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Catching Kids Before They Fall Part 4 NIPPING PROBLEMS IN THE BUD "The kind of kids we see here are typically juvenile-justice involved," says center coordinator Steve Hamai. "They have an arrest record; they're dropping out of school. They're gang involved, drug involved, on the fringe. They're not succeeding in school or in the mainstream, and they don't have much community attachment. So the center is essentially trying to create that for them-a sense of community, a place they can call home." Serving Cambodian and Vietnamese kids 12 to 21 years old, the SafeFutures Youth Center provides case management, counseling, and community organizing. Bilingual staff accompany youth and parents to court hearings and probation meetings. They intervene in school matters, checking out grades and attendance records and talking to teachers, counselors, and school administrators about behavioral problems. They tap into services to help kids, whether it's drug treatment, mental health services, or health care they need. In short, they do whatever it takes. "Very rarely will you hear any staff person here directly tell a kid, 'You've got to get out of the gang,' because those kind of discussions are pretty fruitless-telling the kid what to do when he's had enough of that," Hamai says. "What we really try to do here is foster a new version of family for them. This is a second home for a lot of these kids, so what we tell them is, 'This is your extended family and all the staff here play a role in that family -almost like an aunt or uncle, an older brother or older sister, or a grandparent.' That kind of care, I think, is real important-to be a substitute for the gang life that they could easily lead." For a lot of kids, gangs provide a sort of family structure, a place to fit in. The youth center tries to create a positive alternative to gang life, filling the need for family and belonging. The center's doors are always open, even to kids who slip. "That means a kid can get rearrested, go to a drug treatment center or whatever-they can bottom out and still come back," Hamai says. "We're always going to be here. We want to be the constant in their life." Still, there are house rules. Says Hamai: "We realize we can't control their behavior out on the street, but we do ask them to control their behavior when they're here." Most of the day, the kids are free to hang out. But at four o'clock, it's time for "business." Each afternoon for two hours, University of Washington students tutor youths in small groups or one-on-one. Anybody who's not serious about getting help has to leave. Later, they can come back and participate in structured activities like basketball. One of the kids at the center these days is 16-year-old Veasna. In many ways a typical teen, he wears baggy jeans and T-shirts and sports a clean-cut, Leonardo di Caprio haircut. He likes to play sports, eat pizza, and hang out with friends. In fact, with his gregarious personality and devilish grin, Veasna seems like a kid who would have no trouble rounding up votes for student council president. However, the friends he chose to hang with a few years back wore self-inscribed tattoos instead of letter jackets- tattoos of gang insignia and street names. Veasna was following in the steps of his older brother, Heang, a gang member with tattoos covering his chest, back, and hands. Before long, Veasna was "in," his grades were plummeting, and he was involved in petty crime. Ironically, when he was finally expelled from school, it wasn't because of his gang activities. Rather, he tried to break up a fight between two classmates and got caught with his fist in motion when school staff arrived on the scene. As it turns out, this expulsion may have been a blessing in disguise. The event landed him, not in detention, but at the SafeFutures Youth Center, where he's made a remarkable turnaround. He's no longer sporting gang colors, and his grades have risen from a GPA of 1.0 to 2.8. At Hamai's encouragement, he is a community representative on a teen leadership council that strives to smooth relations between ethnic groups and develop the community's assets. But that's not the end of Veasna's story. It took a twist nobody expected. As Veasna began spending more time at the youth center, his older brother Heang gave his little bro' a lift one night and stopped inside just to have a look. Over time, his visits lasted longer. At last, he no longer needed the excuse of a little brother. Going through a kind of mid-life crisis at the street-weary age of 21, Heang had been giving more thought to the life he'd chosen. He had a newborn son and, like people from all walks of life, wanted something better for his child. With the help of youth center staff, he found a job. And he's considering getting his gang tattoos removed so his son will never have to ask what they mean. To Seattle Police Sergeant Dianne Newsom, stories like this are all too rare. An eight-year veteran of the gang unit, it's her job to patrol the streets, meet the gangsters, get her fingers on the pulse. If a fight's going down, she wants to know about it so she and her unit can get there first. While they disdain regular police officers, gang members have a certain respect for the gang-unit detectives. A number of the gangsters talk to her. It's easy to see why. She's tough and tells it like it is. But