Often on Sunday: teen violence

Sunday is a day of rest for the recreation and youth workers who try to provide positive experiences for the young people in Boston who might otherwise drift into crime or come to harm. But Sunday, it turns out, is also the most active day of the week in the city when it comes to both fatal and non fatal shootings involving people ages 19 or younger.

Boston's 46 city-funded community centers and pools are often dark when the city's streets are popping with violence. The causes of this disconnect are many, ranging from funding shortfalls to the schedule preferences of youth workers who covet weekends and evenings off. But arrest records for 2006 show that roughly half of the city's 1,729 serious crimes involving young people, including aggravated assaults and burglaries, took place on days or at times when the traditional sanctuaries for low-income young people were shuttered. The Sunday situation is especially galling. Thirty-nine shootings, or 28 percent of the total, took place on Sundays alone, when it would take a bloodhound to track down an open youth center.

Many youth programs take their marching orders from studies showing that the key to controlling youth crime, teen pregnancy, and anti social behavior is providing high-quality programs after school from 3 to 6 p.m. It's a legitimate approach. But it is only a partial one, says Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, a primary author of the seminal 2000 study, "America's Afterschool Choice: the Prime Time for Juvenile Crime, or Youth Enrichment and Achievement."

Says Fox: "Crime is not a 9 to 5 issue." If hospitals and police forces operate on a 24-hour schedule, youth workers should be thinking in a similar way.

Simply covering the hours of 8 p.m. to midnight in the city's high crime areas would be a good start. That's when 44 percent of the 140 fatal and nonfatal youth-related shootings occurred in 2006. But staying open during those witching hours can be dangerous to the survival of the programs if they are inadequately staffed and funded. The Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester is one of the few youth-oriented centers to make a consistent effort to stay open late into the evenings and on weekends during all seasons. But lack of experienced supervisors on a late shift last year may have contributed to what police say was the rape of a female client by a Baker House employee. Now the center is struggling to regain its standing and funding.

"Midnight basketball" is a catch phrase for youth centers that provide late-night distractions for young people in high-crime urban neighborhoods. Some observers scoff at the concept as a symptom of the nanny state. But it is a sound strategy consistent with the accepted recreation practice of bringing young people to a state of happy exhaustion and then driving them home. And it is a concept badly in need of expansion in Boston.

"Take a guy and put a ball in his hand instead of a gun," says the Rev. Eugene Rivers, founder of Baker House. "Why is that so hard to get?"

Some of the larger, mainstream youth service programs are getting it. Last summer, the four Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston experimented with weekend and late night hours. It was a successful program that attracted new members, according to club spokeswoman Jan Goldstein. Even young people from different gangs managed to coexist at the Dorchester club under careful adult supervision. But club operators cut back hours again in the fall. Over the winter, most of the happy sounds emanating from Boys & Girls Clubs in Boston on a Saturday were coming from adults who had rented the premises.

Last June, Councilor Michael Ross issued a comprehensive report on youth crime prevention and called for a "seven-day-a-week, 10 a.m. to midnight" recreation model for young people in the city. He urged college students to serve as volunteers and called on the Menino administration to press dozens of elderly commission vans into use for night-time activities. And the message is getting through.

Mayor Thomas Menino promises that roughly a dozen of the city's community centers will offer extended hours as late as 11 p.m. by July. The mayor, who spent several hours last week talking with young people in neighborhoods affected by recent shootings, also says he will offer day trips on Sunday. With the exception of the Shelburne Community Center in Roxbury, consistent Sunday programs are practically non existent in city-run community centers. Midafternoon mayhem, however, is too common.

In suburbs outside of Boston and in the city's safer neighborhoods, some parents worry that a surfeit of structured activities could drain spontaneity from their children's lives. In parts of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, the greater concern among parents is that young people could lose their lives to street violence for lack of a safe place to socialize.

"If you deliver for these kids, they can be so good," says Menino.

Bostonians eagerly await delivery.