Jj I

NOVUfBlR )99~ B.OO

A SPECIAL ISSUE ON NEW YORK YOUTH
Raised in the City
s
o you heard someone on a soapbox say young people are the
future of America? That 's nothing new. In and of itself, it's a
pretty valid statement. When Rudy Giuliani said it and made a big cam-
paign item out of how important Boys and Girls Clubs are, he probably
meant it. Then he was elected and focused nearly all his attention on
crime statistics and budget figures.
Aside from stating the obvious-the fact that just about every recent
budget reduction in social welfare has hit programs for families with low
income children-we try this month to illuminate where we are going as
a city of people who presumably care about kids. We examine the many
.............. _.,.., ...... -
sides of government's commitment to children (or its lack
thereof) in school, after school, at home--and in the

EDITORIAL
streets where the police jacked up juvenile arrests by 30
percent last year. We are not seeking to promote despair.
There are so many good people out there stabilizing
youth programs, organizing for better schools, promoting
solutions to the crisis at the Child Welfare Administration,
all working like mad to do the right thing. What we want is for people to
acknowledge the problems and take note of the struggle.
On a different note, this month City Limits welcomes a new associ-
ate editor, Kevin Heldman. You may have seen his byline on features in
Rolling Stone and Vibe, among other places.
Last month's rollout of our new design wasn't without a few screw-
ups. Number one: The letters page jumped to oblivion, thanks to an inex-
plicable late night computer glitch. If you reverse pages 38 and 39, all
the letters are there and make sense. Number two: The caption to a pho-
tograph accompanying "Whisper to a Roar," last month's article about
the Community Library Information Collaborative in Flatbush,
Brooklyn, misidentified one of its subjects. The man is Jim Braxton,
president of the Friends of Flatbush Library.
Finally, Senior Editor Kim Nauer has won the prestigious 1995
Emery A. Brownell Award, presented by the National Legal Aid and
Defender Association, for her November 1994 cover feature on Family
Court. The previous winner of the 33-year-old award, interestingly
enough, was the editorial board of The New York Times.
Congratulations, Kim!
Editor
Cover photo by Jason Goltz
lity Limits
Volume XX Number 9
City Limits is published ten times per year. monthly except
bi-monthly issues in June/July and August/September. by
the City Limits Community Infonmation Service. Inc .. a non-
profit organization devoted to disseminating information
concerning neighborhood revitalization.
Editor: Andrew White
Senior Editor: Kim Nauer
Special Projects Editor: Kierna Mayo Dawsey
Associate Editor: Kevin Heldman
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Beverly Cheuvront, City Harvest
Francine Justa. Neighborhood Housing Services
Errol Louis, Central Brooklyn Partnership
Rima McCoy, Action for Community Empowerment
Rebecca Reich, Low Income Housing Fund
Andrew Reicher, UHAB
Tom Robbins, Journalist
Jay Small, ANHD
Doug Turetsky, former City Limits Editor
Pete Williams, National Urban League
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CITY LIMITS
THE GRID
,
NOVEMBER 1995
s
FEATURES
Surviving on Instinct
How do you spell survival? Children sometimes need a helping hand, but in this era of
government austerity, youth agencies are maneuvering desperately to stay afloat City
kids are doing much the same thing. By Kiema Mayo Dawsey
Chained Reaction
Copping an attitude. The NYPD wants kids off the streets, by any means necessary. Arrest
rates are soaring. By Kim Nauer
PROFILE
Station Identification
The revolution will not only be televised, it'll be edited. Scott Rosenberg's Media Works
course shows students how to flip the script. By Lise Funderburg
PIPELINES
Bruised and Battered
Eastern District High School in Bushwick is troubled by crime, low test scores and low
graduation rates. Now parents are pUshing for a state takeover. By Winton PiJcojJ
Order to Resuscitate
Part Two of our series on child welfare. Yes, Rudy, you could save a dying department-
and the children who depend on it. By Rob Polntr
Wasted Days
m1III
School's out early for students who don't make the grade. By James Bradley

Spark the Fire
He's been with the Panthers, alongside AI Sharpton and under the Rainbow (Coalition).
Now organizer Charles Barron is focused on his home turf. By Andrew White
NOTORIOUS
No Simple Charity
Zandra Meyers has learned what it takes to help hold her community together.
By Kevin Heldnum

Review 128
Fighting Words By Moises Perez
Cityview 129
Reframe the Drug Debate By Theodore W. Kheel
Spare Change 134
Guns and Hoses By Nick Chiles

Briefs 6,7 Editorial 2
Shameless Letters 4,31
Long Road Home
Professional 32
Cuts Both Ways
Directory
Harlem Impatience
Job Ads 33

-..... ~ - ' . . ''''.-
LETTERS
Political CorrKtlv.
The Cityview by Terry
McGovern of the HIY Law
Project ("Scarlet Letters,"
August/September 1995) on mandatory
HIY testing of infants is so replete with
inaccuracies and untruths that it is difficult
to know where to begin. But let me try.
McGovern states that the "Baby AIDS"
legislation I introduced in the state legisla-
ture in 1993 "would have mandated HIV
testing for all pregnant woman in New
York." This is completely untrue. The legis-
lation offered counseling and voluntary
testing to all pregnant woman-but it fur-
ther required that mothers be informed
when their babies test positive for HIV anti-
bodies in the blind screening test now per-
formed on all newborns in New York State.
Can we continue a policy which makes
it impossible for HIV-positive infants to
access early medical treatment? Consider
the facts. Every baby born in New York
State is currently tested for the HIY anti-
body, and each year we find that anywhere
between 1,600 to 1,900 infants test posi-
tive. But those infants are sent home,
and no one, not the mother, not the
doctor, not the agency responsible for
the baby's care, is informed that
these babies have tested positive for
a deadly disease.
We test infants for seven differ-
ent diseases, including syphilis and
hepatitis B. In every case, the
results are given to the parents and
the children are brought into
treatment, except for the unfortu-
nate infants who test positive for
the HIV antibody. Those babies ---
are sent home undiagnosed and
untreated, some to return to the hospital
months later, too late to benefit from treat-
ment. The reason for this insane policy is
simply this: a positive test of the baby
means the mother is infected, and AIDS
activists, who have a stranglehold on AIDS
policy, have determined that revealing the
infant's status is a violation of the woman's
privacy and her right "not to know."
Can you imagine any caring, responsi-
ble parent who would not want to know
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that her
newborn is at risk for a
deadly disease and that there are steps she
must take to protect and care for her baby?
Since 1987, when we started the
anonymous screening program, over
12,000 infants have tested positive in New
York State alone. Particularly tragic is the
fact that 75 percent of the infants do not
have the virus, only the mother's antibod-
ies; yet the mother, who is herself infected,
must be wamed not to breast-feed in order
to avoid transmitting the virus. For the 25
percent who do have the virus, there is
now life-prolonging treatment.
