Nearly a year has gone by in Chattanooga’s initiative to use both police work and social assistance to stop gang violence here — especially shootings.
There is good news and bad news. Most pointedly, there is a missing piece.
“Altogether, we’ve gotten 76 people jobs,” Chattanooga Public Safety Coordinator Paul Smith told reporters a few weeks ago, when talking about the city’s Violence Reduction Initiative known as VRI, a program aimed at using both law enforcement and social services to turn young people away from gang life.
The less happy picture is that many of those jobs were temporary and fleeting. Last week only 42 of the young people seeking a way back to respectable life were actively working, according to city officials.
The well-intentioned and honorable program has had other bumps, as well: The McKenzie Foundation, one of several local foundations underwriting the program, pulled its support, citing poor communication and planning by Chattanooga Public Safety Coordinator Paul Smith. And the director of the city’s initial choice for a contract group to coordinate the program, Richard Bennett of A Better Tomorrow, was arrested on drug and alcohol charges before the program even got off the ground. All but a misdeamnor marijuana charge has since been dropped.
The city acknowledges the bumps, as it should. Fortunately, city officials — primarily Mayor Andy Berke, who pushed hardest for such an initiative — haven’t allowed those bumps, or the negative headlines from them, to discourage an admirable determination to make adjustments and stay the course.
David Kennedy, who pioneered the VRI methods and is being paid $240,000 to consult on our program, said he is impressed with the numbers the city and its partners have tallied to connect violent offenders with jobs.
“Chattanooga is doing tremendously better than most other cities ever do,” Kennedy told reporters recently.
“[The gang members] have far too extensive records. They can’t pass background checks. They can’t pass drug tests. They have terrible work habits. They have never held a job before. They don’t have the education attainment that they need, even the most fundamental skills to get work,” he said.
And he’s right. It’s frankly a miracle of determination from both the young people and the city partners that any obtained jobs. And while some work was just temporary, it still made a new line on a resume and new experience.
Not even the smallest success here should be scoffed at. This program will have had a positive impact if it helps 76 or 42 or a dozen or a handful of young people who are working to turn around their lives or escape a bullet.
At the end of 2014, gang-involved shootings here had declined by 18 percent from 2013. Overall, homicides involving gang members increased from 12 to 15, according to city police spokesman Kyle Miller.
Ticking through the pieces of a program like this and autopsying every move is akin to watching sausage being made: It’s messy and ugly. But it’s a useful way to learn.
What seems glaringly absent, in both the initiative and ongoing dissections, is any coordination with schools.
Why schools? Because every time a school fails — yes, fails — to keep a child engaged and graduated and prepared for a job or college, they and we have added to the gang-mill. That is especially true when a youngster is suspended or expelled from school. When that happens, we’re pretty much dooming that teen to the only high school left for him in this city — Gang High.
Even a simple suspension can be the ticket. If and when the teens return to classes with a string of zeroes, they likely will not pass courses and will not graduate.
The reality of “zero tolerance” — intended as a tough-on-crime and nip-it-in-the-bud preventive for schools — in fact is a crime multiplier. Those throw-away teens turn to classes in the street, and in turn begin to teach street courses to young people still fighting to stay straight, stay in school and stay on a successful path.
A year or more before the Violence Reduction Initiative cranked up, the new Berke administration disbanded the previous mayor’s gang task force, which had as one of it goals, a recommendation that local city, county and school officials would partner to create alternative schools within schools to serve the disrupters on suspension rather than shove them out schoolhouse doors to Gang High.
That missing piece is still missing — probably through no fault of anyone involved and by fault of everyone involved. Now no one else seems to be picking up that broken piece until it’s holding a smoking gun.
The work done already by the city and its partners on VRI is laudable. No one else in the Chattanooga area has undertaken such a mammoth challenge in the 30 years we’ve been crying about gang violence here.
But we clearly still have lots more work to do. And it’s time Berke and the city seek and get some help from the county, the schools and the public.