Teens and Elderly Team Up in Crime-Fighting Program

Terrence Page and Maryon Freifelder have been an unlikely pair of friends for three years, teaming up on issues of interest to young and old.

Page is a senior at Miami Central High School; Freifelder is an activist with the American Assn. of Retired Persons and a member of Florida’s Silver-Haired Legislature.

Together, they have traveled across the state on campaigns for new laws. Now they are teaming up again to promote a new crime-prevention project linking the two generations.

“We sincerely believe that youth and age--if we’re willing to walk hand in hand--can solve any problem in this community,” Freifelder said.

The program, called Youth and Elderly Against Crime, was kicked off recently with a pep rally organized by Dade County schools, Citizens Crime Watch, Jewish Family Services’ crime prevention group, and Freifelder and Page’s Intergenerational Law Advocacy Group.

Of the 79,000 crimes committed in Miami last year, only two-tenths of 1% involved seniors. But crimes against the elderly create a sense of outrage and opened the door for the program.

About 150 students from three inner-city high schools will be linked with two senior housing complexes, a senior community center and a downtown church to survey seniors about crime and suggest solutions.

One of the program’s biggest achievements would be to eliminate a widely expressed fear among the elderly of teen-agers--all teen-agers.

“Whole generations, especially those living in the inner city, have expressed nothing but fear,” said Vern Thornton, director of the state attorney general’s Seniors Vs. Crime Project. “This fear leads to the elderly community imprisoning themselves at home.”

Page has felt the unwillingness of seniors to accept teen-age strangers, but he considers that a minor setback.

“One of the reasons why there’s resistance is a lot of time it’s hard for people to believe that somebody cares,” the 18-year-old said.

But he sees the generation gap as a misunderstanding that can be resolved.

In the first stage of the one-year project, teen-agers will be matched with a designated group of seniors in their neighborhoods to meet regularly and draft crime-prevention plans.

Other Miami programs already focus on crimes against the elderly and linking old and young, but this extends the existing projects.

Dade County public schools offer Adopt-a-Grandparent and Senior Mentors for Creative Student programs to capitalize on the assets of each generation.

“We have the two extremes. We have the young who are somewhat unaware of the problems associated with being old. Second, we have the old, octogenarians worried about their ability to protect themselves against crime,” Police Chief Perry Anderson said. “I think they’ll be looking out for each other.”