Feature
Youth violence initiative off to slow start
Two-year, $8 million effort aims to halve the number of incidents
Initiative director Mariko Lockhart says the youth violence initiative is “really about ‘Does someone care about me?’” The initiative seeks to cut violent incidents in half by providing community-based services to 800 youth.
It’s high noon at Rainier Beach High School, and inside a classroom, 20 teenage boys, all African-American, are sitting at a circle of desks talking about what they can do to survive the summer in South Seattle.
If only the session were just about beating the heat. It’s early May and, two days before, five boys were coming out of a doughnut shop on Rainier Avenue South when a shooter fired on them, wounding two.
One of them should be in the circle today talking about going to Wild Waves. Instead, 16-year-old Daveon Braxton is recovering from a bullet in the back — a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, says Gabriel Ladd, the meeting’s leader and founder of Youth 180, a mentoring group working to steer teens clear of street life and the violence that gangs can lead to.
In the hot days ahead, “I don’t want to be picking up bodies off the ground,” the 29-year-old Ladd tells the boys. “I don’t want to be moderating no funerals. I did two funerals this past year.”
The room falls silent. From a corner outside the circle, Tavares Jackson, a friend of Ladd’s and former gangbanger who volunteers with the group, asks the question of the hour.
“What makes you hang out on the corner? What makes you just walk up and down the same spot all day, every day? I need a real answer,” Jackson says. Fifteen-year-old Will Myles replies.
“Some people might be selling drugs. Some people might be out there because somebody else is out there [or] because they’re with their homies,” Myles says. “Some people do it because they’re having a hard time with their mom, their dad.”
“Others,” he says, “they just do it because they don’t got nothing else to do.”
Ladd once worked as a truancy officer at Cleveland High School. He founded Youth 180 one year ago to give teens hanging out on corners like Henderson and Rainier something more to do, something more their lives can be, than selling drugs or accepting violence as a way of life. Besides leading the group sessions, he walks the streets to recruit new members and, with the help of his young crew, has turned the family home where he grew up into a “safe house” where he hopes one day to teach job skills like carpentry and plumbing.
Youth 180 is one of three existing programs that got $25,000 this year under the mayor’s new Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. It’s the type of culture- and relationship-based effort that teens, parents and community leaders have called for in recent city forums leading up to the ceremonial launch of the initiative’s services on July 7 at the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club.
The initiative seeks to cut violent incidents among youth in half by providing community-based services to 800 middle-schoolers and youth up to age 17 with $8 million in funding over the next two years. Some teens will get anger replacement therapy, some a personal mentor and others full-service case management, all arranged through three “network hubs” or lead agencies in the city’s most affected areas — the Central District, Rainier Valley and Southwest Seattle — where police “emphasis officers” have also been assigned to get to know students at five middle schools.
Separately, the police department has also funded a new daytime gang-unit squad of four officers and a sergeant and is currently negotiating with King County, says gang-unit supervisor Lt. Ron Wilson, to have juvenile probation officers ride along on police patrols at some point.
In all of this, critics say, grassroots programs like Youth 180 have taken a backseat in a top-down bureaucracy that’s already months late and will do nothing more than what the city was already doing — in some cases, less — with little input from the community or young people on the activities, programs and jobs they say they want.
“When I was a child, I spent my time at the Parks Department,” says Yvonne Newson, an aide to Councilmember Richard McIver and the mother of a teenage daughter, both of whom voiced concerns at a June 25 town hall meeting held by councilmembers. “The parks had programs where they took us camping, they signed us up for arts and crafts, they taught us swimming.”
“All that was free,” she says, “so while we’ve spent money putting people in prison — we always have money to send these kids to jail — we’ve cut back all types of programs for recreation and now we’re asking what are we supposed to do?”
More police, detractors say, is not the answer: The racial profiling and unjustified stops, searches and verbal abuse that many African-American teens say they have experienced, including ones in Ladd’s group, make them wary of officers.
“Putting police officers in schools is just suppression,” says Liz Ali, who founded the Mothers Outreach Movement after her son, 18-year-old Perry Henderson, was shot and killed at a party last year. “[It’s] not dealing with the solution, it’s not giving the youth what they need”: mentoring, she says, to change their lives.
