City Must Face Youth Violence

Give Mayor Jack Geraghty a hand. In a major act of civic leadership he has challenged our community to face and deal firmly with one of the biggest, toughest urban problems of our time: Violence and crime among juveniles.

His six-point proposal, submitted last week to the City Council, acknowledges the difficulty of the task ahead and defines the problem well. “Most of our kids are acting responsibly,” the mayor emphasizes. “Only a few hundred out of the many thousands of young people in our area are involved in youth crime and violence. … As citizens, we certainly should have the capability to target this troublesome hardcore segment.”

Comparatively small as this group might be, its impact on us all is large. So are the frustrations. It isn’t easy to fix the young human wreckage that emerges from inattentive, abusive or troubled families. But the community must try. The alternative is simply to watch while drive-by shootings, robberies and drug trafficking escalate, while gangs of thugs and bands of troubled street kids roam the community, trashing community property and our sense of safety.

Yes, we are a free society. But this does not require us to accept crime, vandalism and truancy.

Many cities around the nation already have grappled seriously with this challenge. It is well past time for Spokane to start.

Geraghty makes six proposals:

Invite volunteers in each of the neighborhood Cop Shops to develop tailored programs that would address their particular youth crime problems.

Coordinate the efforts of all agencies in the city and county criminal justice system.

Establish a no-tolerance policy toward the possession of firearms by juveniles, with aggressive police enforcement and perhaps with toughened laws.

Form a task force on which young people themselves would serve, advising adult policy makers. This key ingredient recognizes that it’s folly for well-meaning adults to form committees and merely talk at each other about problems they may not even understand.

Assign two police officers as truant officers, to patrol malls and other teen hangouts. They will apprehend truants and take them to a new truancy center to be operated by School District 81. This aims to make clearer the community’s expectation that youngsters ought to be in school. It may nip delinquency in the bud; truancy is rebellion’s first big step. The center will summon the truants’ parents and link both students and parents, as needed, to social agencies and alternative classrooms.

Establish and enforce a curfew for young people who have committed a crime and have been placed on probation. This, the only proposal we question, involves a risk that innocent youth will be improperly harassed by police - although we can acknowledge that a police contact with youngsters who roam the streets at night might be beneficial in any event.

Spokane does not need to tolerate juvenile misconduct. The community has an absolute right to clarify and enforce the standards of conduct that allow us all to mature and live in safety.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board