specifying a range of activities appropriate for children of
different ages and with different interests. Each organization meets the
high standards required for licensed childcare, including provision of safe
places, a relatively high staff-to-participant ratio, wholesome snacks, and a
sign-out procedure that ensures each child leaving is in the care of an
authorized adult.

All meet in either the school gymnasium or school cafeteria as soon as
school is over, and the activities carried out by the children involve a
choice of age-appropriate physical exercise (such as circle games for the
youngest children and tether ball or relay races for the oldest), arts and
crafts for fostering fine motor skills, board games for broadening
intellectual skills, and cooperative projects for developing social skills.
Younger children ask for and receive more individual attention from the
staff than children approaching adolescence, who are more interested in
communicating with each other. With the occasional exception of a child
who has been assigned to a solitary, short time out for breaking a rule
known to all participants (such as pushing or shoving), and a number of
the youngest children who tend to run out of steam and get cranky as
evening approaches, most children appear to be happily occupied in
one-on-one or group activities.

The Arlington Police Department Is Strongly Involved in Afterschool
Programs

A prime area of police involvement is in the juvenile diversion program, in
which police play an important role in helping identify detained juveniles
for assignment to the Teen Center by the courts.

In addition, the Arlington Police Department carries out highly visible key
efforts to create safer places for school-age children. Its efforts involve a
wide spectrum of independent crime prevention programs, some
implemented by the department itself and some carried out as part of the
City of Arlington Crime Prevention Action Plan mentioned earlier. The
department provides formal support to youth organizations, and officers at
every rank in the department, including the chief, carry out volunteer
activities.

Independent departmental efforts include more than 25 age-appropriate,
relatively short youth education programs covering a range of issues. For
the youngest latch-key children (kindergarten through grade 4), programs
focus on such topics as self-help in emergency situations and "stranger
dangers." Programs for children approaching adolescence (grades 4
through 6) include making choices, living with alcoholic parents,
responding to gang alerts, and babysitting safely. The department also
implements more sustained approaches, many developed as part of U.S.
Department of Justice efforts, such as the D.A.R.E. program. To
familiarize children with police, officers distribute trading cards with their
pictures, their descriptions, and safety tips.

The School Resource Officer Program Plays a Key Role in the Arlington
Crime Prevention Action Plan

The goals of the School Resource Officer Program are to (1) provide a
valuable service to the Arlington Independent School District and the
community as a liaison between the school district and the police
department, (2) communicate with youth in a positive manner and dispel
myths and misconceptions, (3) educate youth by providing relevant and
informative educations programs, (4) enhance the police's image by
example and through positive youth contacts, and (5) provide problem
resolution, counseling, and enforcement when necessary.[7] Officers who
apply for the position are selected in part on the basis of a prior record of
"positive citizen contacts." As part of their duties, school resource officers
maintain contacts with and actively refer children to other community
agencies providing services for children, including the scouting
organizations, Camp Fire, Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA, and Big
Brothers and Sisters. School resource officers are also encouraged to
become Boy Scout Explorer Post leaders.

Patrol Officers Also Provide Ongoing Formal Support for Safe
Afterschool Activities

Patrol officers carry out background checks of the youth organizations'
staff before they are hired. Staff say the police respond rapidly to any calls
about potential crimes or crime-related incidents. As part of their regular
patrol, officers stop in at youth centers when programs are in progress and
stay at least a few minutes to talk to the young participants. 

At the Teen Center, patrol officers regularly drop by in the late afternoon
and remain to watch and cheer basketball games. They have an easy
comraderie with the staff and many of the participants. Their presence is
not only welcomed by those involved in Teen Center activities but is key
to the residents' willingness to have the center in their neighborhood.
When the Teen Center was first proposed, the neighborhood was literally
up in arms at the idea of having gang members and a large number of
minority teens concentrated in the area. However, once the police made
clear that they would patrol regularly to keep the peace, the community
agreed to give the center a trial period. The more frequent presence of the
police in the community is now seen as a benefit rather than a necessity.

In addition to cooperating formally with the youth organizations, the
police department also encourages officers and civilian staff to actively
support the organizations in a volunteer capacity. Top administrators serve
on the organizations' advisory boards and capital fund campaigns; staff at
every rank devote off-duty hours to coaching, leading, and working with
Arlington's children and teens on a regular basis. 

The Approach in Arlington Receives Wide Community Support

Community leaders interviewed as part of this study are pleased with the
services being provided by the youth organizations described here. Some
feel that more caution should be exercised when recruiting adolescents
who have committed crimes. However, even those with the most
reservations about serving young offenders or other at-risk youth take
pride in participants' individual success stories.

By and large community members appear to strongly endorse many of the
innovations that have been made to foster this success. Coalitions have
been formed between professional organizations providing youth services,
and children and teens in youth organizations greatly benefit from the
direct services and financial support of volunteer auxiliaries and
community betterment organizations such as the Junior League. Members
of the women's auxiliary for AYS provide hours of onsite administrative
support as well as helping hands for creative projects. Their gala annual
fundraisers such as the Cinderella Ball result in ongoing support for
activities for children most in need of safe places in the nonschool hours.

Spokane, Washington

Shortly before the end of the 19th century, the first settlers of European
descent moved inland from towns on the Oregon-Pacific coast and
established sawmills on the Spokane River. Surrounded by large
mountainous tracts of towering evergreen trees, the area had for many
generations been Indian fishing lands; the natural resources attracted other
white settlers who founded Spokane. Within a few years of their arrival,
the State of Washington was established. As with many western cities,
Spokane's population soared when the railroad reached town. The boom
continued when precious minerals were discovered, and today the
population stands at more than 180,000. In addition to being a major
distribution point for goods for the Northwest, the city provides an
economic, educational, and cultural center for the northeastern part of the
State. Residents take pride in the city's own acclaimed symphony orchestra
and riverside parks built for the 1974 World's Fair. 

