Parents in Central and South Seattle who have urged Mayor Greg Nickels to do something to stop the city's growing youth violence may be in for a long wait.
On Aug. 23, a small group of residents and NAACP members held a march in the Central District to call attention to the six teens who have been killed since January in gang-related shootings and demand action from Nickels.
But just days before, at a gang prevention forum held Aug. 18, Terry Hayes, the city's youth services manager and co-chair of a city/county effort to develop a gang strategy, said it could be the end of next year before there's a plan in place.
Hayes says the Seattle/King County Gang Prevention & Outreach Work Group put on the event, which drew police, youth workers, parents, and former gang members to the state Criminal Justice Training Center in Burien, to look at successful anti-gang models in two jurisdictions -- San Jose, Calif., and Wake County, N.C. -- and solicit ideas for what a strategic gang plan should include in the Seattle area.
The local work group has a budget of $28,000 this year and has held three community meetings, producing a gang status report issued in March. To create San Jose's latest strategic gang plan, two officials from the city said they had held 43 public forums, with their Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force receiving $4 million in funding this year.
Youth intervention manager Esther Mota and Mario Maciel, San Jose's city superintendent, said that in the 1980s, the city and its police chief denied there was a gang problem. In the 1990s, their early work stressed law enforcement, but later shifted to programs focusing on gang prevention and intervention such as providing afterschool activities, outreach by reformed gang members, and tattoo removal.
"It's about youth. It's about family," Mota said. "It's always important that we foster hope" -- and remember, Maciel said, that "we can't arrest our way out of this problem."
The key to success, they said, is not only having community members at the table, but key decisionmakers like San Jose's mayor: people who can leave a task force meeting and turn plans into action without having to consult anyone else.
Mayor Nickels does not belong to the Seattle/King County gang work group, nor do Chief Gil Kerlikowske or Sheriff Sue Rahr. Hayes says he's hopeful they will participate some day, but cautions that his ad hoc group wasn't formed to fix the gang problem, but merely to get a dialogue going, which Hayes plans to continue with a more youth-focused event in September.
"The first 'next step' is getting people together to talk to each other," he says, "and that includes faith-based organizations, parents, teens, people from the [Department of Corrections] and juvenile justice."
It's a process that isn't moving fast enough for Gerald Bradford, a forum participant and job placement officer with the Seattle Vocational Institute.
"Are we going to meet again in a year [to talk]? Something actually needs to be done now," Bradford said. "What we're ultimately talking about is resources [for activities and programs]. One of the reasons kids join gangs is that there's nothing for them to do."
Larry Evans, legislative aide to County Councilmember Larry Gossett, says the new 0.1 percent sales tax that the county started collecting this year might be a place to look for funding, as the tax is designated for mental health and drug dependency programs.
"We have to make sure at the county level that a portion of that funding goes to working with these disenfranchised youth and their families," Evans says. In the 2009 budget deliberations that have just started, he says, "We've got to bum-rush the city and county budget hearings with a plan."
Gossett helped form a Black-on-Black Crime Coalition that Evans says has developed and twice submitted a gang plan to the mayor. But Steve Baber, a pastor at Skyway United Methodist, says he's not holding out much hope Nickels will do anything with it.
The mayor is "just lolly-gagging and putting fines on people about the doggone plastic bags," Baber says, "while our children are dying."