EDITORIAL: Editorial: New teen gang intervention program a welcome start

March 08-- Mar. 8--Prevention often, but not always, proves more effective than suppression when it comes to dealing with criminality. Understanding and addressing the myriad societal contributors to the problem, intervening at the source, can yield positive results.

Nowhere is this approach more needed than with the troublesome issue of youth gang membership, a decades-long problem in Yakima and elsewhere in the Valley. Which is why it's heartening to see that the city has agreed to the formation of a pilot program that teams at-risk middle-schoolers with an intervention specialist to provide guidance away from gang affiliation.

Certainly, the program the City Council unanimously passed on Tuesday is limited in scope. It involves just two middle schools, Lewis and Clark and Franklin, and will involve 10 students in the initial stages. But all worthy efforts must have a starting point, however small, and at this point there is much value even if the program saves just one teen from joining a gang.

The effort is a result of a broad-based community response, prompted by a grant from the Department of Commerce to the city to develop a sustainable approach in dealing with gangs. The past few months, representatives from about 25 other organizations -- school districts, health-care and mental-health services and after-school community programs, chief among them -- have met to discuss issues and approaches to link youth and families to services. Participants ranged from La Casa Hogar to the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic, from the state Department of Corrections to People for People. Spearheading the effort is the Yakima School District and Educational Services District No. 105.

As Matt Fairbank, of Sageland Mediation and Facilitation Service, which corralled such a wide-ranging coalition, told us, "these programs already exist; we've been meeting to find the most effective approach to help kids link up to all these resources."

In the process, representatives from the city and schools struck upon the preventative model of pairing an intervention specialist with teens in middle school. Using recommendations from the federal government's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, as well as a successful community gang-prevention model in place in Spokane, the Yakima group struck upon the individual intervention model as the most direct course of action.

The program's newly anointed intervention specialist, Gary Garza, a substitute teacher and coach in the Yakima School district and former school resource officer with the Yakima Police Department, is ready to go to work, even though the program is only partially funded. Fairbank and the city say grant possibilities exist from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Prevention.

That governmental entity has long worked to not just quell gang violence in cities large and small but to drill down into the reasons why early teens are drawn to the lifestyle. The office's most recent report on gang prevention lists risk factors such as poverty, lack of parental supervision, experience of violence inside and outside the home, mental health problems, alcohol and drug use, victimization in a harsh "school climate," and peer pressure.

The fact that the report lists ages 12 to 13 as the start of a youth's flirtation with gangs and 13 to 15 as the age-period most likely to take the plunge shows that Yakima's approach of targeting middle schools is appropriate.

Interestingly, though, the report debunks the common belief that young people are coerced into joining gangs. Rather, a gang becomes something of a surrogate family to youths starved for validation. "Gangs are often at the center of appealing social action -- parties, hanging out, music, drugs, and opportunities to socialize with members of the opposite sex," the report states. "The gang may be appealing because it meets a youth's social needs ... filling the void that inadequate family care and schooling leave."

Garza's job in the pilot project, running between now and June, is to try to reach at-risk kids before they choose gang life, steer them toward more productive after-school pursuits and, most important, address the underlying familial and societal problems that make them consider such a destructive path.

That Garza will be on the ground at the two middle schools is crucial, since numerous studies detailed in the governmental report link delinquency to a student "feeling unsafe at school" and having "a low degree of commitment to and involvement in school."

Yes, Yakima's new approach has inherent limitations. It will serve just 10 students out of hundreds at risk. And it's just pertains to Yakima, not other communities with gang problems, such as Sunnyside and Toppenish. And it's doesn't nearly address the reasons for, or provide solutions to, the systemic poverty that contributes to the familial fraying and concomitant feelings of alienation among today's youth.

But we're hoping it will begin to make a difference and lead to additional funding that will yield a more comprehensive program to prevent the spread of gangs in the Valley.

Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Bob Crider and Sam McManis

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