McGovern raises the specter of women
suffering discrimination if the information
is disclosed. But the "Baby AIDS" bill
requires that the information be made avail-
able only to the parents, or, if the infant has
been abandoned, to the caregiver. In the
past, in dealing with sexually communica-
ble diseases, we have managed to provide
treatment and still protect the confidentiali-
ty of the victims of the disease. In any
event, the health of the infant must take pri-
ority over any other consideration.
McGovern assures us that the "solution
is to make effective counseling and good
medical treatment mandatory." This is
hardly a new idea. The Department of
Health, aware of the public health disaster
they were facing, invested millions of dol-
lars in counseling programs designed to
persuade mothers to be tested in 24 hospi-
tals in New York State where high risk
women give birth. Those programs were
an abysmal failure; only 16 percent agreed
to testing, 24 percent knew their status
when they entered the hospital and 60 per
cent of the infants left the hospital undiag-
nosed and untreated. Nowhere does
[Continued on page 31]
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BRIEFS,
Resources
SHAMELESS
Some things never change.
Three years ago, City
Limits visited 116-118 West
112th Street a six-story apart-
ment building owned by
Benjamin Sneed. At the time,
Sneed's building had 600
housing code violations, with
cracked ceilings and exposed
wires in many of the apart-
ments. The elevator was bro-
ken; windows were shattered.
Sneed himself was on trial for
failing to' make city-ordered
repairs and City Limits named
him as one of the New York's
worst landlords in its "Shame
of the City" series.
Sneed ended up spending
just one day in jail for his mis-
.. FPOOR .....
......... 1'IIIIouIIy, they
would seldom be poor for
long in the first place,"
claims NYU professor
Lawrence Mead. Yep, it's
obviously got nothing to do
with economics, education,
bureaucracies. racism. Must
be those poor dummies'
lad of good sense. For a
stellar rebuttal of this
painfully prevalent point of
view, see the freshest wort
of Jonathan Kozol, released
last month: "Amazing
6raa," published by Crown.
HALF apia as IMIIJ
JOUIIC ........ in
poverty today as in 1976.
One in three juvenile
M
deeds. Today, despite owing
the court more than $25,000 in
fines and the city more than
$154,000 in back taxes and fees,
he still owns the building.
Conditions, residents say, are
worse than ever.
"So many things need to be
fixed; says tenant association
President Glenda Credle, a for-
mer city worker who has lived
in Sneed's building for eight
years. "The windows are
cracked, the heaters don't
work. the kitchen ceiling has
collapsed. I can't even use two
rooms.
Minnie Williams, 96, has
lived in Sneed's building for 20
years. She requires round-
the-clock care because of her
diabetes. Yet the city's Human
Resources Administration has
threatened to stop sending
her night attendant if the
detainees were on drugs
when they were arrested. If
current trends continue,
juvenile arrests for violent
crime will double by 2010.
Want more? Read the
recently released "Juvenile
Offenders and Victims: A
National Report" Call the
Juvenile Justice Oearing-
house at (BOO) 638-8736.
apartment's heating system
isn't fixed. Williams says she
has been asking Sneed for a
new radiator for 17 years. This
year, Credle reports, Sneed
told her "to find another
apartment.
Most of all, it is the struc-
tural integrity of Sneed's
building that alarms the ten-
ants. Many of the walls bulge.
All of the apartments are
infested by rodents and
insects. Water leaks have
damaged the building's upper
units. Residents fear that
some of the 18 children living
there could be injured by one
of the loosely fastened elec-
trical sockets.
Hopes weren't always so
dim for residents here. In
February 1993, the city took this
building and another owned by
Sneed at 157 West 129th Street
into in-rem tax foreclosure.
The city's Department of
Housing Preservation and
Development (HPD) still owns
the 129th Street property.
However, Sneed was able to
reclaim the 112th Street building
in late 1993 after paying back
taxes. At the time, housing offi-
cials ordered him to make
repairs. It appears Sneed flouted
the order. HPD Spokeswoman
Deborah Boatwright says the
building now has 805 recorded
housing code violations.
Sneed, however, is unre-
pentant "I've made $53,000 in
repairs; he says. "I've correct-
ed 90 percent of the housing
code violations. The problem is
the tenants. They're lazy and
they don't work. All they want is
to sit around and wait for their
social security checks:
Ben Howe
LONG ROAD HOME
The Urban Justice Center
is launching a new project,
the Underground Railroad,
giving a new name to a move-
ment that has been going on
for years: poor and homeless
people entering city-owned
abandoned buildings, making
repairs and claiming them as
their homes.
The Underground Railroad
has identified three aban-
doned buildings-in Bedford
Stuyvesant, Harlem and Park
Slope-that the city obtained
through tax foreclosures, and
is asking officials to turn them
over for sweat equity rehabili-
tation by mostly homeless
men and women. The project
coordinators, Lisa Daugaard
and Cameron Levin, hope that
eventually the buildings could
become tenant owned coop-
eratives. They are challenging
the city to acknowledge and
legalize sweat equity housing
for some of the 1,661 vacant
buildings (17,000 vacant units)
controlled by the department
of Housing Preservation and
Development (HPD).
The project was devel-
oped through regular meet-
ings with a core group of 25
to 30 shelter residents and
tenuously housed people
involved in leadership train-
ing, housing and welfare
issues who wanted to call
attention to the fact that
there isn't an adequate sys-
tem for providing permanent
housing for people in or seek-
ing to leave shelters.
Daugaard says that the
city's "general rhetorical
claim that the city is going to
house homeless people; is
basically "a massive fraud."
Mara Neville, spokesper-
son for HPD, disagrees. "It's
absolutely ridiculous to think
the city is letting vacant build-
ings sit idle; she says, adding
that HPD has the resources to
rehabilitate all city-controlled
abandoned buildings. She
calls homesteading U an
appealing and romantic idea;
but says her agency's Urban
Homesteading project, aban-
doned in the mid-1980s, was
inefficient.
Underground Railroad
wants to identify abandoned
buildings not yet slated for
city-funded rehabilitation
and allow shelter residents,
through an already existing
network of homesteaders,
building suppliers, archi-
tects, plumbers and electri-
cians, to make these build-
ings habitable.
Kevin Heldman
ClTVUMITS
CUTS BOTH
WAYS
Are the poor being input?
Or putout?
The question is at the heart
of the debate over city efforts
to improve computer systems
tracking everything from taxes
to child care benefits.
City Hall says that
improved computer systems
will allow the government to
do more with less. But detrac-
tors nota that the most impres-
sive technology gains so far
have been reserved for initia-
tives like electronic finger-
printing of welfare recipi-
ents-e relatively ineffective
attempt to cut the welfare rolls
by eliminating fraud-and
other efforts aimed at stream-
lining benefits to the poor.
