Zoo Shooting Points to Youth Violence’s Reach

Seven times this school year a student at Ballou Senior High School here has been killed and seven times a mourning ritual has begun: crisis counselors, ribbons on tree trunks, a victim’s picture on a T-shirt.

“The mourning is constant. It takes its toll and you’re always weary of it,” said Art Bridges, principal at the inner-city school.

Violence struck again in Washington last week in a brazen episode of gunplay among youngsters at the National Zoo, leaving seven children--all bystanders--with gunshot wounds. It was another sober reminder that, for all the celebration over a nationwide drop in crime, youth violence continues to strike with pervasive force. In big cities in particular, police are struggling--with mixed results--to contain the problem, a battle that is compounded by the often random nature of such crimes.

“We have officially crossed all the sacred thresholds where children should be safe--churches, day-care centers, schools and now national landmarks like the National Zoo,” said John Calhoun, president of the National Crime Prevention Council.

Part of the problem, Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview, is that while mass tragedies such as the Columbine High School shooting get worldwide headlines, other students are killed in anonymity every day.

“One thing that is crystal clear is that access by young people to firearms can be the difference in a life-and-death situation,” he said.

Ironically, amid a seven-year nationwide decline in crime, violence among youth appears to be dropping significantly. The most recent FBI statistics show a nearly 11% drop in juvenile arrests for serious and violent crimes, double the decline for adults.

In Los Angeles, statistics on gang-related crime show drops in the last year in virtually all areas, including homicide, assault and robbery. But some cities have seen flare-ups. In Washington, 17 youngsters have been killed by gunfire this school year, prompting stepped-up security measures.

When young people in the city have been shot and killed--a tennis star sitting quietly on a bus, a popular boyfriend and girlfriend unloading groceries, a quiet kid stumbling onto a robbery--the grieving in school hallways is palpable.

“A lot of our kids just talk about being numb, paralyzed with this sense of powerlessness,” said Diane Powell, director of student intervention for the Washington schools. “What’s been so dramatic is that a lot of these things have happened with students that were basically bystanders, doing well academically. The bottom line is they’re children.”

In a report released Friday, federal officials issued an “action guide” on how schools can “safeguard our children” and spot warning signs of violence. The report, which will be distributed nationwide, says that administrators must make anti-violence plans fit the characteristics of their own districts.

The attack last Monday at the National Zoo came on a day of festivities marking a century-old African American celebration, which was shattered by fighting between rival youngsters. A 16-year-old boy who might have been a gang member was arrested for allegedly shooting and wounding seven children, including an 11-year-old who was shot in the head.

Some law enforcement experts said they are worried that gang members are becoming emboldened by allegations of police misconduct in places such as Los Angeles, New York, Washington and San Diego. This boldness appears to be true in California, even though the state has a new law making it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults.

In Riverside County, “we’re seeing a little bit of a spike in gang violence,” said Creg Datig, head of the district attorney’s juvenile division.

“With the heightened scrutiny and political pressure on law enforcement to be careful about their methods, some of the gangs are testing the waters to see if there’s a gang-friendly atmosphere,” he said. “Rather than scurrying around like rats in the shadows, they feel they can step forward.”

Efforts to head off the problem are multi-pronged.

The Clinton administration, for instance, is now seeking to pump nearly $1 billion into after-school programs to help keep kids out of trouble, a move that would double funding for a federal effort that was virtually nonexistent five years ago.

Authorities also have been pushing toughened restrictions on gun dealers, trigger-lock mandates and other measures to keep guns out of the hands of children.

And a growing number of cities in Southern California and elsewhere around the country are experimenting with anti-gang court injunctions, banning known gang members from congregating.

One Chicago suburb last year even tried to evict anyone known to be a gang member from its borders. Town leaders in the suburb of Cicero had to settle for a youth curfew when civil libertarians took legal action against them. But officials in the town, where a 7-year-old girl was killed on her doorstep a few years ago in a gang drive-by shooting, said that they are happy with their progress.

Cicero spokesman David Donahue said that area gang members “now realize there’s increased enforcement, and they just tend to avoid [police], so in that respect it’s worked.”

Youth gangs are said to be involved in nearly one of every five U.S. killings, making them a chief law enforcement target.

The most recent federal statistics, based on a nationwide survey of police, are encouraging. The number of gang members identified in the survey dropped from 816,000 in 1997 to 780,000 in 1998.

“The fear,” said John Wilson at the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “is that now that arrests are coming down everyone will say: ‘Oh, we’ve solved that problem and we can move on to something else.’ ”

Indeed, the survey found youth gangs active in nearly half of police jurisdictions.

But the aggressive efforts have not come without a cost, some civil libertarians said.

One study released last week by a liberal coalition, entitled “And Justice for Some,” concluded that black and Latino juveniles are far more likely to be prosecuted and incarcerated than white counterparts who commit the same crimes.

“Often there’s a perception that these [minority] young people are gang members,” based on the clothes they wear, the attitudes they express and the neighborhoods they live in, said Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center. “The reason the racial disparities occur is that policymakers [devise rules based on racial] stereotypes,” he said.

Another policy flaw, said Lawrence Sherman at the University of Pennsylvania, is that politicians refuse to acknowledge that youth violence is largely a big-city problem. One of every four juvenile murders, he noted, takes place in five cities--Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago.

“Murder and youth violence is not a national problem,” he said, “but we’ve responded with a whole series of programs that spread the money around where the votes are, not where the problems are.”