Almost every city with a gang problem has its offering of solutions, ranging from police crackdowns and job training to tutoring and tattoo removal. The models for intervention are endless; making them work is elusive.
A 2007 report from the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), Best Practices to Address Community Gang Problems, found that most successful gang intervention occurs in communities that mobilize all of their youth-serving groups and keep those groups working together through a lead agency. The problem is this: Implementation of OJJDP’s various and revised Comprehensive Gang Models has produced mixed results, and overall “anti-gang” efforts really come down to creating a network of comprehensive youth development services, which is difficult to do in a way that produces measurable decreases in gang activity.
But when it comes to establishing productive relationships with gang-involved youths – even if just to offset some of their gang activity in hopes of eventually drawing them away – two especially successful strategies stand out: collaboration among youth workers and gaining the respect of the youth on the streets. The OJJDP report noted the importance of hiring youth outreach workers who wield respect among local youth, either because they are former gang members or live in the community.
So what advice should be given to a community like Seattle, where gang activity prompted Mayor Greg Nickels recently to unveil a $9 million proposal to slash youth violence?
Hire the Right People
Mike Rieder, executive director of Haven House Services in Raleigh, N.C., says finding the right type of people to work with youth in gangs can be difficult, but is the single most important factor for success. Haven House runs a boxing program, Second Round, for young people affiliated with or affected by gangs, and Rieder says providing a clear structure for the youths there is central to success. The coaches know how to look for gang signs and conflict, and to address small issues quickly before they escalate.
Second Round is among the many programs that hire ex-gang members to work with such youths, because of the respect they wield in the neighborhoods and the knowledge they have of gang lifestyle. But it’s not always easy to hire ex-offenders. (See “Retired Gangsters Gang Up on Youth,” November 2000, Youth Today).
Vel Garner, project coordinator for the Comprehensive Gang Model in Denver, notes that if a program wants to use ex-offenders, it’s best for nongovernmental partners to do the hiring. “You have to be willing to bend the rules a little,” Garner says, and private nonprofits often have more freedom than government agencies in hiring people with criminal records.
Boston offers an example of how requiring street workers to have clean backgrounds can be counterproductive. Police Commissioner Ed Davis has pointed out that the city’s program of hiring ex-offenders to work street outreach, which began in 1990, is failing because of new and more stringent background-check requirements, and union requirements that protect street outreach workers from plying the streets during the hours when gangs are most active.
Once 40 street workers strong, the Boston program has shrunk by more than two-thirds, and most of the workers have no direct experience on the street. Homicides have increased significantly in recent years, which officials say is an indication of continuing gang violence.
Regardless of the youth workers’ backgrounds, Garner stresses the importance of hiring people willing to hit the streets at the right hours. “You have to be out there, and you have to be visible,” she says. “Find the community activists who are already out there and make them your partners.”
Location, Location
Another challenge is finding a convenient place where the youths can congregate in a positive atmosphere. Few landlords want to lease space for use by gang members or potential gang members. In Raleigh, Haven House runs its boxing program in an old plumbing warehouse.
Unfortunately, finding successful models isn’t easy. From 1995 through 1999, OJJDP launched five demonstration projects of the Comprehensive Gang Model, developed by University of Chicago sociology professor Irving Spergel. The agency found that the projects had minimal impact, due in large part to the cities’ failure to adhere to the model. Replications have shown more success in recent years.
Deborah Huso is a freelance writer in Blue Grass, Va. dhuso@youthtoday.org.
Haven House Services Second Round Boxing
Raleigh, N.C.
(919) 833-3312
http://www.havenhousenc.org/secondround.htm (This online version corrects an error from the print edition, which published the wrong website—address successfully accessed on 12/01/08.)
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| Photo: Haven House Services, Second Round |
The Strategy: Use boxing, weight-training, conditioning and competition to replicate the community and machismo of the gang through a pro-social, positive group setting that offers an alternative to life on the streets.
“Boxing has a high degree of ritual, just like gangs,” says Mike Rieder, executive director of Haven House. “Thus, it presents a similar attraction to gang membership, as well as a sense of belonging, and it’s accepted by the kids’ peer group.”
Boxing coaches, who include former gang members and military veterans, work with a core group of 15 to 20 youths, training them for sanctioned competitions, including access to the Golden Gloves and Olympic trials.
Getting Started: The nonprofit Haven House has been providing youth and family services in Wake County since 1973. Second Round Boxing was developed three years ago at the suggestion of staffers as a way to reach out to kids involved in gangs. The staff members presented research on martial arts activities that suggested the potential for positive outcomes.
Putting It Together: “I initially thought the idea of teaching boxing to gang members was counterintuitive,” Rieder says. But Program Director Matt Schnars and boxing coach Adam Murira, who was a member of a gang in California before joining the military, put the program together after presenting research to the Triangle United Way, which provided start-up funds. The program grew quickly through word of mouth, as well as referrals from school counselors, youth workers and parents.
Youth Served: About 65 youths, ages 11 to 18, regularly attend Second Round Boxing. Most are African-American or Hispanic; 90 percent are male. Thirty percent describe themselves as gang members, while 84 percent consider gang activity a significant factor in their lives.
The core competition group trains on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Any youth can go for training on the other three weekdays, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Staff: Second Round employs one full-time program director and seven part-time coaches.