Recent migration from the larger urban coastal cities has brought new
middle class residents to Spokane who are fleeing urban blight and
seeking a "better way to live." However, they rapidly discover that, though
smaller in size, Spokane also has its bleak side. It has neighborhoods in
which many residents live in poverty, and it has problems often associated
with poverty that have a negative impact on day-to-day life.

Many new residents in Spokane arrive with no mainstream American-style
leadership skills and few skills for surviving in an urban area. Some are
members of minority groups that have been disproportionately affected by
poverty, including Native Americans and African-Americans. Others are
recent immigrants from Southeast Asia and East India, while still others
are of European descent and now enmeshed in poverty. 

Youth Issues Are Identified by a Citywide Youth Commission

Established by city ordinance in 1985 and using the "Caring Community
Model" developed by University of Washington researchers David
Hawkins and Richard Catalano, the Youth Commission has taken
responsibility for communication and networking, investigation and
research, and advocacy. A "report card" on Spokane area youth sponsored
by the commission and area businesses found:[8]

o The school dropout rate was lower than the national average, but 1,000
Spokane County students who entered the freshman year in high school in
1988 did not graduate; Spokane pays about $3.3 million per month to
support dropouts and their families.

o Drugs and alcohol were used several times a week by 45 percent of
Spokane area youth; 15 percent used them daily. Among 10- to
17-year-olds arrested in Spokane, 80 percent used drugs or alcohol, and 65
percent were dependent on substances; 40 percent started using drugs
before age 12.

o Over 20 percent of youth aged 16 through 19 who were actively seeking
employment in 1989 could not find jobs. Most lacked the skills needed for
employment.

o One out of eight 17-year-old teens in Spokane was functionally illiterate.

o In 1986, almost 600 teenagers gave birth; another 556 teens terminated
pregnancies; 11 percent of all births in Spokane were to mothers under 20
years of age.

o In 1987, there were 3,916 arrests of school-age children (10 through 17),
meaning that about 10 percent of all school-age youth were arrested.

A recent research effort spearheaded by the Youth Commission included a
survey conducted by the YMCA to assess the needs of teens throughout
the city, a majority of whom requested a center of their own. In response,
the commission rapidly conducted an inventory of buildings that could
serve the purpose using resources provided by the public and private
sectors.

Realizing that the results of citywide surveys do not necessary capture
priorities of particular neighborhoods, committees formed in the West
Central Community Center by the Community Development Association
carried out their own neighborhood needs assessment and publicly
presented findings and recommendations to the Spokane City Council.
Rather than focusing on problem behavior involving individual
neighborhood youth, West Central Spokane task forces have focused on
community conditions that need to be addressed to prevent problems
involving school-age children and to create a safer and more productive
community for children and their families. In January 1992, based on
results of five monthly public neighborhood meetings convened after
several extremely serious incidents of violent victimization of children, an
ad hoc Security Task Force composed of residents, representatives from
schools and city agencies, and West Central Community Center staff
identified the categories of issues that needed to be resolved in order to
prevent future crimes involving children:

o Police-community relations. Specific conditions included low levels of
service, perceived discrimination against minority group residents, and
lack of communication between the police and residents. 

o Neighborhood security improvements. Conditions included lack of
traffic signs, poor neighborhood lighting, neighborhood eyesores
(abandoned houses and cars and other trash), and lack of safe places for
entertainment in the neighborhood. 

o Security education. Parents needed to learn how to take more
responsibility for the supervision of their children.

o Block networking and organizing. A major concern was the lack of
communication between neighbors. This resulted in the inability to take
coordinated action to ensure the safety of children and families.

The task force provided 30 recommendations that were translated into
actions that led to the collaborations and approaches described in this
report.

Components of the approaches taken in Spokane include:

o The West Central Community Center, which operates with the
cooperation of many community-based organizations.

o The Washington State University Family Focus Program, which teaches
life skills to adults.

o COPS West, a ministation staffed by community volunteers.

o Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers, teens who participate in crime
reduction activities under the supervision of police.

The West Central Community Center's Outreach and Programs Seek to
Break the Cycle of Poverty

Spokane's West Central neighborhood is a multiethnic community that has
experienced some of Spokane's worst problems associated with poverty,
including crime. The West Central Community Center (under the direction
of the West Central Community Development Association) functions as a
locus of community consensus building for innovation and change. The
center is working closely with regional directors of 4-H and Girl Scouts to
develop new procedures that will better meet the needs of neighborhood
children.

The physical plant is a large, one-story modern building constructed more
than 16 years ago as part of a federally funded effort to revitalize the social
and economic structure in the surrounding neighborhood. In its first 10
years, the West Central Community Development Association
concentrated on developing the Community Center facility and
implementing programs designed to break the cycle of poverty in which
many neighborhood families were enmeshed. WIC (a Special Supplement
Food Program for Women, Infants and Children), Head Start, classes to
teach parenting skills, and other community education classes were made
available in the center, as were some youth development activities.
However, the programs had minimal participation among those most in
need, according to the center's original executive director. This changed
when rigorous outreach was conducted in the surrounding neighborhood,
in large part through the efforts of COPS West and Family Focus (as
discussed later). 

A large number of the small, modest bungalows that constitute most of the
West Central neighborhood house single mothers struggling to feed and
clothe their children or older residents living on fixed minimal stipends.
Although a number of residents have always lived in the area, some single
mothers followed husbands or boyfriends who were incarcerated in the
nearby county correctional facility. A little over 5 years ago, few
neighbors knew each other, and most were afraid to go out after dark
because of crime including rapes and other attacks on people and property.
Many residents felt totally isolated and depressed about neighborhood
conditions but didn't think that they could do anything about it.

