Early Action : Probation Officers Take Intensive Role in Vulnerable Youngsters’ Lives to Keep Them Out of Gangs

Tired of rousting a frequently truant 13-year-old boy from his bed to get him to class at Maclay Junior High School in Pacoima, probation officer Rick Saenz finally gave the youth an ultimatum:

The next time the boy failed to show up for school, Saenz warned, he would drive the boy and his mother to school, and embarrass him by having her sit beside him through all of his classes.

The boy slept in and Saenz kept his word, invoking the authority the mother signed over to get her son into an innovative county program aimed at keeping youths from joining gangs.

For the time being, the boy appears to have gotten the point, said Saenz, one of 30 probation officers assigned to the year-old Gang Awareness and Prevention Program.

The point was that Saenz and his colleagues in the $2-million program will go to great lengths to deter youths who have been in minor scrapes from getting into more serious trouble.

The probation officers spend their time in the youths’ schools, neighborhoods and homes instead of behind a desk. Although the efforts of the probation officers assigned to the program are still evolving and have taken a different shape in each of its five locations, the officers say they act as social workers, counselors, teachers, parents, friends, authority figures, police officers and more, all at once.

“We’re not in there just counseling the kids about drugs and gangs,” said John Poplawski, who heads the east San Fernando Valley office of the gang prevention program. “What we’re ending up doing is some basic parenting kinds of things. Kids need to go to a doctor. Kids need immunizations. They need somebody to come over and get them up in the morning to go to school. A lot of it is just paying basic attention to these kids.”

Such intense involvement is possible because GAPP officers have caseloads of approximately 30 to 35 instead of the 100 to 150 cases commonly supervised by other juvenile probation officers. But experts say that despite the smaller caseloads, the program is cost-effective because early intervention--children in the program are usually between the ages of 10 and 14--raises the chance of helping youths avoid lives of crime.

“It’s reasonable, practical and it makes an enormous amount of criminal justice sense,” said Michael Agopian, a professor of criminal justice at Cal State Long Beach who is studying the effectiveness of the program for the county.

“The best time to work with children who have problems is as soon as possible,” he said. Because juvenile offenders are frequently turned loose without court action, “Most kids don’t get into juvenile court until they are 16 or 17 or 18 and by then they have had five or six arrests and a couple of at-home probations. You wouldn’t bet on those kids who come to court.”

But, he said, younger children still have a good shot at productive adult lives. “They are not solidified in gangs, they’re not carrying weapons and not breaking into cars and houses,” he said.

The teen-agers whom probation officers usually work with are caught up with “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” said Poplawski. But those targeted by GAPP are “still playing with toys.”

The GAPP program’s emphasis on prevention is highly unusual and is receiving statewide attention, Agopian said. The program has offices in North Hollywood, Long Beach, in the Centinela-Firestone area of South-Central Los Angeles and in the Rio Hondo Court Building in the San Gabriel Valley. An office in East Los Angeles focuses on Asian gangs throughout the county.

School and city officials in Compton, West Covina, Norwalk, Downey and the Antelope Valley have asked county officials to expand the program to their areas.

There are no firm statistics on the success rate of the program. But Bert Davila, supervisor of the San Gabriel Valley office, estimated that only 20% of the youths there are arrested while in the program, a “considerably lower” rate than those outside the program.

Even with the successes they cite, probation officers such as Saenz and Laura Pogoler know they are fighting an uphill battle. Although effective with some youths, the program can reach but a small proportion of those who need help countywide.

The probation officers found that youths begin identifying with gangs and getting involved with drugs early. Teachers at a Pacoima elementary school discovered a misbehaving fifth-grader was carrying $200. Pogoler said that a kindergarten student threatened to unleash Pacoima’s Project Boyz gang on his teacher when she disciplined him. And Rick Saenz said a mother told him her 5-year-old son was already out of control, flashing gang hand signals and wanting to wear gang dress.

Anna Alvarez, an administrator at the Van Nuys-Pierce Park Apartments, one of two housing projects where GAPP officers are active in the east San Fernando Valley, said parents see the program as a source of support.

“I have a lot of parents who are beginning to see the signs of their kids getting involved in drug and gang activity and they’re looking for help,” Alvarez said.

She cited the case of a 10-year-old boy arrested for car theft. The boy’s 13-year-old sister had run away from home, he was already working as a drug runner and the family appeared to be disintegrating. The boy’s parents agreed to put him under the supervision of the probation officers, promising to abide by a number of conditions, including not using drugs or associating with gang members. They also agreed to attend family counseling.

Now, Alvarez said, the youth has undergone something of a transformation and plays football after school instead of hanging out with gang members. “The little boy is just completely different,” she said. “He has direction.”

Pogoler, who works in the GAPP program in Pacoima, described the case of a brother and sister who played hooky from San Fernando Junior High School all last year. The School Attendance Review Board at the school referred the pair to the program and Pogoler got involved.

Pogoler signed them up for summer school, took them on field trips and involved them in a YWCA activity program in Van Nuys that teaches young people responsibility. She drove them from San Fernando to the YWCA each morning and picked them up each afternoon because they had no other means of transportation. “This program allows you the time to do that,” she said.

Now the brother and sister are attending school regularly and have brought their grades up. “We’ve invested a lot of time in them” and “they’re real positive kids,” she said.

A major thrust of the probation officers’ efforts is to help families stay together. But, in some cases, families are so harmful to the children that the probation officers recommend that their charges be placed in foster homes.

Pogoler cited the case of a young boy whose mother and grandmother appear to be drug users. Transients drift through the filthy house and the 14-year-old boy, who is on probation for shooting out windows with a BB gun, receives virtually no supervision. “What exactly do we expect of these kids?” she said in frustration.

The Pacoima officers secured unclaimed bicycles from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and tried to give them to the children they supervise.

“We thought this would be great for the kids . . . and easy to do,” Poplawski said. “We’re finding out it is difficult and my suspicion is that these kids probably can’t hold on to a bicycle. In time, somebody’s going to come and take it away from you and you’re going to have to fight for it.”

The officers working in Pacoima have taken their charges to Dodger games and to the zoo, on group outings to Lake Castaic last summer, and to the Rose Bowl. They are planning a trip to the Mt. Waterman ski resort, which has agreed to provide lift tickets for youths in the program. The Long Beach GAPP office organized a family picnic last summer. The probation officers who work in South El Monte set up a special school for youths assigned to the program.

Youths enter the program in one of two ways. Some are referred by teachers or counselors or even parents for truancy or because they are beginning to adopt a gang mien and wardrobe.

To be part of the program the youths and their parents must sign a contract obligating the student to regular school attendance, abstinence from drugs and a number of other conditions.

A Juvenile Court also may order a youth into the program as a condition of probation. The youths and their parents can be criminally liable if the terms of the probation contract are violated.

Capt. Ray Gott, who heads the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s juvenile operations bureau, said the emphasis on prevention is overdue.

“For too many years . . . we have placed a great amount of effort and incredible amounts of money on treating the tail end of the problem,” said Gott, referring to the expense of juvenile incarceration.

He said prevention programs are difficult to sell politically, because they do not immediately generate dramatic crime reduction statistics. But, Gott said, “the bottom line is that as a society we better pay now or pay later. If we don’t get into prevention programs such as GAPP . . . the cost is going to be astronomical.”