Moreover. at least one sys-
tem designed to ferret out
scofflaws in the broader popu-
lation has fallen victim to
bureaucratic ineptitude. A
recent audit by city
Comptroller Alan Hevesi found
that development of the
Department of Finance's FAlR-
TAX system, meant to consoli-
date tax collections. is more
than three years behind sched-
ule and wiH cost nearly $160
million-seven times the origi-
nal S22.6 miHion estimate.
IU. a joint haaring for the
City Councifs Committee of
Generel Welfare and the city's
Task Force on Technology in
Government. Councilman
Stephen DiBrienza observed
thet many of the Giuliani
administration's most effactive
technological advances have
been about denying services,
not improving them.
Critics charged that the city
has done little to improve com-
puterization for case managers
and other city e,,!ployees
whose productivity could be
witty improved.
Officials, however, main-
tain that the city is merely
doing what any good business
has alreedy done. Says Gino
Menchini, director for citywide
information systems in the
mayor's office: 'We're using
technology to increase busi-
ness and reduce cost
JIIliIm CtImiJo PoW
NOVEMBER 1"5
HARLEM IMPATIENCE
Governor Pataki, was instru-
mental in brokering an agree-
ment
After months of political
jockeying and backroom nego-
tiations, the New York City
Empowerment Zone may finally
get off the ground.
Governor George Pataki
announced in late October that
the state will provide its share
of empowerment zone financ-
ing. This money was expected
last spring, but Pataki and
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have
been feuding over who will
appoint the chair of the
empowerment zone's govern-
ing board. Pataki wants a say,
while Giuliani is insisting on
complete control as stipulated
in the original plan.
The Clinton administration
initiative is slated to pump $300
million in federal, state and city
funds into Northern Manhattan
and a small part of the South
Bronx during the next 10 years.
However, the feds have
refused to cut the first check
Short Shots
SAY WMI'? Just ...,.
...... exCOlWing tile MIA
board for spending too
much on exerutive pay,
Mayor 6iuliani was publidy
defending a proposed 27
peKent pay hike for-guess
who?-himself and his
until the mayor and governor
iron out their differences. Other
cities have long since been
barreling ahead with their own
zone projects.
Apparently, the stalemate
here is nearly resolved,
although details were not
available as cay Limits went to
press.
-I think they've both come
to terms and realized that they
have a larger good at stake
here,- says Esther Fuchs, a
Columbia University professor
who was involved in the draft-
ing of the plan. -New York
State can't do well unless New
York City does well, and I think
Pataki has come to recognize
that-
Sources say Richard
Parsons, chairman of the
Upper Manhattan Empower-
ment Zone Development
Corporation and a close ally of
both Mayor Giuliani and
It's about time, as far as the
scores of people who helped
plan the project are con-
cerned. That is, if the governor
actually delivers.
-It's frustrating from the
community point of view,
because we want to get start-
ed, - says Denise Scott, coordi-
nator of UMEZDC. -Both com-
munities-Manhattan and the
Bronx"--have been patient, and
to some degree, that patience
is running out-James Bradley
commissioners. See how
that plays in tile neighbor-
hoods.
SEXUAL ............
may ...... easy when the
target is a newcomer to tile
country and dependent on
her employer. But cleaning
woman luz Ruiz. whose we
we reported in February,
has finally seen justice win
out The company that
employed her-and whose
supervisor harassed her-
has agreed to a settlement
The city's Commission on
Human Rights had already
affirmed a decision to
award Ruiz $450,000.
BRIEFS ~

PROFILE (
1
Students in the
Media Works
program pro-
duced a public
service video
on racism.
-
Station Identification
A course in media literacy teaches young people that the
medium is the message. By Lise Funde'rburg
F
r high school senior Lani Parrilla,
taking a media literacy course has
had an unexpected result: he now
needs a watch. "I used to turn on
the TV and tell you what time it is," he
says. "I had this whole thing laid out."
"You, too?" asks fellow student
Rebecca Sinclair. "I could listen to Montel
and from where he is in his conversation,
tell you exactly what time it is, down to
the minute."
Parrilla and Sinclair say they rarely
watch TV these days. Since they've
learned how to decode images and ques-
tion their purpose, they are put off by the
sameness they see. "I used to really like
going to the movies," Sinclair says. Now
she gets bored. "I went to go see
'Desperado' and the only thing 1 could
think was: This is a Mexican 'Rambo.'"
Scott Rosenberg, the zealous founder
of the four-year-old nonprofit group Art
Start-the parent organization for Media
Works-couldn't ask for better results. A
visual artist himself (be describes his work
as minimalist mixed-media), the 32-year-
old transplant from Washington, D.C.,
launched Media Works in early 1994.
Art Start's main project, staffed by vol-
unteers, brings a rotation of visiting artists
and dancers to the city's homeless shelters
(see City limits, January 1994). While the
program offers flashes of creativity and
fun to people living in a typically bleak sit-
uation, its impact is vastly constrained by
the turbulence around it. Rosenberg real-
ized that to explore material more deeply,
he needed to find an environment with less
turnover and where participants were
roughly at the same level; in the shelters, a
class could consist of four-year-olds, their
parents, and every age in between.
Teaching a high school course, Rosenberg
hoped, would allow him to use popular
media and hip hop culture as a springboard
to critical thinking.
He found a school willing to let him in:
the New York ' City Public School
Repertory Company, a so-called "last-
chance" high school for students who have
an interest in the arts but who have had
problems in mainstream high schools.
Principal Ellen Kirschbaum welcomed
Rosenberg because his approach mirrored
her own. "In a society that does not neces-
sarily even value the arts," Kirschbaum
says, "we're one ofthefew 'right brain-left
brain' places that says the arts are an intel-
lectual pursuit." Media Works is perfect
for her students, who, she notes, have been
bombarded by electronic images from the
day they were born. "They probably rarely
sit in a house that doesn't have something
on. For them it's background to life, but
they're not always critical."
TooCnatlve
As soon as Rosenberg got into the
classroom, he realized that talking about
the material wasn't enough. The students
were too creative. "They were itching to
do something."
"Most of these students come from
really dramatically difficult circumstances,
economically and personally," he says. "I
think that [with these 1 young people, espe-
cially when .they've had to struggle and
stick with it and survive and persevere as
opposed to folding or being tossed by the
wayside or becoming a statistic, there's an
intellectual development and strength of
character that emerges. In some ways,
they're more advanced than kids who
come from better economic backgrounds."
After three semesters, Rosenberg found
he was spending more time on school
paperwork than with his students. So he
decided to move the project into a work-
shop-still for credit, but now held after
school and off the premises. Media Works
now meets every Wednesday afternoon at
FilmNideo Arts, a media education center.
In the workshop, students are asked to
analyze media and then create it.