Money: Second Round has an annual budget of $144,000 and is funded through the Triangle United Way, Wake County Human Services and the Governor’s Crime Commission.
Results: Between January and June, Second Round surveyed its core group of competition boxers; they reported a 94 percent reduction in recidivism. The same group showed across-the-board improvement in physical fitness. More than 75 percent of the core group of boxers hold full or part-time jobs.
Rieder says Second Round has a goal of getting at least one of its members into the next summer Olympics.
Comprehensive Gang Model
Denver
(720) 913-7537
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Peace and Healing Murals: Replace gang tagging in Metro Denver Photo: Metro Denver |
The Strategy: Send ex-gang members into neighborhoods to reach kids in gangs and to protect the neighborhoods. The Comprehensive Gang Model (CGM) uses three main strategies:
• Sponsor community events, such as music in the park and Cinco de Mayo, to encourage neighborhood pride. Outreach workers get gang members to agree not to create trouble at these events.
• Send ex-offender outreach workers to neighborhood middle and high schools, churches and recreation centers to conduct gang awareness presentations for youth and parents.
• Provide crisis response services. “If there is an event like a gang-related shooting, the outreach team goes to the hospital to reach out to family and quell retaliation efforts,” says CGM Project Coordinator Vel Garner.
Getting Started: The Comprehensive Gang Model is provided by OJJDP. It was adopted in Denver in January as a partnership among Denver’s Crime Prevention and Control Commission, the Metro Denver Gang Coalition and the Metro Denver Comprehensive Gang Initiative Steering Committee. The model was instituted in Denver in anticipation of increased gang violence due to the release of a number of ex-offenders originally incarcerated in the 1990s.
Putting It Together: While Denver’s Crime Prevention and Control Commission provides the organizational structure for the CGM, the model involves just about every youth-serving agency and program in the city, through the Comprehensive Gang Initiative Steering Committee. Garner hopes this network will ensure that the activities begun by CGM will continue even when the model itself is no longer funded.
For example, the CGM’s outreach workers are hired through a nonprofit called the Gang Rescue and Support Project (GRASP). This enables the hiring of ex-offenders, whom a city agency might not be able to hire.
Youth Served: The CGM serves neighborhoods in Denver’s Southwest and Northwest corridors, the areas identified as having the most violence in the city. Garner can’t say how many young people the CGM reaches, but says outreach workers provide services in five middle and high schools, each of which has between 800 and 1,500 students. Most of the young people in these neighborhoods are of Latino, African-American or Asian descent.
Staff: The CGM has four full-time staff members and four part-time outreach workers.
Money: The CGM’s annual budget is approximately $200,000. Half of that funding came from the Denver Foundation, with most of the remainder coming from the city’s Crime Prevention and Control Commission.
Results: Because the CGM is in its first year, Garner says she can’t provide specific data on its effectiveness. She says all of the community events citywide last summer went on without any gang-related incidents.
Vision Regeneration
Dallas
(972) 218-1921
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Tuesday Night Hype: A weekly church service that draws in gang members with hip-hop and rap, ice cream and pizza. Photo: Vision Regeneration |
The Strategy: Send former gang members and ex-offenders into neighborhoods with “hot” gang activity to talk informally to kids on the street and to target specific gang members. “Sometimes we go unannounced,” says Omar Jahwar, executive director of Vision Regeneration. “We are like the kids’ peers, and we are recruiting as vigorously as the dope boys.”
The group hosts Benefits and Consequences classes taught by former gang members two nights a week, and once a week puts on Tuesday Night Hype, which is a Bible study at a church that features rap and hip-hop music, pizza and ice cream. The youth workers try to reach the youths through inspirational rap and dance.
Getting Started: Jahwar had worked as a gang intervention specialist with incarcerated youth, and got tired of seeing youths get out of jail, only to end up right back in again. He sought to move his intervention strategies to the streets, and founded Vision Regeneration in 1998.
Putting It Together: Vision Regeneration works with gangs all over Dallas, and maintains contracts with the Dallas Independent School District and Dallas County Juvenile District Court. “Most people dealing with youth in crisis are afraid to go where they are, at the time they are there,” Jahwar says.
Vision Regeneration targets 10 to 15 youths in each of 12 Dallas schools with which it has contracts. Those youths have been labeled by the schools as severely at risk of gang involvement.
Jahwar’s youth workers hit the streets to recruit gang members to join Vision Regeneration and curb violence. Many of the workers are former gang leaders themselves. “These people are not afraid to go into these neighborhoods,” Jahwar says, “and they already have the respect of the neighborhoods.”
Street workers also go to schools to help combat violence by working with staff members and having ex-gang members address students in class.
Youth Served: Each year, Vision Regeneration works with 400 to 500 young people, ages 12 to 19. Almost all are gang members.
Staff: Fifteen full-timers.
Money: The budget is about $630,000. Funding comes from contracts with Dallas County and the Dallas Independent School District, and through grants from the U.S. Department of Justice OJJDP, Foundation for Community Empowerment and Dallas Social Venture Partners.
Results: The U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise consider Vision Regeneration a model for gang intervention tactics and have helped implement similar programs in other cities. Vision Regeneration was credited with orchestrating the first gang truce between the Crips and the Bloods in Dallas, in 2000.
