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Sunday, March 21, 1999
Knight-Ridder
News Service
WASHINGTON
-- Maryland teen-agers are taken to the morgue to view bodies
in a lesson on gun violence. Alabama judges order parents of
teen gun offenders to attend classes. Boston cops deliver ultimatums
to gang leaders. And Minneapolis parents of murdered children
talk to kids convicted of gun crimes.
In the war on gun violence among the young,
communities across the nation are using innovative battles.
But few people know about them.
The Clinton administration is beginning to
highlight programs from Richmond, Va., to Richmond, Calif., aiming
to show communities that comprehensive initiatives elsewhere
can work at home as well. President Clinton, in his Saturday
radio address, underscored this new commitment by directing the
Justice and Treasury departments to devise a national strategy
to reduce gun violence.
The goal isn't to find a single solution that
can be replicated nationwide, but to present a smorgasbord of
ideas from which people in urban and rural areas can pick and
choose. Some of the initiatives are detailed in a 253-page report
the Justice Department released Saturday.
From the report, and from interviews with
eight local program directors, a few reasons for success become
quickly apparent. One is getting agencies to work together. Another
is confronting repeat offenders and sentencing them to long jail
terms.
A third way: Confronting kids with death.
At the Prince George's Hospital Center in
Cheverly, Md., just east of Washington, emergency-room attendants
embrace shock value. Since 1994, the hospital and a group called
Concerned Black Men of Washington, D.C., have run the Shock Mentor
Program for about 450 teens. Some of the students are high school
leaders, some are on the edge of trouble.
One recent attendee, Takeela Dyer, 17, possessed
both qualifications. Violence, she explained, hits home. "My
father's been stabbed, my mother's been stabbed, there's been
family fights, my sister's been stabbed, my 11-year-old brother
was just stabbed." Taking a breath, she continued: "My
uncle's been shot, my friend was shot Monday, no, two friends
were shot Monday."
That shocked hospital administrators. Then
the hospital shocked her.
"I've never seen a dead body before,"
Dyer said afterward, still stunned. Days later, she spoke to
a class about the visit, and told them she wanted to become a
nurse at the trauma center.
Changing a teen's behavior can happen in many
ways, say local directors. In Birmingham, Ala., the 3-year-old
Juvenile Gun Court ropes in parents. Every parent of a child
convicted of a gun crime must attend a 10-week course on parenting.
The youth also must attend.
"It's so funny at the very beginning,
because the parents are very angry about the order," said
James Sparks, who directs the class and brings in speakers that
include the sheriff and family counselors. "At the end of
it, they are telling the speakers, `Thank you, thank you.' They
become very grateful."
Boston's program is far more confrontational:
teams that include prosecutors, police and probation officers
bring in gang leaders with a message to stop gun violence or
else face the full force of the criminal system's wrath.
Since the program began in 1996, and after
several high-profile prosecutions, the number of youth homicides
has dropped by more than half. In 1995, 40 people ages 24 and
younger were murdered in Boston, compared with 15 in 1997 and
10 in the first eight months of 1998.
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