Rosenberg has them view everything from
public service ads for prenatal care to the
opening credits for the movie, "Menace II
Society." All of it is dissected for meaning:
sounds, images, lighting, typeface, In one
exercise, students bleak down a television
commercial's audio track. They identify
five separate background noises, make a
script of the voice-over narration, and ana-
lyze how the components come together.
Then, with one student acting as director,
each of the others takes responsibility for a
piece of the soundtrack and recreates the
commercial with the TV volume turned off,
The summer before last, armed with a
$3,500 Board of Education grant, students
ClTYUIo4I1S
filmed their own public service video,
"Protect Your Child Against Racism,"
which is now in the final stages of editing.
Rosenberg would like to pursue similar
productions, but money is scarce. Art Start
is working on becoming an independent
nonprofit, but in the meantime Rosenberg
must rely largely on material contributions
from media organizations and the dedica-
tion of a handful of artists.
Social Comm.ntary
Media Works veterans Parrilla and
Sinclair will now mentor incoming stu-
dents. In a recent workshop, the two
demonstrated their new analytical skills.
Rosenberg held up a print ad from the
Benetton clothing company. Like the rest
of the company's controversial ad cam-
paign, this image has little to do with fash-
ion but plenty of social commentary. The
ad is simply a photograph of a nude bot-
tom stamped with the letters "H.I.V." and
"POSITIVE." Off to the side of the image
is a tiny reproduction of the company logo.
''What do you see?" Rosenberg asks.
"It's a butt," Sinclair exclaims. Rosenberg
begins a volley of questions: What do you
see? What are the connections? What are
the links? Using the Socratic method, he
tries to force his students to take their own
intellectual journeys. They reply that dra-
matic lighting gives the butt depth. It's a
"pretty butt" that attracts them, yet the
"H.I.Y. POSITIVE" puts them off. They
say the words look like a cattle brand or
maybe a tattoo. The purpose could be to
isolate people. Maybe, someone else sug-
gests, to bring a positive association to the
message.
"Why did they make this?" Rosenberg
asks. "Let's push this a little further."
"Benetton often takes people's preju-
dice and people's own assumptions and
makes it visual," Sinclair says. "You may
think something and feel something. But
to actually see it is unnerving."
Another artist helping to teach the
class, 24-year-old photographer Simon
Fulford, takes his turn in the questioning:
"When you see Benetton, what do you
think of?"
"I think of it as a cool company that
just wants everybody together," Parrilla
responds. "1 mean, yeah, everybody
together wearing their stuff."
Sinclair chimes in. "Yeah. Let's
unite ... wearing Benetton."
NOV.EMBER '"5
Focus and Follow Up
For both students, Media Works has
been a welcome relief from past educa-
tional experiences. Lani Parrilla says he
ended up at Repertory High after, as he
puts it, "I was invited to leave my school."
The medical honors program he was in
at his last school was overbooked, carrying
as many as 37 students in a class, he says.
If half were absent, he remembers teachers
would repeat the entire lesson the next day.
"I found the classes boring," he says,
admitting that he ended up cutting many
and going to the library where there were
computers to explore. "I built a very close
relationship with the librarian," he says.
Repertory was a big improvement, he
adds. It is a smaller school-teachers can
pay more attention to the students-and it
offers the media literacy program.
Rebecca Sinclair says Rosenberg has
taught her how to focus and follow up.
Now, if she calls a college for information
and gets no answer the first time, she' ll
call back until she does. Sinclair came to
Repertory after getting "distracted" at
another alternative school. "I was cutting
and going to parties. That's it, plain and
simple. I just got caught up in the trouble."
Their lives may not have completely
turned around: Parrilla still considers him-
self a goof-off, and Sinclair claims she's
lazy. But clearly they're both inspired to
think more critically, and they like it.
When asked to tell the best parts of this
experience, one might expect them to
choose the glamorous moments that
Rosenberg provided: discussions with
directors Jonathan Demme and Robert
Townsend; bit parts in a television ad; vis-
its to movie sets and museums.
But that's not it, Sinclair says. "It's not
so much meeting the people or going to
places, but actually learning the things that
you don't know. And learning them the
way Scott teaches them, you go: I gave
myself the answer. I wasn't given the
answer. You feel proud and you feel like
you've actually accom'plished something."
Parrilla agrees. ''You give a kid a new
tool, a toy, and he's going to go off and run
with it And when it becomes second nature,
then he's going to come back for more."
.,.". ... La .....
For Rosenberg, "more" is a plan to
teach the students how much they know by
making them teachers themselves. He's
negotiating with two other high schools to
offer the program this spring. One is
another last-chance high school, like
Repertory, but the other is a school for the
"gifted and talented." As teaching assis-
tants, Sinclair and Parrilla will have a
chance to defy the labels of who's smart
and who's not.
At times, Rosenberg is saddened by
how available the students make them-
selves for his field trips and late night pro-
duction sessions. "It shows how hungry
these kids are," he says. "It's heartbreaking
because this project is so small." Yet their
attendance tells him something else as
well. "It says to me that this is working.
This is definitely working."
Lise Funderburg is a Brooklyn-based
freelance writer.
s
RlblCCI
Sincleir end
Leni Plrrilll
now PlY clo.e
Ittention to
hidden medii
millege .
-

VERBATIM ~
,
Spark the Fire
Organizer Charles Barron talks about environmental justice
and the politics of Brooklyn. By Andrew White
W
hen a Long Island-based
company, Atlas Bioenergy
Corp., announced a plan last
spring to build a wood-burn-
ing incinerator in East New York. a buzz
went around the Brooklyn community.
Politically, the economically deprived
neighborhood has long been split into fac-
tions, undermining residents' ability to
fight abuses by both the private and public
sector. This time, something clicked. Block
associations, community housing groups,
churches and others joined together and,
with technical help from a few citywide
organizations, won a stunning success: last
month, city environmental regulators ruled
that the proposed incinerator was illegal.
Charles Barron, a former Black
Panther; longtime organizer and political
ally of activist ministers Jesse Jackson,
Herbert Daughtry and Al Sharpton, is
chair of the East New York Community
Committee Against the Incinerator.
Members of the group credit Barron and
Rachel Godsil of the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund with an unusually effective
tactic: instead of challenging the health
impact of the proposed incinerator; the
pair found a little-noticed clause in the
city's administrative code that outlaws
most privately sponsored refuse-burning
plants. It appears to have been a fatal blow
to the Atlas project.
AW: What did it take to bring together
a neighborhood where people have been
divided for so long?
CD: In East New York you have so
many camps and so many people who are
in so many folks' pockets, be they politi-
cians or people who are connected to
money, or people who have been given a
job or a program. People are very mis-
trustful, they always think there's a hidden
agenda, a hidden motive, that there's some
political ambition to remove somebody
from office or get somebody from the
other camp elected to the school board.