Today the West Central Community Center is a beehive of activity.
Referrals for virtually any social, psychological, or health service are
easily accessible in written form or from Community Center staff. During
school hours, the center is a home away from home for developmentally
delayed adults who are cared for by trained providers until their primary
caretakers return from their jobs. The center also provides a safe and
productive environment for children and teens in the hours before and
after school.

Beginning in the early morning, many working parents drop their children
off for before-school youth development activities. Rather than being left
in empty homes and walking to school through unsupervised areas,
elementary school children have choices of activities in which they can
participate until they are taken by van to school.

4-H Clubs Are Involved 

Realizing the important role they could play before as well as after school,
4-H has started an early morning club in the center in conjunction with the
Family Focus Program. The 4-H Club activities, provided as part of the
Family Focus Program, are geared for children living in urban
environments and facing urban realities. Many of the older children are
excited about participating in 4-H projects--hands-on activities
accompanied by information tied to the activities that seems like "good
stuff to know" rather than like "boring lessons."

From after school until early evening, the center is filled with children and
adolescents participating in a range of activities, beginning with snacks
and homework help and followed by a choice of age-graded programs.
The administrative staff is working hand in hand with directors of regional
offices of national youth-serving organizations to develop the interest and
capacity of the community residents to provide volunteer-led youth
programs. 

Girl Scouts Are Involved

The Inland Empire Girl Scout Council is one of the organizations working
with the center. Until recently Girl Scouts did not have a visible presence
in the West Central community. Many mothers in the neighborhood never
had an opportunity to be Girl Scouts or other youth group participants as
children. So when the council first tried to organize troops, they found a
lack of women in the neighborhood who valued youth development
activities sufficiently to volunteer to be trained as leaders. 

In response to this lack, the Girl Scout Council adopted innovative
procedures to meet the needs of girls and to introduce neighborhood
families to the benefits of Girl Scouting. A professional staff member is
organizing and leading troop activities in the center. Parents' interest and
confidence in taking over troop activities are being bolstered by their
recruitment for weekend events and their involvement in projects the girls
take home to complete.

Although the council has adapted ordinary procedures to meet the realities
in the West Central community, it has not changed the nationally
developed, age-appropriate skill-building program that results in
recognized achievements by girls in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The Community Center is also the primary meeting place for cross-cutting
groups creating a safe community and promoting the participation of all
residents, including children and teens. Many of these meetings involve
coalitions of professionals and community representatives who are
collaborating to ensure that services provided in the community are as
productive as possible and to plan future joint enterprises.

The Washington State University Family Focus Program Teaches Family
Life Skills 

The Family Focus Program outreach component in West Central Spokane
is designed to teach skills to adults who, while growing up, did not learn
basic methods for managing their own personal lives or their own homes.
Family Focus is administered by the Spokane County Cooperative
Extension of Washington State University (WSU) and supervised by the
WSU community resource coordinator.

Small classes are held in the homes of the participants, concentrating on
providing basic living skills first; second, skills to conduct the everyday
business of running a household; and third, skills for parenting and
managing a family. Finally, skills for working with larger groups in the
community are discussed and opportunities to exercise them provided
through newly formed neighborhood groups.

Processes integral to Family Focus are designed to break down social
isolation and bring neighbors together for mutual day-to-day support and
assistance. A door-to-door visit by the Family Focus Team recruited
neighborhood residents for the program. The Family Focus outreach and
implementation staff, family resource assistants, are for the most part
down-to-earth women whose many years of practical experience in
organizing homes, managing their own families, and participating as
volunteers in community associations have equipped them well for their
roles.

Conversations with women in the program indicate they are learning many
routine skills--such as using time outs to deal with their own children.
They are gaining confidence in their ability to take charge of themselves,
their homes, their families, and their neighborhoods. Program outcomes
achieved from January 1, 1993, through June 30, 1994, have been
documented by a WSU study. They included a 35-percent increase in the
average time parents spent with their children each day, a 38-percent
increase in the time parents spent on self-improvement activities, a
41-percent decrease in watching television, and a 58-percent increase in
the number working or going to school.[9]

The COPS West Ministation Binds Neighborhood Adults and Youth to
Police to Reduce Crime

Housed in a building donated by a local business owner, COPS
(Community Oriented Policing) West is a ministation staffed by
community volunteers (many of whom are Family Focus participants or
graduates), a neighborhood resource officer assigned by the Spokane
Police Department and, more recently, representatives from a number of
other public agencies including the Office of the District Attorney and
Adult and Juvenile Probation and Parole. COPS West was organized in
1991 by a community resident who had recently moved to the West
Central neighborhood from a distant urban area. Horrified by the
abduction of two children and the murder of one child shortly after she
moved into the area, she worked with the West Central Community
Development Association director, the Spokane Police Department, and
business owners in the neighborhood to create a comprehensive set of
approaches for reducing crime and restoring community control.

Both traditional and innovative neighborhood policing techniques are used
by COPS West. Block Watch and McGruff safe houses are part of the
effort as are D.A.R.E. and neighborhood cleanups. But COPS West has
also implemented other strategies. Teams of neighbors are trained in
dispute resolution and respond to calls involving conflicts between
community children and teens or other residents, if the neighborhood
resource officer is confident that the confrontation can be handled without
violence. Adults patrol the streets before and after school to ensure that
children are safe and that older teens are not harassing each other or
younger children. 