there's an underlying earth-mother quality about her that makes kids comfortable. The gangsters, who all have nicknames, have given her one too: Dragon Lady. "Some of these kids really want to change, but don't have the self-confidence to do it yet-or the self-respect," the Dragon Lady says. "We give them an excuse not to go somewhere if they don't want to. I give them my card and tell them to call me." Newsom will do whatever she can to help a kid get off the streets. It's this commitment that led to her involvement in SafeFutures collaborative efforts, where she serves as a liaison between service providers and gang-involved kids. Newsom thinks she's seen the biggest need for a lot of kids-someone to say "no." "Kids test limits. They have to," she says. "It's part of growing up." When parents are there to guide them, kids learn to choose better and anticipate consequences. "But when these kids test and push limits, no one's there." According to Newsom, the judicial system could use some tweaking, too. "When a child does something wrong, they need to be punished right away-time-out, whatever-so that they can connect the punishment to the crime." Under the current system in Washington state, juveniles accumulate points for each crime. Punishment comes only after a certain number of points build up. The crime that pushes a kid over the top may be far less serious, ironically, than the original crime, for which he was not punished directly. "They've forgotten about everything else-what else got them there-because they weren't punished the first time," Newsom explains. She supports an alternative called At-Risk Youth Petitions. Filed by the parents or guardians of an out-of-control child who's not yet involved in the court system, the petition spells out expectations for the child: attending school, meeting with a counselor, making a curfew. Because it's a legal agreement approved by a judge, it's binding. If the child fails to stick to the agreement, he or she goes to detention. Dealing with problems early can prevent a more serious offense down the road. In one case, a girl stood up and asked the judge, "Why should I be home at 11 o'clock, doing my homework, when my mother never comes home?" The judge said, "Really?" The judge added a clause to the petition, requiring the mother to be home at 11 o'clock on week- nights. Newsom laughs. "You can't ask somebody to change if you don't set an example," she observes. Newsom sets her own example in schools throughout Seattle. A road show on gun violence, Options, Choices, and Consequences, lays out the uncut realities of using firearms. Joining her on the stage is a physician who shares pictures of gunshot victims, so that kids can see how TV differs from real-life violence. Also in the cast is a prosecutor who talks about the law. He tells kids, for instance, that even packing a toy gun will get you thrown out of school. Newsom tells students what will happen if they're involved in a shooting: "You're going to end up in handcuffs. You're going to end up in the back seat of the car. We're going to call your parents. If you're 16 or over, we can send you right to adult court. If it's an automatic, you will be tried as an adult." She explains that adult jail is nothing like the juvenile detention center. "You know what? The big, bad guys? They're not at all impressed that you're a 16-year-old kid with a gun. They don't care. There, you're small potatoes." Recently, Newsom brought a former client into her act. "I always liked him," she says. "But he made me angry because he kept doing dumb stuff. Each time, he'd say, 'This is it, Dianne. I'm going to change.' And I kept saying, 'Good. Do it. Stop hanging there. You're too smart. Make something of yourself.'" She was there when one of his friends was dying. He said he would get out. She was there when he shot at a police officer. He promised he would stop. "And then," she says, "he ends up killing somebody." In prison, Newsom's friend had a religious conversion. Devoting his life to turning others from his path, he tells Seattle students he didn't hear Newsom's message in time. "She talked to me. She told me I should stop," he says, "but I wasn't ready to hear it." A couple of heads in the audience nod. "But I'm telling you now, you need to hear it sooner than I heard it. Because I went to prison." Finally, Newsom tells the students what it was like for her to watch two gunshot victims-a seven-year-old caught in crossfire and a 13-year-old killed for her jacket-die in her arms. She asks if they can imagine what that would be like. She asks if they can imagine taking that kind of news to a parent. To their parents. She doesn't know if she's made an impact. In many cases, she knows she hasn't. "There's that mentality, from 12 to 16, that they're invincible-that it won't happen to them." But, of course, it does. And sometimes, it gets to her. "There's times when," Newsom says, losing her brass for the first time, "especially the ones you watched grow up, you wonder where you lost them. I mean, some of these hard-core gangsters-when you sit there and talk to them one-on-one, away from the group- some of them are really nice. And you just wonder what circumstances could have changed earlier in their life that didn't. "Sometimes," she says, "you just cry."
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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