REBECCA CARRASCO

CONVENT – Though there is concern all over the country about increases in juvenile crime, statistics for St. James Parish are encouraging. St. James Parish Sheriff Willy J. Martin Jr. showed in his data that there were 78 juvenile arrests from August through December 1999. In contrast, there were 57 juvenile arrests between August 1, 2000 and April 17, 2001. That represents a decline of 26.9 percent, despite the longer period covered. What can explain the decrease? According to Martin, early intervention is the key to reducing juvenile crime. Working with juveniles is important because they often are drawn into conflicts without really having a reason, he explained. “We noticed in the last couple of years, just in our own parish,” he said, “that groups of kids from, say, Convent will want to have it out with a group of kids from Lutcher. And when you talk to these kids about why, half the time they don’t even know why.” Martin indicated that the parish has begun a number of intervention programs to deal with issues such as gang activities. “The Peace Initiative is one thing that we are doing to target what we know to be a problem with violence between kids,” he said. The Peace Initiative is bringing in experts who have dealt with the problem of urban juvenile violence in various settings, he added. “They are going to educate not just the sheriff’s deputies and personnel, but also school officials, business people, and other leaders in the community.” A good job has been done, continued Martin, of documenting forms of behavior viewed as gang-related. “The gang image,” he explained, “is when you work together as a group to commit crimes and be defiant to authority. We don’t see gangs in St. James parish that would support the theory of gangs that you see in other major cities, where you have to go out – rob a bank or kill somebody. We don’t see that, and we have been very lucky. We don’t necessarily have a true Crip or Blood gang, just kind of wannabes’. But of course we have to be pro-active and target the ringleaders.” Juveniles join would-be gangs for many reasons. “In many cases,” Martin suggested, “a single mother is trying to raise a young man who is very street-smart but did not have a father-figure, did not have a male role model in his life. He goes out looking for acceptance and finds it on the streets in a gang.” Another initiative is the sheriff’s summer camp. “We bring kids at risk to expose them to something different, and they spend an entire week doing some of the things that Scouts do, like camping out. That is a good program. It’s just to target troubled kids and try to get them off the track they are on.” The sheriff’s office also has success in the high schools with two deputies serving as resource officers. “At the rate we are going,” he said, “we will probably have resource officers at the junior high schools in the future.” “We are starting to have dealings with kids at a younger age than you would hope you would have to,” Martin reflected. “For a long time we put a lot of emphasis on crime prevention. We have more crime prevention programs at the younger age than we do for teen-agers.” The elementary schools use the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, and the McGruff program. The DARE program has come in for criticism, but Martin defended its use until somebody comes up with a better program. “I really think that DARE is good and it works,” he said. “It is good the way it is done, but if we can make it better, let’s make it better.” Judging the value of programs and statistics, he suggested, is not easy to do. Martin concluded: “Our society changes. There may now be more effective ways to report new crimes and more effective ways to document crimes and more effective ways to bring messages to people. We see the problem a lot easier – it’s hitting us in the face. Maybe 15 years, or 20 years ago, it was there, but it was not publicized.”