Ministers launch drive to combat youth crime

Black ministers in Boston, responding to a surge in youth violence, have launched a drive to recruit, train, and deploy 1,000 volunteers to work with at-risk young people from the city's toughest and poorest neighborhoods.

The initiative, the largest undertaken since the youth crime wave of the early 1990s, aims to greatly expand the ministers' street-level involvement in fighting violence. It also seeks to revive the community-police partnership that was a key factor in the drastic reduction in the city's homicide rate from 1996 until last year.

City and police officials are applauding the plan. The police department will help train volunteers and will develop deployment strategies for the initiative, which is being launched by the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group of churches and faith-based organizations founded in 1992 to combat gang violence.

The first 100 volunteers are nearing the end of their training and will be deployed on neighborhood walks, home visits, and mentoring assignments after a final training session with Police Superintendent Paul Joyce next week.

The volunteers will try to build trust between neighborhood residents and police, improve police response to community problems, and reconnect community groups to young people, TenPoint leaders say.

Other volunteers are being deployed to lobby politicians for increased state funding for youth work and for witness protection. The TenPoint staff says that 100 churches and other organizations that now belong to the coalition are actively involved in the effort.

Volunteers will concentrate on 10 ''red zones" -- the areas police identified as youth violence hotspots as the homicide rate rose to a 10-year high in December. The initiative is scheduled to be announced at a TenPoint meeting this morning at Charles Street AME Church in Roxbury.

''There is a realization that we've been asleep at the wheel," said the Rev. Jeffrey L. Brown, a Dorchester resident and pastor of Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, speaking of the clergy, law-enforcement agencies, and social service organizations that collaborated so effectively in the 1990s that their work became known nationally as ''the Boston miracle."

Trust and cooperation between the community and law enforcement have eroded, and relations among high-profile preachers, including Eugene Rivers, Ray Hammond, and Bruce Wall who led the 1990s effort, have collapsed in acrimony, according to many church, community, and municipal officials.

''The only way to make progress is to drill down to the membership level in our churches," Brown said.

''What we did before wouldn't work now," said Brown, who was the youngest member of the TenPoint leadership in the '90s, and who has taken a leading role in recruiting volunteers. ''Conditions are different on the street."

Police and social workers agree, and say several factors are contributing to the problem: an increased tendency of young people to engage in deadly violence for seemingly trivial reasons; an increase in the youth population overall; major cuts in funding for youth work; and burgeoning numbers of criminal offenders who are returning to the community after serving their sentences.

Joyce, in an interview at police headquarters yesterday, applauded black ministers' desire to ''take ownership" of Operation Red Zone, which until now has involved mostly conventional law-enforcement efforts in the 10 hotspots.

Volunteers will enter the hotspot areas and offer troubled youth assistance in turning away from criminal activities before they are swept up by police.

This merger of ministerial intervention with police enforcement action echoes the approach used by police and clergy in Operation Ceasefire, the key element of the effort of the 1990s.

Joyce also said he was heartened to see a new generation of ministers leading street-level work. The leaders of the 1990s effort ''have all become executives," said Joyce, who as a lower-level officer was involved in earlier antiviolence and community policing efforts. ''We need a whole new group of clergy, and we are starting to see that. It is a good thing."

The TenPoint initiative's emphasis on volunteerism is particularly helpful, he said, because of major funding cuts for youth and police work that occurred after the crime rate declined and the economy slowed. ''We've lost so many resources, and I don't see it getting better," Joyce said.

A major need that volunteers will try to address is mentoring of criminals who are finishing their sentences and are preparing to return to their communities.

Current programs to assist ex-offenders in re-entering society reach only about 20 people a month in the Suffolk County House of Correction, Joyce said, while 250 to 300 people a month are being discharged from the jail -- 70 percent of whom return to Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, and the neighborhoods that border them.

Scores more are coming back from state and federal penitentiaries every month.

Federal funding for the existing, relatively small programs for re-entry of violent offenders will run out next summer, and no alternative funding has been found yet, Joyce said.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, in a telephone interview yesterday, applauded the efforts by the ministers to work with police to make Operation Red Zone into a community-police partnership.

''We need this community piece," Menino said. ''Anyone who thinks the police can do it alone does not understand. Putting 1,000 people on the streets would be very helpful to us. I'm happy with 150 or 200. That's more than there were in the past."

Chris Sumner, executive director of the TenPoint Coalition, said that the coalition put only 30 to 40 people on the streets at the peak of its activities in the 1990s.

In addition to adding new people, the coalition has revised its approach to street work, according to Matt Gibson, coordinator of training for the organization. Among other changes, the coalition plans to:

Deploy smaller groups than in the past -- perhaps as few as five people in an area -- because small groups are less intimidating when they enter and try to establish contacts with youth;

Deploy more women than in the past, when almost all street work was done by men, because there are issues specific to girls that women can more effectively address;

Support those churches and organizations that are working on youth issues but which are not part of the TenPoint Coalition;

Pay more attention to law-abiding residents in the neighborhoods, not just to the troubled youth.

Previously ''we were kind of myopic, saying, 'It's the kids, it's the kids,' " Gibson said. ''Well, it is the kids, but it's everyone else too -- grandparents, little children, you go out at night, everyone is out."

Building relations with a broad array of residents, and encouraging them to speak up for their community, is of critical concern both to the ministers and the police.

Even as the homicide rate was rising to a 10-year high of 75, the number of homicides in which suspects were identified or arrested fell to 30 percent, a statistic police officials say reflects public distrust of police or fear that police will not protect them if they give evidence.

Sumner said a principal aim of the initiative is ''us getting back to what we used to do and them [the police] getting back to what they used to do. . . . We want to fight the feeling of residents of being alone, of not feeling they will be protected and supported if they come forward."

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.