A close bond has been forged between uniformed police officers and
residents through joint participation in upbeat community events and
programs designed to express appreciation for each other's efforts, such as
Holiday Meals for Police Officers. Together with WSU and the West
Central Community Development Association, COPS West has taken the
lead in organizing events enjoyed by the whole neighborhood, such as the
now annual Neighbor Days when a parade highlights the start of an entire
day of celebration. Integral to community events is the participation of
neighborhood children and teens in the COPS Junior Volunteer Groups
and other youth groups formed at the Community Center. The
neighborhood resource officer is highly visible at many community
events, coalition meetings and, as noted in an independent study of the
Spokane Police Department's Neighborhood Resource Officer Program,
carries out activities responsive to the community's needs.[10]

Together COPS West (including its neighborhood resource officer
component) and WSU Family Focus have achieved documented success in
creating a safer community. According to the police department, the effort
has resulted in a 40-percent decrease in crime in the West Central
neighborhood between 1991 and 1994. In 1994 the police department
hired the resident who initiated COPS West to coordinate the numerous
COPS organizations taking form in neighborhoods around the city. 

Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers Are Trained by Police to Help
Prevent Crime 

Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers is a core subgroup of one of
Spokane's neighborhood COPS initiatives. Currently the group has more
than 60 active participants, both girls and boys, most in their midteens.
The girls who belong to Nevawood COPS Youth Volunteers are officially
a part of Girl Scout Troop 437, originally organized more than 10 years
ago as a Brownie Girl Scout troop for 6- to 8-year-old girls living in a
predominantly working class neighborhood adjacent to the West Central
community. The leader inspired them to go well beyond basic
requirements for earning Girl Scout badges and awards and to tackle
projects that other girls their age never thought they could. 

By the time they were Senior Scouts (aged 15 to 17), the girls were
anxious to take on projects to correct neighborhood conditions that had
become visible problems, such as a deteriorated local park that was no
longer safe for their activities. Realizing the changes that the West Central
community had achieved through the COPS effort, one of the Scouts
decided to organize a similar effort in the Nevada-Lidgerwood area as part
of her Girl Scout Gold Award Project.

With the support and encouragement of her troop leader and the active
cooperation of the Spokane Police Department's COPS coordinator and
neighborhood resource officer, the Senior Scout organized her sister Girl
Scouts to recruit other neighborhood adolescents who could be trained by
the police as youth volunteers. She persuaded a local business owner to
provide a facility on Mount Spokane for training youth volunteers--and
also to "provide a hiking excursion, swimming, horseback riding, and
meal for each junior volunteer that is trained."[11] Many girls volunteered,
as did neighborhood boys who had never thought scouting was "cool."

One of the volunteers' first projects was to reclaim their neighborhood
park. They documented and reported graffiti, trash, broken lights, and
other unsanitary and unsafe conditions. They put on summer campouts in
the park for neighborhood children, and the Spokane police and a special
group of adult neighborhood COPS volunteers provided extra patrols.

Over the following year the Nevawood Youth Volunteers began to take on
a wide range of projects, including "Knock and Nag" for reminding
residents to keep their doors locked, a blanket drive for residents in need,
and Alley Watch--occasional 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. outdoor vigils in areas
formerly experiencing high rates of burglary, carried out under the
supervision of the police. Although their projects take them out into the
community several times a week, the volunteers' planning meetings are
held just once a month and are conducted entirely by the youth. As a group
they decide which of the many projects requested by the community to
take on.

The Spokane Police Department Spearheads Police-Community
Collaboration 

The department provides one of the finest examples of outcomes that can
be achieved through community-oriented policing services. The COPS
initiatives already described in this report are natural products of a
departmental approach that involves officers in community collaborations
for:

o Identifying problems.

o Analyzing the specific facets of problems that have been identified (who
is involved, when, how, and why).

o Taking logical steps and community action to resolve problems.

o Evaluating the outcomes that have been achieved.

Key to Spokane's community policing approach is the chief's strong
encouragement of actions by officers that go well beyond traditional law
enforcement and crime prevention approaches, particular those addressing
problems involving Spokane's children and teens. As a result of the
motivation provided by the chief and supervising officers, individual
officers in Spokane have developed a range of approaches for creating
safer environments for children and teens.

One example is "Every 15 Minutes," a 2-day, 1-night program designed by
an officer who was sickened by a number of visits he had to make to
inform parents that their teens had died in alcohol-related accidents on
prom night. The program, provided in all Spokane high schools in late
spring, is entirely funded by local businesses and carried out on a
volunteer basis by officers and their spouses. Two days of activities
involving the junior and senior high students culminate in a multimedia
performance by the students that obviously captures their minds and
emotions and leads to their immediate decisions not to drink and drive.
Since the program was initiated, there have been no more alcohol-related
fatalities in Spokane on prom night.

The COPS-N-Kids annual car and truck event held at the end of the
summer is another initiative officers have launched to deal with an
ongoing youth problem. As in many cities, teens from all over the area
would drive to a central location to "cruise." Many cities have cracked
down on cruising by passing and enforcing ordinances prohibiting this
activity. However, officers in Spokane went to bat for the teens, pointing
out that-if properly monitored and directed-cruising was not innately bad
for the community or for the participants. Officers convinced auto
businesses and adults with auto-related hobbies, such as show-car owners,
to come down to the cruising area and help the teens maintain their
vehicles. The annual end-of-summer car and truck event, including free
food and drinks, is promised to the teens if cruising has remained trouble
free during the preceding months. Cruising in Spokane reportedly is an
essentially wholesome activity since the officers have been involved, and
adults as well as youth look forward to the August COPS-N-Kids event.

Police Create a Special Boy Scout Explorer Post

The final police effort to be described in this report is a traditional youth
development approach, a Boy Scouts of America Explorer program. But,
as is typical of many of the youth approaches in Spokane, the program is
integral to the philosophy and implementation of community-oriented
policing services. The Explorer post was started in 1987 as part of the
chief's plan to create a volunteer program in which officers carry out youth
development and community development activities with the active
cooperation of neighborhood volunteers. In addition to the Explorer post
volunteers, others in the volunteer program are police reserve officers,
Spokane Community College students (co-ops), senior volunteers, and
volunteer specialists.