When you look at the school board, it's a
battle between Congressmen [Edolphus)
Towns and City Councilwoman Priscilla
Wooten, the district leader, Borough
President [Howard) Golden, Community
Board 5 .... Our success was that we carne
in independently, not tied to anybody. It
enabled us to stand up to anyone who
would try to manipulate our process. And
believe me, quite a few people tried.
AW: For instance?
CD: We had some real serious battles
with ACORN, we had some battles with
the borough president's office, and we
were concerned about the [city)
Department of Environmental Protection
and its inability to deal with us because
Commissioner [Marilyn) Gelber was a for-
mer chief of staff to the borough president.
She wanted to make sure, I believe, that
the issue stayed in the control of the bor-
ough president's office.
AW: What was it that struck you, that
said to you this is the time to take this on?
CD: I've been traveling allover the
country organizing other communities
around the same issues that were affecting
my community. I just said to myself, how
many times are you gonna walk out of
your neighborhood and do for other neigh-
borhoods what you're not doing for yours.
After that, I became the chairperson of
the coalition. We had a demonstration on
7
July IS, a 100 degree-plus day. Over 300
people came out. We had the Rev. Johnny
Ray Youngblood, the Cleveland Street
Block Association, churches, other com-
munity groups started to come out. And 30
or 40 people turned out every week to reg-
ular meetings.
AW: You decided to challenge the
entire environmental impact statement
(EIS) process by saying the incinerator
application itself was not legal.
CD: At one meeting some guy was
saying, "How do we know this application
is even legal?" I don't even know who he
was. Just a community person. But that
stuck with me. This EIS thing would have
taken a long time. That's how they beat
community efforts, by putting us through a
long, drawn out process where community
meetings die down and peter out. Our
lawyers found where the city administra-
tive code says that privately sponsored
refuse burning incinerators are prohibited
in New York City. The only exceptions are
medical wastes and the departments of
sanitation and transportation.
AW: In more general terms, how much
can be resolved in East New York by local
people trying to change things internally?
CD: I think the internal organization of
community people will influence the
external. Externally, East New York does-
n't get the respect it ought to receive
because it needs new leadership with a
new vision and a new kind of commitment
to our community. We need an emergence
of elected representatives that goes beyond
the clubhouse mentality, beyond the polit-
ical patronage mentality.
AW: In this city, not just in communi-
ties of color, accountability of public offi-
cials has often been lacking. People have
talked about changing that for years and
years and nothing has come of it.
CD: I'm very optimistic. The way you
hold people accountable is by doing exact-
ly what we are doing. You get active. You
get numbers of people moving. Right now
they are wondering, what do I want, what
am I running for. They figure I have to
want a job. When I tell them I don't, and
that at this present moment I am not seek-
ing any political office, they can't believe
it. It's principle. We can surely take 30 or
40 people a week and change East New
York. I believe in a protracted struggle.
Nothing happens overnight.
CITVLlMITS
J
NOVEMBER 1995
~ ...
... ,
CHASE
Community
Development
Corporation
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Corporation Finances Housing and
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Bruised and Battered
Eastern District is about as bad as high schools get. With restructuring at a
dead end, parents say they might be happier if the school were shut down.
By Winton Pitcoff
Eastern District
parent association
vice president
Carmen Gines
(leftl and presi-
dent Maria
Deleon want the
state to ta ke over
the school.
f.
E
ven Maria Deleon admits to try-
ing to avoid sending her children
to Eastern District High School in
Bushwick, Brooklyn. She told
school officials she had moved, giving
them her sister's address, so her children
could go to a different school. She didn't
get away with it, but Deleon, who is pres-
ident of the school's parent association,
says she knows of many parents who have.
DeLeon's daughter graduated from
Eastern District two years ago, but her son
is struggling through his program there
even though he never struggled in junior
high school. Deleon's niece also graduat-
ed from Eastern District, but found herself
ill-prepared for life after school; she says
she couldn't even score well enough on the
math portion of the military entrance
examination to join the U.S. Army.
Three years after staging a boycott of
Eastern District in order to draw attention
to the rising number of violent incidents at
the school, the parent association is back
on the offensive. Its members are charging
that school officials are doing nothing
about a failing academic program and still-
inadequate security. They also say the
administration has systematically ignored
the concerns of parents, students, and com-
munity members. This time the stakes are
higher, however: parents are asking the
New York State Department of Education
to decertify Eastern District and take the
school out of the city's hands-or possibly
even shut it down.
Low Enrollment
Eastern District was built in 1981 to
accommodate 2,974 students; current
enrollment is 2,032, down from 3,195 in
1993. At a time when other city high
schools are bursting at their seams,
Deleon sees the low enrollment as an
indication of neighborhood parents'
refusal to send their children to the school.
Academically, Eastern District ranks at
or near the bottom of city high schools.
Only about 13 percent of the students are
reading at their grade level, and last June
......... ---. ....... -
PIPELINE
only four graduates received Regent's
diplomas.
Of the 528 students who entered the
ninth grade in 1990, only one-quarter
graduated in 1994, another quarter
dropped out, and most of the rest were still
enrolled after the end of their fourth year
of high school. Close to two-thirds of the
students in the school in that year were
considered over-age for their grade.
School safety and chronic absenteeism
are concerns as well. Eastern District's
232 violent incident reports in 1995 rate
second only to one other high school in the
entire city, and more than 350 of the
school's students have been absent for 20
or more consecutive days this year.
All of this might be more tolerable, say
parents, if school administrators and city
Board of Education officials were doing
something to resolve the problems.
Deleon is particularly frustrated, she says,
because the administration has shut the
parents and community out of important
decision-making processes. When the
school needed a new principal last year,
parents and officials interviewed five can-
didates. She says her association felt Louis
La Bosco was the least qualified of the
five, but Assistant Superintendent Noel
Kriftcher him nonetheless.
'The Board of Education has been
insensitive and arrogant to any kind of real
input and change," agrees State
Assemblyman Vito Lopez, who has
worked with the parents for the past three
years. 'The Board's High School Division
has failed this community," he says.
"Nobody is holding Kriftcher respon-
sible for continuous failure under his
administration," says Marty Needleman,
attorney for the parent association and
Project Director for Brooklyn Legal
Services Corporation. He and others in the
neighborhood say the problem is not just
one of inaction. They charge that school
officials have effectively written off
Eastern District. 'The school serves as a
dumping gJ:ound for teachers and adminis-
trators rejected from other schools,"
Needleman says.
"Legally, if there was an investigation,
you would find that it's not a school, it's a
job factory," says Gil Vega, a member of
Brooklyn Community School Board 14,
who has also been working with the parent
association to get some answers from the
city. "It's a place to send staff who have
ClTVUMITS
J
..
done something wrong, or friends of the
administration who don' t want to work but
need a paycheck."
