Even a simple thing like providing transportation can improve a child's situation, Pieretti said. All that came out of a simple physical assessment by a school nurse. We're no longer re-active, we're more aggressive. Our actions have changed. We focus more on holding parents and kids accountable.
Schools are more user friendly.
But in the middle, in 1994, there was a sharp spike in the number of arrests. Don Gross, a youth-services supervisor with the Fresno Police Department, talked about what caused the turndown from the 1994 spike. That brought immediate accountability, but it also gave students a sense of safety. Students, Gross said, felt safer to tell campus police officers about illegal activity. Police officers have been assigned to all Fresno high schools since the 1960s, but creation of the Police Probation Teams in 1994 made a major impact on juvenile crime.