The chief realized that, when provided with productive opportunities,
older teens can be a powerful community asset rather than a community
problem. The chief involved an organization with a long history of
providing proven youth development programs--in this case Boy Scouts of
America. He delegated the creation of an Explorer post to a police officer
with prior professional experience in working with older teens who had
been recognized for his previous volunteer contributions to the
community. 

After initial discussions with the national organization to learn the
fundamentals of the Explorer program, the officer visited posts formerly
created in other police departments where Scouts were drawn from urban
neighborhoods. The initial set of Scouts recruited for the program were
older teens with an interest in law-enforcement careers who, according to
the officer leading the post, "were guaranteed to succeed--teens who were
already leaders in church groups or in school." And succeed they did.
They enthusiastically completed the rigorous training carried out at the
Spokane Police Academy and began working side by side with uniformed
officers and adult volunteers in highly visible positions. They gained
positive publicity for the post and their communities. But that was just the
beginning of the program. 

The intent of the post was to involve adolescents who had little or no
previous opportunity for community leadership--not by waiving the
qualifications for Explorer Scouts--but by stimulating younger teens to
meet the requirements for joining the post. A cornerstone of this approach
is the L.E.A.D. (Leadership, Education, and Development) program
provided under the supervision of the officer who directs the Explorer
post. Spokane girls and boys in the eighth and ninth grades can apply for
the program and are selected in part to reflect the ethnic diversity in the
city. L.E.A.D. students participate in an intensive training program similar
to that of Explorer Scouts but more appropriate for their stage of
development. Training not only involves physical exercise but also
exercises for increasing communications skills, teamwork and, as is
explicit in the program name, leadership skills. Officers who are involved
in working with L.E.A.D. participants, including the chief, are drawn from
all ranks.

Students who would like to become Explorers but are having difficultly
making the school grades required by the program are given extra support.
As is common in Spokane, other youth organizations help provide this
support. For example, the Explorer leading a police department horse at a
Nevawood fundraiser had been tutored by several of the Nevawood youth
volunteer participants. Uniforms are donated by local businesses as is
other equipment so the economic realities faced by many Spokane teens
are not an obstacle to participation. Together, as in many other approaches
involving Spokane youth, police and community members are working
hand in hand to help children and adolescents reach their full potential and
to create safe places in the nonschool hours. 

Successful Efforts in Spokane Benefit From the City's History of Forming
Coalitions to Address Shared Problems

In addition to police leadership and participation in youth development
activities, Spokane has benefited from wide collaboration with other
youth-serving public agencies and community groups. Among these are:

o The citywide Youth Commission, established in 1985 and composed of
citizen members (seven adults and four teens) and advised by one board
composed of representatives from a broad spectrum of youth-serving
agencies and another board composed of teen representatives throughout
the city. The Youth Commission has created a number of teams for
addressing specific issues, including the Teen Pregnancy Prevention
Coalition; the Spokane Service Team, which provides teens educational
preparation and opportunities for carrying out community service projects
in small groups; and neighborhood-based implementation of Project Get
REAL (Recreational Alternatives for Leisure), which provides field trips,
preparation for employment classes, and leadership training in the
nonschool hours.

o Coalitions of public agencies and private youth organizations. These
agencies have committed to working together to support the Youth
Commission's efforts by providing comprehensive services for children
most at risk of committing violence--especially those who have little or no
family support or support from schools. As needs for services are
identified, representatives of agencies form ad hoc groups to solve
problems.

Another group, headed by a concerned parent and composed of
representatives from the police department, child protection services, a
private foster care/adoption agency, a local university, and several other
volunteers living in the community, is implementing a plan to ensure that
runaway and thrownaway children are housed at night in safe places--
preferably in the homes of families in their own neighborhood.

More comprehensive services for street children include a "head-start type
program" for the babies and toddlers of homeless teens. School "classes"
for small groups of teens meet during regular school hours. Parenting
classes and recreational activities are provided for the teens in nonschool
hours. These are all held in a downtown building where meals are
provided for both the teens and their babies.

o Neighborhood-based teams of youth-serving organizations, public
agencies concerned with youth, and neighborhood volunteers. These are
extending grassroots collaboration throughout the city, with the Spokane
Police Department as the central coordinating agency for 14 neighborhood
coalitions. Although Family Focus classes were limited to the West
Central community at the time of the onsite study, the WSU community
resource coordinator was working throughout the city and, as of the date
of this report, Family Focus activities are being carried out in nine
neighborhoods.

Spokane Benefits From a Spectrum of Youth-Serving Organizations That
Provide a Range of Programs for Meeting the Comprehensive Needs of
Many Children in the City

Some of the organizations that help Spokane are independent providers;
others are affiliated with national organizations participating in this study
as well as equally fine organizations such as Camp Fire Boys and Girls
and the YWCA. Many of the nationally affiliated organizations are
independently serving their more traditional constituencies. For example,
the downtown YMCA provides many programs found in "Y" branches
around the country for individual and family members ranging from
infants to seniors. Personal fitness activities include an aquatics program
and "Adventure Club" programs in the hours before and after school in six
elementary schools.

As previously described, the West Central Community Center offers Girl
Scout and 4-H activities and a range of opportunities provided by other
independent organizations. These choices are also available in Spokane
schools providing afterschool programs. The coordination that occurs
among youth organizations in a single location is perhaps exemplified best
by the 9-day Spokane KidsWeek held each summer in one of Spokane's
largest parks. More than 20 youth-activity providers--public and private,
commercial and not-for-profit--join forces to celebrate Spokane's children
and "to recognize our youth and let them know they are valued." The
effort is funded by city agencies and private businesses, which sponsor an
extensive set of age-graded activities from "music and movement for
toddlers" to "blood and guts" science workshops for early adolescents to
midnight bowling and miniature golf for older teens. The reason for this
collaboration is captured by the KidsWeek motto . . ."Because Kids are an
Important Community Resource."