The initiative will pay for 100 mentors. And its director, Mariko Lockhart, who joined the Office of Education in April, says the school officers will play a similar role by building relationships with students and identifying those who might need more attention. “I would hate to call that suppression,” Lockhart says.
Through the Parks Department, the initiative is also paying for three community centers and the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club to offer extra programming and even later summer hours — most of the night — to give teens a place to go. Lockhart, who formerly ran a New Jersey nonprofit focused on dropout prevention, says the program has also funded about 220 of the summer jobs that were offered this year through the Human Services Department’s Youth Employment Program.
But for every gain, there’s been a loss — and a delay.
Mayor Greg Nickels asked members of Youth 180 to stand beside him when he announced the initiative last September at the Central District’s Garfield Teen Life Center. But in the back and forth between the mayor and City Council, which took until April to finalize the plan, months went by while the city worked out which department was going to do what, says Ladd, delaying the $25,000 grants that Youth 180 and two other groups had been awarded by the Department of Neighborhoods.
The three were originally awarded $20,000 each last year under what had been the Central District & Rainier Beach Youth Initiative, which the Department of Neighborhoods started in 2007. Where that initiative funded 22 community projects last year, only three remain: Youth 180, another mentoring program run by the Black-on-Black Crime Prevention Coalition and Game Recognize Game, a program run by a Central District group called Umoja Fest that explores various jobs within the sports industry as models for success.
Five more programs have just gotten Neighborhoods grants of $15,000 or less, Lockhart says, with about five more awards to come, for a total of about 13 youth programs compared with last year’s 22.
The Central District’s lead agency, the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, has already hired three full-time and three part-time outreach workers to talk to teens and their families. But where there were 19 case managers under an old city consortium of programs called the Seattle Team for Youth, the new initiative will pay for 11, with higher than average caseloads of 25 teens compared with 15 before, city documents show.
But the city’s already had case management and late-night summer programs, Ali says, and they don’t pull in the kids who are killing each other. She’s also worried there’s no programming at all for young adults 18 to 24.
“My son was 18 when he was killed,” Ali says. “What about the 18-year-old? Where does he go? What program does he have?”
For 18-year-old Albert Pool, it’s a new job that he’s just started as a childcare specialist at the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club, which is leading a consortium of programs that will serve as the initiative’s lead agency in Rainier Valley.
Pool was 12 when he saw a close family friend gunned down in the street in an argument. That same year, he lost two family members in an accident and a shooting — tragedies, he says, that have helped shape his fierceness and passion. He’s now working to finish high school and says he doesn’t see much value in what the mayor is doing.
“I honestly feel they’re going about it the wrong way. They’re going through a lot of corporate, from-the-outside-looking-in type stuff,” Pool says. “It’s never going to work, because the people that they’re trying to affect are just going to be like they haven’t been through what we have, they don’t know what they’re talking about — because they don’t.”
“Instead of talking down and making everybody in the situation look so negative and so hopeless and pitiful,” he says, “they need to realize that the main power of change lies with the people” — who are only going to change, Pool says, when they’re ready.
And if they’re not ready to leave the friends they have in gangs — the people they think of and rely on as family — it isn’t going to happen to make some corporate type happy, he says.
“Gangs don’t necessarily need to be criminalized. They don’t need to be locked up,” says Moni Tep, a staff member with Communities Against Rape and Abuse who spoke June 2 at a City Hall forum that Lockhart participated in on youth violence. “So much money is being put in every single year for these gang preventions, but we’re not really at the root, we’re not really talking about what’s going on.”
“It’s not just about reaching out and saying I’m gong to help you here [or] give you this,” says Tep, who lost two friends to gun violence last year. “It’s about if nobody else loves you, then I’m going to love you because you’re a human being.”
In all the coalescing and coordinating of services, “There will be adults who will say, ‘I love you,’” Lockhart says. “I think that absolutely goes to the core of it — it’s really about ‘Does someone care about me?’”
Comments
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We try to get up and active in three to four months 70-640,” said Dorienne Silva, admiral of the Pennsylvania-based Youth Apostle Programs’ Southeast region 642-901, who is active spearheading the barrage of a Mobile, Ala., apostle program. “If it takes longer 70-290, it takes longer, but we’re actual experienced.”
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