Kriftcher and La Bosco say these
charges are false. They blame their stu-
dents' lack of academic success on the fail-
ings of the junior high schools that feed
into Eastern District and they say the high
number of reported criminal incidents is
the result of the school's more vigilant
security mea ures. They also point to
efforts during the last three years by
administrators and school staff to work
with parents on devising a plan to restruc-
ture Eastern District into several smaller,
independent, specialized, and more man-
ageable schools.
But this project, too, has engendered
anger and distrust. When the top candi-
dates for coordinator of the restructuring
program dropped out, Kriftcher unilateral-
ly appointed a person from within the
school administration without consulting
the committee assembled for that purpose.
Though Kriftcher insisted he had every
right to make the appointment, the parents
disagreed. They promptly dropped out of
the planning process.
HOVEMBER 1995
Soon after, the parent association
called upon New York State to take control
of Eastern District away from Kriftcher
and the Board of Education. "We love
Eastern district," says Carmen Gines, vice
president of the parent association. "But
the way kids are learning here, it would be
better to close it down and send them to
another schooL"
Turn up the HNt
The state Department of Education, in
fact, first took notice of Eastern District's
situation in 1989, when it placed the
school on review after a three-year down-
ward academic spiral. The slate asked that
a school planning committee develop a
plan to address the school's problems. But
Eastern District has not shown improve-
ment, according to Associate
Commissioner of Education Sheila
Evans-Tranumn. She has recommended to
her boss, newly-appointed State
Commissioner Education Richard Mills,
that he tum up the heat on Eastern District
and sixteen other New York City schools.
At press time, Commi sioner Mills was
expected to make a final decision as to
whether or not the 17 schools shou Id move
to a more intense level of state oversight.
No New York City school has ever been so
censured, and that action would place a
more immediate burden on the city's new
chancellor and the Board of Education to
implement a plan for corrective action.
Principal La Bosco, when asked to com-
ment, says he has no knowledge of the
state's plans.
All the while, hanging over the school
is the threat of decertification-and the
closing of its doors. State officials say they
have no intention of taking control of the
school and running it; they would rather
leaves it up to the central board to figure
out how to radically rebuild the school's
academic program and meet the state's
certification standards.
After working with the parents associ-
ation since 1989, Deleon says this is her
last year with the organization. She is dis-
couraged about the last six years of work.
"I don' t see any progress. Right now I'm
just pushing for the state to take over."
Winton Pitcojf is a Brooklyn-based
freelance writer.


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Me

Order to Resuscitate
There are many ways to improve the child welfare system, if the mayor would
just give them a chance. By Rob Polner
N
ew York City's Child Welfare
Administration is one agency
over which Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, a self -described rein-
ventor of government, has absolute author-
ity. There is no need for him to wrangle
with Albany for mayoral control of its
nearly $1 billion budget. Nor is there an
independent chancellor of child welfare
whom the mayor could chase out of town
with a barrage of venomous criticism.
In other words, Kathryn Croft, the
deputy commissioner for
child welfare, is no
Ramon Cortines, the for-
mer schools chancellor.
She serves pretty much at
the mayor's pleasure, and
is a voice rarely heard
are crying out for top-to-bottom reform. If
children are to be protected, the agency
must get its act together.
And it can.
hpl.e.d Ranks
Here, for starters, are just a few ways a
truly hands-on mayor might begin to fix
CWA, which annually investigates 50,000
allegations of neglect and abuse involving
77,000 children. The agency is also the
ultimate guardian of those children pulled
from their homes and placed in foster care.
Each of the following suggestions has
been proposed by men and women who
are engaged with the CWA system in their
everyday work, some from the inside
where they toil as caseworkers and super-
visors, and some from the outside world of
~ ~ W e don't have a system to track
47,000 kids, to know where they are,
.. _---_ .. ' ... -
PIPELINE
where caseloads stand at double and
triple the professional standard, is a scan-
dal waiting to erupt.
Beef up caseworker training. A good
way to begin has been introduced by
Councilman Stephen DiBrienza, the chair-
man of the City Council's General Welfare
Committee.
The bill, endorsed by City Comptroller
Alan Hevesi, author of an audit revealing
sagging test scores for probationary case-
workers, would require a form of profes-
sional certification for these undervalued
city caseworkers who are required to have
a bachelor's degree but no social work
experience. For many years (though not
this past year, despite a continued dilution
of training efforts) CWA's own Child
Fatality Review Board has recornmended
expanding training opportunities.
And, CWA can, but doesn't, assume
leadership in developing a strong cadre of
professionally trained social workers who
can help instruct and oversee the growing,
lopsided number of inexperienced case-
workers who assist and investigate families
splintered by poverty and addiction.
A well thought out response to staffing
needs, backed by the mayor, would boost
from within an umbrella agency-the
Human Resources Administration-best
known these days for spending millions
on technology and staff to track down
welfare fraud.
who they are with, where they
are going. That's just scary. "
-
For all his campaign promises to revive
CWA, people both inside and outside the
agency describe it as dismal and deterio-
rated. Rounds of city and state cuts over
the past 22 months have stripped it of $200
million in funding and 275 caseworkers-
JO percent of the front-line staff-along
with 1,700 clerical employees. Scores of
city-funded preventive Services for trou-
bled families have also been eliminated,
leaving more children at high risk of mis-
treatment and of placement in foster care.
It is a safety net tom.
No single child welfare agency can be
expected to prevent every child death in a
city as bedeviled by poverty as New York.
But the promise of the Giuliani candidacy
was an end to crisis-by-crisis management
at CWA. With the agency looking more
dismantled than reinvented, and with
workers, former and current managers and
child care professionals describing
unprecedented levels of dysfunction, many
advocates and nonprofit contractors. In
general, the cost of measures that require
an up-front investment would be offset by
the likely productivity gains and assured
quality:
Restock the depleted ranks of child
protective caseworkers and loosen up on
overtime restrictions, especially for night-
time staff.
Child care professionals, the National
Association of Social Workers (NASW)
and the Child Welfare League of America
all make persuasive arguments about the
short- and long-term costs-including
legal and medical expenses-of a system
that fails in its mission to protect chil-
dren. The need for staff restorations at
CWA is obvious, the cost minimal. These
are relatively low-paid city employees
who conduct complex investigations of
troubled homes where children are
threatened. Any significant lessening of
this effort, as has occurred in a city
morale and help stabilize the agency-just
as Giuliani likes to point out that such an
effort at the police department has embold-
ened cops on the beat. NASW puts it this
way: "CWA should stand, as it did twenty
years ago, as an exemplary social service
delivery organization."
Restore preventive services to full
strength, including homemaking assis-
tance to overwhelmed mothers and drug
treatment and family counseling to those
whose infants who test positive at birth for
cocaine. A small investment in $6.50 an
hour homemakers-a program slashed by
the Giuliani administration-has been
shown to hold together stressed families
and prevent foster care placements. Each
child placed in foster care costs taxpayers
a minimum of $16,000 a year.