Endnotes

1. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 1994, Active Firearm
Licenses: License Type by District Statistics, Washington, D.C.: Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

2. Teske, Raymond, Jr., ed., 1995, Crime and Justice in Texas, Huntsville,
Texas: Sam Houston Press.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. City of Arlington, Texas, 1993, City of Arlington Crime Prevention
Action Plan, Arlington, Texas: City of Arlington, p. 6.

6. The Boys and Girls Clubs of Arlington also has a camp facility on the
shore of a lake. Since this study focused on safe places in the nonschool
hours in urban settings, this facility was not included.

7. Arlington [Texas] Police Department, 1994, Administrative Services
Bureau School Services Unit Standard Operating Procedures, Arlington,
Texas: Arlington Police Department, p. 1.

8. Cormany, Gerrit, and Carol Wendle, 1990, Making the Grade: A Report
Card on Spokane Area Youth, Spokane, Washington: Spokane Area
Chamber of Commerce. As suggested by the Caring Community Model,
the statistics for Spokane were compared with national trends and trends in
other cities; these comparisons are not presented in this report since the
intent is to compare issues identified across the three study sites. 

9. Information provided by John Newkirk, Chair, Spokane County
Cooperative Extension Office, Washington State University, 222 Havana,
Spokane, Washington 99202.

10. Thurman, Quint, and Phil Bogen, 1994, A Final Report to the Spokane
Police Department: An Implementation and Short-Term Impact
Assessment of the 1993 Neighborhood Resource Officer Demonstration
Project, Spokane, Washington: Washington State Institute for
Community-Oriented Policing.

11. Dusik, Harmony, 1994, Girl Scout Gold Award Project Form--
Appendix G-5: Nevawood Junior Volunteer Update, Spokane,
Washington: Harmony Dusik.

-------------------------------

Chapter 4 

Exemplary Partnerships Between Police and Youth Organizations

In any business--retail or manufacturing, service or government--the
people in the trenches are the best sources of ideas on how to do their jobs
better. They see the daily needs of their customers and conceive ways of
improving services or the delivery of services. Any business that ignores
this rich source of practical help does so at its peril. . . We have
encouraged our employees--uniformed and civilian, paid and volunteer--to
find ways to bring our citizens into this partnership.[1] Terry Mangan,
Chief of Police, Spokane

Police chiefs, other police department managers, officers, and civilian staff
interviewed for this report were acutely aware of the serious risks faced by
children and adolescents in their communities. Rather than placing blame
on the children themselves or on their families, they recognized that
ongoing attention, both to conditions that place children at risk and to
supports that help them succeed, are very much part of their responsibility
as professionals and as civic-minded individuals.

Across the three cities that were the subjects of the case studies, police at
all ranks were carrying out a spectrum of activities for responding to the
needs of youth organizations and for supporting their efforts to provide
safe and productive undertakings for school-age children. These included:

o Chiefs and other top-ranking police actively participating on youth
organizations' advisory boards.

o Chiefs and other top administrators publicly honoring youth for
community service and encouraging and acknowledging officers who
voluntarily provided leadership for school-age children in their off-duty
hours.

o Officers of all ranks leading traditional youth programs--frequently for
older youth living in inner-city areas who ordinarily would not care to
participate or, if they did, would not meet qualifications for participation.

o Officers and civilian staff serving on juvenile review boards and helping
select and divert young offenders from the juvenile justice system to
productive community service assignments.

o Officers helping to identify other youth in need of youth services and
helping ensure provision of such services, including afterschool activities
that help build social and academic skills.

o Officers actively working with other service providers to identify and
better serve abused and neglected youth.

o Patrol officers regularly dropping by centers and other youth program
sites to watch and cheer activities.

o Neighborhood and community police officers regularly participating in
neighborhood organization meetings to help assess the needs of children.
They also play a key role in helping community members realize that
programs involving at-risk adolescents are more a boon than a threat to
neighborhood safety.

o Neighborhood and community police officers routinely involving
children and teens in playing a major role in keeping their communities
safe. Rather than viewing the kids as the source of the problem, they make
them part of the solution.

Police Activities at the Three Exemplary Sites Took Many Forms

The Bristol, Arlington, and Spokane case studies presented in the
preceding chapter illustrate in detail the specific forms of police activity
that contributed to the exemplary nature of the partnerships between police
and youth organizations in these three sites. Cities and communities that
are experiencing the same challenges that Bristol, Arlington, and Spokane
faced may be able to benefit from these sites' experiences. Highlights of
the activities discussed in the case studies are presented below. 

In Bristol, Connecticut, participation in the city's Juvenile Diversion
Program and other such collaborative efforts gives officers the opportunity
to better serve youth at risk or those that may have been abused. Police
have a strong commitment to "walk-and-talk" community policing,
whereby on a daily basis they interact positively with citizens of all ages,
including children at the Family Center. More specifically:

o As they participate in projects sponsored by the youth organizations,
such as the creation of posters against drugs, police work directly with
children in neighborhoods where they appear to be especially at risk. 

o In their interactions with children, police officers learn about family
situations that can be ameliorated through referrals to specialized
community agencies, and occasionally they may learn about activities,
such as child abuse and drug offense activities, that require law
enforcement action.

o Police officers provide special training for youth organization
participants to help them deal with gangs, safety, and other issues.

o Police have turned Neighborhood Watch from complaint sessions about
crime into positive citizen participation in monitoring of gang and drug
activity and in provision of block parties and other wholesome activities
for children.

o Police devote many hours in the selection and monitoring process and in
juvenile review board meetings where appropriate placement for each
juvenile is arrived at jointly. 

