‘The 3 M’s’ Help Keep Youth Violence at Bay

Nationally, since 1993, violent crime rates have fallen by about a third. In most big cities, murders, shootings, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults are down to levels not seen in a quarter-century.

Even with this decline, and despite a radically expanded federal role in crime control and billions of dollars spent on anti-crime measures, rates of urban youth violence are higher now than in 1967, when a presidential commission warned that an “enormous number of young people” in minority “slum neighborhoods” were becoming involved in “juvenile delinquency and youth crime.” In 1995, there were 1.7 million delinquency cases, one-fifth of them involving robbery, assault and other crimes against people. The tremendous drop in youth violence in the past five years has been from this terrible peak.

The good news about crime has been tempered, especially in the largest urban African American communities, by some disturbing trends. By the mid-1990s, black males ages 14 to 24 were 1% of the country’s population but 17% of its homicide victims and 19.9% of its homicide perpetrators. In Los Angeles, since 1991, the chance that a 15-year-old black male would be murdered before he reaches age 45 has fallen by half, but that still means that three out of every 100 of the city’s young black males lose their lives to violence.

In March, 62% of California voters approved Proposition 21, which allows prosecutors to bring felony charges against juveniles 14 or older and permits courts to sentence juveniles to adult prisons. As even conservative crime analyst John J. DiIulio has argued, the roughly 1 in 10 repeat youth offenders who commit serious violence should be confined, “but only in suitably secure, rehabilitation-oriented, juveniles-only facilities. Merely locking up more youth offenders with older felons under spartan conditions,” DiIulio concludes, “will only produce better street gladiators.”

In the 1990s, Boston succeeded in reducing youth crime by emphasizing community-based preventive strategies. Working together, police, probation officers and inner-city clergy helped cut the city’s murders from 153 in 1990 to 61 in 1996. By the late 1990s, Boston had fewer than 35 murders a year, and for nearly two years did not have a single gun-related youth homicide. This year, however, in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, a few juveniles have been killed, and gang violence has intensified.

I and the city’s political, law enforcement, religious and other leaders have rededicated ourselves to “the three M’s” of youth violence reduction: monitoring, mentoring and ministering. Los Angeles leaders should do the same.

* Monitoring: This year, more than 500,000 youth offenders, including many first-time violent offenders, will be placed on probation. A recent report noted that L.A. and most big cities have hit-or-miss probation systems that neither sanction nor rehabilitate youth offenders.

In the early 1990s, Boston began to strictly monitor the whereabouts and behavior of juveniles and young adults on probation. Known as Operation Night Light, probation officers and police visit the homes of 10 to 15 youth offenders in teams, two to three times a week. With clergy and street workers, the teams also stop at public areas where youths congregate. The program strictly enforces curfew and area restrictions.

Initially, this program resulted in a 50% increase in the number of recorded violations. By the mid-1990s, the number of violations for new arrests dropped as compliance with curfews and other conditions of probation improved. While the state as a whole experienced a 14% increase in the number of probationers arrested, Boston’s poorest high-crime neighborhood had a 9% decrease. Most probationers have received drug treatment, counseling and help finding jobs. Led by Boston, probationer recidivism rates statewide have fallen by nearly 20%.

* Mentoring: A recent federal report estimated that 1.5 million children--more than half of them children of color--have one or both parents in prison. Research shows that the low-income urban minority children of incarcerated people suffer extreme risks of lifelong illiteracy, substance abuse, witnessing or experiencing violence, imprisonment and premature death. Putting responsible, caring adult mentors into the lives of these and other severely at-risk urban youth is the sine qua non of effective community-based efforts to cut or contain youth violence and improve these children’s life prospects.

Led by small black churches located in the toughest neighborhoods, Boston’s religious congregations have worked with probation officials on programs that keep young male probationers connected to their children. For example, in response to the latest warning signs, black clergy and volunteers at the Ella J. Baker House in Boston have mobilized dozens of black male former prisoners to mentor gang members.

Through the preschool-to-prison ministry of the Rev. Eugene Williams and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Churches, or LAMC, L.A. has taken similar steps toward faith-based mentoring of needy black and Latino children. Unlike Boston’s clergy, however, LAMC has not received the full measure of political and financial support necessary to put mentors into the lives of significant numbers of children.

* Ministering: As studies have shown, religious involvement and holistic ministering programs not only reduce teenage drug use and violence but also increase the odds that low-income minority youth will succeed in school, escape poverty and otherwise make it in the U.S.

In Boston, church-anchored civic partnerships designed to benefit youth at high risk of experiencing or committing violence have been struck across all the usual racial, denominational, public-private and religious-secular lines. With LAMC and other clergy groups, Los Angeles can do the same.

As the Bible teaches, “Little children, let us love, not merely in word or speech, but in truth and action.” To keep youth violence at bay and save needy children, say “amen.”