Computerize
Install personal computers tied to the
statewide child protection comppter sys-
ClTYUMITS
tern in every field office where casework-
ers are headquartered. The confidential
history of children in the "continuum of
care"-from the initial child abuse investi-
gation to foster homes to permanent place-
ment-should be at the fingertips of case-
workers and supervisors. Sadly, it is not,
and never has been: with case files not
computerized, copies of essential forms
sent to state regulators in Albany for even-
tual entry into a database are not accessible
in the city. This has resulted in hundreds of
cases simply disappearing off CWA's radar
and expensive delays, according to admis-
sions by the city in a legal scuffle over
staffing levels with the Legal Aid Society.
For now, Governor George Pataki
agrees that computerization is needed.
The state has issued a request for corpo-
rate proposals for installing a $100 mil-
lion computer system for CWA, just in
time to qualify for 60 percent federal
funding. But a similar effort during the
Koch administration collapsed under
bureaucratic wrangling.
Gail Nayowith, executive director of
the Citizens Committee for Children, sees
the project as overdue. 'The Gap clothing
store knows how many millions of jeans
and tops they sell and in what sizes and
styles they come. But we don't have a sys-
tem to track 47,000 to 50,000 kids, just to
know where they are, who they're with,
where they are going. That's just scary,"
she says.
Install a voice mail telephone system,
too. Every client and service provider
speaks of the frustration of not being able
to leave phone messages for agency staff.
And make use of inexpensive soft-
ware for keeping track of complaints to the
agency's understaffed ombudsman's
office. The Accountability Project, Inc., a
small, privately financed effort operated by
Public Advocate Mark Green, has been
able to troubleshoot effectively for hun-
dreds of individual clients, though it can't
hope to assist all of CWA's clients.
Encourage small, community-based
foster care programs, so the endangered
child wrested from his natural parents
remains in his own neighborhood and in a
healthy mix of child and family social ser-
vices with which local caseworkers are
familiar. An acclaimed model for this
approach is the Center for Family Life in
Sunset Park, Brooklyn, run by the Sisters
of the Good Shepherd. Barbara Blum,
president of the respected Foundation for
Child Development, says that such ser-
vices must be emphasized in a climate in
NOVEMBER 1"5
which resources are scarce.
Finally, open up a dialogue with the
people on the front lines of child welfare,
from case workers to service providers and
older teens who have spent much of their
lives in the system.
''I'm wondering why child advocates
who have been dealing with these issues
for many decades have not been consult-
ed on the mayor's agenda for children,"
says Dr. Vincent Fontana, head of pedi-
atrics at the Foundling Hospital, which
runs a 24-hour crisis center for drug-
addicted mothers and their children. He
says he doesn't see any kind of direction
for the agency from the mayor's office
except orders to downsize.
"If we have all this rhetoric about chil-
dren as our future, it's all rhetoric, not real-
ity. The reality is, children suffer."
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. ---.... ----------.. - - - - - - ~ .--
Wasted Days
High school students on the dropout track get an extra push toward
failure from a new, legally questionable policy. By James Bradley
ROXine Ind
Bridget Rodriguez
Ire sisters whose
school schedules
were reduced to
four cllSses IdlY.
i.
A
t Adlai E. Stevenson High
School in the Sound view sec-
tion of the Bronx, school secu-
rity is so tight students have to
take off their belts to pass through the
metal detector. Those who can't pass the
detector have to be frisked with a scanner.
Security guards are everywhere,
patrolling the hallways, talking into
walkie-talkies. These are some of the
measures the school is using to increase
student safety.
Last year, Stevenson began another
"get tough" measure, this one articulated
succinctly in flyers posted throughout the
school: "FAIL 4, GET 4." The caption
underneath reads: "If you fail four sub-
jects this term, you will only get four sub-
jects next term."
Stevenson is hardly the only school
with such a policy. Faced with shrinking
budgets and increasing attendance rolls,
many New York City public high schools
have reduced the number of daily classes
assigned to some students, primarily
those who have had academic problems.
The practice is in blatant violation of state
law, and educators and activists fear it
creates an incentive for academic under-
achievers to drop out of school.
Some schools claim to be using the
tactic as a way of lightening the load for
students in academic difficulty-an idea
whose validity experts in dropout pre-
vention adamantly oppose. Others,
meanwhile, are clipping schedules as a
means of coping with budget problems.
Either way, critics say the revelation
punctures a hole in Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's contention that cuts to the
Board of Education affect bureaucrats,
not students.
"High schools have adopted a policy
of triage, there's no question about it,"
says Jon Moscow of the Parents'
Coalition for Education, a group of public
scliool parents. "Some of the high schools
are giving kids the bare minimum of
classes, if that. We thought originally that
it was one or two schools, but we now
know that it's much more than that. It's
very prevalent."
PIPELINE
DHmecll Mot Worthy
The majority of students given shortened
school days, observers say, appear to be
those in academic difficulty-the very kids
who need more help and attention, not less.
Public school activists say officials seem to
be pushing out "undesirable" students
deemed not worthy of school resources in
these financially-strapped times.
"It's a very terrible practice," says
Noreen Connell, executive director of the
Educational Priorities Panel, a nonprofit
advocacy group with more than 50 mem-
ber organizations. "In the zoned high
schools, where all applicants must be
accepted, they take a look at students who
are lower-achieving and they don't just
give them one study hall, but two or three,
sometimes more." Study halls are essen-
tially free time.
New York State law mandates that high
school students receive a minimum of five
and a half hours in the classroom each
day-roughly the equivalent of seven peri-
ods, excluding lunch. There are excep-
tions. Students who have already accumu-
lated enough credits to graduate, for exam-
ple, are exempt from this rule, as are those
above the compulsory school age and
those who must take double sessions
because of overcrowded classrooms. But
even under those circumstances, a special
waiver must be acquired from the State
Department of Education.
Few of the students receiving shortened
days fall in these categories, however.
Manhattan State Assemblyman Steven
Sanders, chair of the Assembly's
Education Committee, is investigating the
matter. ''For the most part, in terms of the
shorter hours, it's absolutely contrary to
state regulations," he says. "If a school is
not adhering to the number of hours
required to provide instruction, they jeop-
ardize being reimbursed by the state.
Regulations must be adhered to."
Still, the law seems open to interpreta-
tion. At least that's how some high school
principals look at it. Alan Weiner, the prin-
cipal at Stevenson High School, says
shortened school days are a logical way of
dealing with students having trouble with
their grades. ''A student who is faiIing
classes will be best served by a shortened
school day," he says. "To give a faiIing stu-
dent a full day's worth of classes is educa-
tionally unsound." When questioned
whether this procedure violates state law,
aTYUMllS
s
Weiner responds: 'That's something you
can research. I have to do what I think is
best for these students."
get them into a meaningful post-high school
career, anything that serves to frustrate them
further-which this policy does-is going
IIJf you get only four
classes, it's going
Earlier this year, John J. Ferrandino,
the Board of Education's High Schools
Superintendent, wrote a letter to Diana
Autin of Advocates for Children saying
that "shortening a student's program is not
a disciplinary action; it is frequently an
appropriate guidance intervention. When
combined with support services, it may be
the most appropriate guidance strate'-
gy .... To require that students be given an
inappropriately long program is self-
defeating educationally and counter to the
goals we share."