In Arlington, Texas, preventing crime involving children ranks among the
highest police department priorities, as was made evident by tributes from
youth organization staff interviewed for this project and by the large
number of civilian and sworn staff, including the chief, who showed up at
a meeting to learn about police crime prevention efforts. These efforts
involved a wide spectrum of independent crime prevention programs
implemented by the police department, approaches carried out as part of
the City of Arlington Crime Prevention Action Plan, formal support to
youth organizations, and volunteer activities by officers at every rank in
the department. Following is a sample of their efforts:

o Police officers conduct 25 short, age-appropriate youth education
programs for children from kindergarten through sixth grade.

o To familiarize the children with police, the officers distribute trading
cards with officers' pictures, their descriptions, and safety tips.

o The police School Resource Officer Program provides a liaison officer
between schools and the police department. School Resource Officers
regularly stop at youth centers and maintain contacts with and refer
children to other community agencies providing services for children.
Some become Boy Scout leaders.

o Police allayed citizens' fears that a teen center would bring gangs and
juvenile delinquents into their neighborhoods. They promised an enhanced
police presence in the area surrounding the center. Residents now
welcome the teen center and the increased police visibility it has brought
to the neighborhood.

In Spokane, Washington, The police chief motivated his officers to
develop and participate in a host of creative activities that put officers side
by side with other community members in channeling youthful energy into
crime prevention and other positive activities. Partnerships with Girls
Scouts, Boy Scouts, and other organizations devoted to youth
development are key features of police activity in this city. Following are
some of their activities:

o The "Every 15 Minutes" approach involves high school seniors in
several days of intensive planning and activities culminating in their own
multimedia presentation that graphically shows the grave consequences of
drunk driving and has virtually eliminated drunk-driving fatalities on prom
night.

o Police sponsor an August COPS-N-Kids truck and car event that enlists
the participation of auto-related businesses to teach kids vehicle
maintenance and keep teen "cruising" trouble free.

o Thanks to partnership with police, youth organization participants can do
"real" policing by helping prevent crime. Nevawood COPS Youth
Volunteers are midteen Girl Scouts and other girls and boys who report
graffiti, trash, and broken lights and conduct summer campouts in the park
for neighborhood children.

o A police officer leads a Boy Scout Explorer Post specially created to
recruit adolescents with no previous opportunity for community
leadership. Interested boys and girls participate in an intensive training
program involving not only physical exercise but exercises to increase
their communication, teamwork, and leadership skills.

Coalitions Among Police, Local Officials, Community Leaders, and
Youth Organizations Develop Strategies 

Partnerships that include a spectrum of community institutions and
organizations promote comprehensiveness of services that endure over the
long term; experience in all three sites bears this out. In developing and
implementing Bristol's approach to providing safe places for youth, for
instance, Bristol Youth Services drew on information gathered by the
police department, schools, and community agencies as well as on the
joint efforts of local officials, community and business leaders, and
directors of public and private agencies and service organizations that
constituted the Greater Bristol Community Leadership Team.

Arlington, particularly, undertook a long period of coalition building to
ensure that the approach chosen met the real needs of the community to be
served. The local United Way's Priorities Committee ranked problems and
made recommendations, and a committee representing not only youth
organizations but also the police department, the mayor's office, the public
library, the recreation department, and civic, religious, and business
groups expanded perspectives even further to come up with an action plan
that culminated in the establishment of centers of safety for children and
teens in the afterschool hours.

In Spokane, collaborative efforts have long been a hallmark in the city's
history. Spearheaded by Spokane's Youth Commission, interdisciplinary
teams have addressed such issues as teen pregnancy and developed
community service and recreational projects for youth. Their efforts have
spawned numerous coalitions of public agencies and private youth
organizations to supply more supports for more teens and children, such as
runaways, street children, and teen parents. In addition, the Spokane Police
Department coordinates the work of 14 neighborhood coalitions of public
and private organizations serving youth and neighborhood volunteers.

Comprehensive, sustained, and creative partnerships are integral to
community oriented policing services, as amply shown in Spokane's
COPS West ministation, which depends for its existence on the efforts of
volunteers, many drawn from participants in Washington State
University's Family Focus program, and representatives of the Office of
the District Attorney and Adult and Juvenile Probation and Parole. Indeed,
the driving force behind community policing is police participation in the
community on an ongoing basis to further crime prevention, neighborhood
problem solving, and community-based solutions to crime and juvenile
delinquency. The close bonds needed between citizens and police were
forged in joint celebrations, coalition meetings, and day-to-day contacts
with youth wherever they congregated.

While the organizations in Bristol support each other's efforts, and
organizations in Arlington cooperatively divide up areas of the city to be
served, Spokane is remarkable for the coordination that brings multiple
organizations into the same location in the nonschool hours. Enduring
neighborhood-based partnerships between city agencies and organizations
are being generated and sustained by the COPS programs organized by the
Spokane Police Department. By physically housing neighborhood
volunteers and representatives from key city agencies in COPS
ministations in a growing number of Spokane neighborhoods, agencies are
able to coordinate services and activities on a minute-by-minute basis.
And by routinely involving COPS Youth Volunteers and participants in
other youth organizations in COPS ministation meetings and activities,
both neighborhood adults and professionals have the opportunity to stay
tuned in to the real concerns of neighborhood children and to respond
quickly to their ongoing and emerging needs. 

The most comprehensive partnerships can have major payoffs, as shown in
Spokane, where they have led to neighborhood revitalization and the
development of youth as active community participants and leaders. The
ultimate result should be a reduction of crime, as has already happened in
Spokane's West Central neighborhood. 

"The payoffs for giving our young people the right stuff are all around us:
better community leadership, informed citizenship, and increased
vocational skills. Personal health is improved and family life is stronger. A
solid, secure next generation can mean less delinquency, fewer family
breakups, fewer problems with alcohol and other drugs, and a happier,
more vibrant community." Washington State University Cooperative
Extension[2]

What You Can Do to Provide Safe, Constructive Activities for At-Risk
Youth

The essential measures taken in Arlington, Bristol, and Spokane are
similar. Leaders in each city gathered information needed to assess the
status of their youth. They faced hard problems head on and came up with
action plans to address multiple factors that were endangering kids' lives.

Rather than reinventing ways to prevent violence and promote wholesome
development, they figured out who in the community already had
approaches likely to be most effective. This included the police, directors
of nationally affiliated youth organizations, and other public youth-serving
agencies--schools (administrators, counselors, and teachers), social
services, health and treatment organizations, and juvenile justice
practitioners including judges, district attorneys, and probation officers.

Your city may already have carried out some of the steps described in this
report. However, because violence involving youth has multiple causes,
cities that carry out multiple concerted actions are more likely than others
to bring youth problems under sustained control. The following steps
carried out in the case study sites are offered as a checklist to consider
actions your city might take.

Police chiefs and other law enforcement executives can:

o Get to know the directors of youth-serving agencies and be willing to sit
on their advisory boards and on community coalitions addressing youth
issues.

o Encourage officers to volunteer at youth organizations in the community
and publicly reward them for their efforts.

o Incorporate joint activities between police and youth- serving
organizations into the day-to-day operation of the department.

Directors of youth organizations and agencies can:

o Introduce themselves and their organizations to the police chief and
welcome a police presence on and around their premises.

o Invite police to put on prevention programs with the children and
adolescents they serve and to participate in recreational activities for
youth. 

o Participate in city task forces that deal with youth issues, in
neighborhood coalitions to advocate for safe activities for youth, and in
community antidrug, anticrime efforts.

o Work with police and child protection agencies to identify and provide
services to youth who may be perpetrators or victims of crime.

o Work with police and community leaders in offering their centers as
places where troubled teens can perform community service.

o Advocate for youth among local officials and legislative bodies and
teach young participants to be advocates.

o Work with other youth-serving organizations in joint ventures on a
continuing basis.

o Get to know the educational and religious leaders in the community and
find ways to have fruitful working relationships or to plan comprehensive
solutions to common problems.

Community coalitions and collaborations can:

o Make sure they have a strong police, youth organization, and at-risk
youth presence.

o Talk to police and others to determine the scope of delinquency and the
range of adolescent experiences that contribute to it.

o Find out what services are currently available for at-risk kids.

o Assess the needs of youth for wholesome skill-building activities that
they find fun after school.

o Find or advocate for places that can house afterschool programs where
they are the most needed, operated by organizations that have
demonstrated experience in providing them.

Local officials and other community leaders can:

o Find out from the organizations that work with kids what kids' greatest
needs are.

o Find ways public agencies (such as youth-serving and public housing
agencies) can collaborate to keep youth off the streets and in safe
activities.

o Help launch or participate in coalitions dedicated to this goal.

o Wherever possible, promote a comprehensive approach to delinquency
prevention that involves both police and youth-serving organizations with
demonstrated experience in serving teens.

This report has provided more complete descriptions of these steps as
taken by the organization leaders in the three case study cities. Their
actions represent an arduous undertaking, and they willingly shared their
experiences so that this report could be written. They are also prepared to
provide advice and support to you. Their names and information for
contacting them are furnished in an appendix. They will be glad to hear of
your commitment to provide safe, productive places for our Nation's
youth.

Endnotes

1. Spokane Police Department, 1995, Community Oriented Policing
Programs, Spokane, Washington: Spokane Police Department. 

2. Thomas, Robert E., 1989, Washington 4-H: Today and Tomorrow,
Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Cooperative
Extension.

-------------------------------

Appendix

Information Resources

Contacts in National Youth Organizations

James D. Cox
Vice President, Urban Services
Boys and Girls Clubs of America
1230 W. Peachtree Street
Atlanta, GA 30309
404-815-5781
jcox@bgca.org

Boy Scouts of America
National Office
1325 West Walnut Hill Lane
Irving, TX 75015
972-580-2000

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.
Information and Referral Center
420 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10018-2798
800-GSUSA 4U (800-478-7248)
rosa.esposito@bbs.gsusa.org

Faedra Lazar Weiss
Research Associate
Girls Incorporated National Resource Center 
441 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-634-7546
fweiss@girls-inc.org

Joseph Wilson
Executive Director
National Association of Police Athletic Leagues 
618 U.S. Highway 1, Suite 201
North Palm Beach, FL 33408-4609
561-844-1823
CopNKid1@aol.com

Beverly Brown
Associate Director
Youth Development/Black Achievers
YMCA of the USA 
101 North Wacker Drive
Chicago, IL 60606
800-872-9622, ex.122
brown@ymcausa.org

Cooperative State Research, Education, and 
   Extension Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Avenue N.W., Mailstop 2225
Washington, DC 20250
202-720-2297
4h-usa@reeusda.gov

Affiliates Whose Approaches Are Described in This Report

Carolyn L. Thompson
Executive Director
The Family Center
47 Upson Street 
Bristol, CT 06010
860-583-1679
famcen@esslink.com

Susan Herman
Executive Director
Arlington Youth Services, an affiliate of Girls Incorporated 
600 New York Avenue
Arlington, TX 76010
817-275-2120
AYS1997@aol.com

Cheryl Steele
Program Coordinator
Spokane COPS
Spokane Police Department
North 901 Monroe, Suite 320
Spokane, WA 99201
509-625-3300
csteele@spokanecounty.org

Marilyn Trail
County Agent
WSU/Spokane County Community and Family Education 
222 N. Havana
Spokane, WA 99202-4799
509-533-2048, ex. 105
trailm@wsu.edu