But educators and experts in dropout
prevention say students denied classes are
often offered nothing constructive as an
alternative.
Carol Allen runs Pius xn, a youth
counseling service at Stevenson and four
other Bronx high schools that specializes in
dropout prevention. A soft-spoken yet stem
woman, Allen helps students cope with
outside social problems that affect
schoolwork. She says she believes a
er schedule may be necessary for some
dents with serious academic problelDS/oflI
only if counseling, tutoring and
vices are offered in place of classes.
to be a deterrent"
Students themselves attest to how the
policy can go badly wrong. Anne Cancel, a
sophomore at Stevenson, failed four class-
es in 1994 and was assigned only four
classes the following semester. "I said,
'Why? I need these classes.'" she recalls.
"Instead, they volunteered me for an
internship program. I was working in pedi-
to take you forever
to graduate. "
atric nursing at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital." mulate enough credits to graduate after
But Cancel received no credit for this work four years, at an annual cost of $150 to
and has now fallen back two grades. "If I $200 million in additional class time.
could have taken those four classes along Figures recently released by the Board of
with independent studies or something like Education indicate that of all the students
that, I would not have been in the grade I who entered high school in the fall of 1990,
am now." 51 percent graduated in four years, 30 per-
Some of Cancel's friends at Stevenson cent were continuing into a fifth year of
were pleased with their shortened sched- high school, and 18 percent dropped out
ules. 'They like leaving early and every- Many of those now in their fifth
thing. They 'Oh, I got four classes, I high school are to drop
tthe Meanwhile,

She says the "Fail 4, Get 4"
provides none of this. "It's a way of 01'",n"''''--1111111...
rid of students," she says bluntly. "If you
get only four classes, it's going to take you
forever to graduate. Also, your self-esteem
is lessened, because the school is saying
they don't have faith in you at all. So what
happens?" she continues. "You fall behind
in your classes. Next thing you know,
you're over-age. You have to take
classes over again with kids who are
three years younger than you.
well be out of the school. And
pushes them out."
Dropout Prey_ntlon
Pius xn is one of 270
funded through the Board of EdU(:allolrt.:.'>
state-funded, $14 million dropout preven-
tion program, administered by the United
Way. The program serves 35,(0) students
in 129 elementary, middle and high schools.
Alex Bettencourt, the program's director,
says truncating students' school days great-
1y hinders dropout prevention efforts. "To a
large degree it sets us back," he says. "If
we're really looking to get kids on track and
NOVEMBER 189'
it has been taking
for the city's public
high school students to graduate.
According to a 1990 report prepared by the
Educational Priorities Panel, one infour
public high school students does not accu-
cuts, but
"I know many
school adIllIDlstrators who have done
everything possible to maintain a full acad-
ernic program" in spite of the cuts, says
Alex Bettencourt '1'0 some degree, it's the i
ingenuity and creativity of a good school
administrator. It also has to do with will."
-
by Kierna Mayo Dawsey
photos by Jason Goltz
t was a bittersweet evening," recalls Bonnie
Genevich. "Young people gave some of their
best perfonnances ever because they understood
that this was rea1ly it. Toward the end of the
night there were long moments of silence and
then tears from young women and young men
and from all of us who worked with them." Genevich was once a
director of The Leadership Organization for Teenagers (The
LOFT) in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She can hardly believe it, but it's
been almost a year now since the closing ceremonies for the cen-
ter that once provided a viable alternative to the streets for young
people for close to 17 years. The LOFT "was kind of like the last
open community center [in the neighborhood] where kids could
walk in off the streets, no questions asked," she says.
The LOFT's good works were not enough to save it, however.
The organization-like at least 114 other youth service agencies
that depended on funding from the City's Department of Youth
Services (DYS) and other city agencies-could simply no longer
stay alive after massive budget cuts by the administration of Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani during the city's 1995 fiscal year, which ended in
June. That year alone, approximately 740 DYS contracts were
scaled back and 146 eliminated. A survey last spring by the City
Project, a budget watchdog group, examined only 20 percent of the
affected youth service agencies and found that, as a result of the
cuts, at least 1,059 staff members of various nonprofit groups have
been laid off and 640 others have had their hours reduced.
"Now when you walk outside, you still see youth from The
LOFT. They have nothing better to do but hang in the streets,"
says Martha Vargas, who lives near the former youth center. "You
know, that's how arguments and trouble starts."
The defunding of youth organizations has many citizens, youth
advocates and service providers gravely concerned. Communities
ClTVUMITS
MOVE ... SER 1995
are experiencing pangs of loss as young people are turned away
from locked doors and shuttered programs. More than $20 mil-
lion, fully one-third of the city's youth services budget for com-
munity groups, has been cut out of the current year's budget. Last
March, DYS Commissioner Alfred Curtis acknowledged to the
City Council that as many as a half-million fewer young people
would be served by his agency in 1996.
The fate of those youth agencies that remain open for business
is unclear. Many are resilient. They are struggling, maneuvering
with their own ingenuity and creative, cobbled-together strategies
to provide necessary services to a significant portion of the city's
1.7 million children. Many of them are also absorbing cuts in
their other social services programs, such as day care, mental
health, foster care prevention and drug counseling. They are find-
ing fewer places to refer children and parents in crisis situations.
And they are weathering the turmoil that has beleaguered DYS,
with contracts cut and restored, delays in payment and inconsis-
tent oversight, ever since Giuliani's first youth commissioner
resigned under a cloud of alleged tax fraud.
"Programs have been totally destabilized by this ebb and flow
of funding. You cannot ride these roller coasters and maintain sta-
bility," says Jean Thomases of the Neighborhood Family Services
Coalition. What is left is a city department meeting fewer and
fewer of the needs of the young people it is supposed to help
most-"at risk" youth. Those young people who, if someone isn't
looking, slip quick:\y through the cracks.
hen Paul Wilson, an employee of the Crown
Heights Youth Collective, says he would
"rather be here than out there," consider that
the best for everyone. In part because he is so
polite and perhaps even a touch soft-spoken,
you might never know that the 22-year-old is
a former "stick -up kid." "I was robbing a little bit
of everyone, people in the neighborhood and out of the neighbor-
hood," he says simply. He was eventually caught and imprisoned,
but life is much different' now for Wilson. Something meaningful
to do with his days was about all he needed, he says. A new man
stands in place of his former, cold self. He is engaged to be mar-
ried and even works some evenings at the Collective handing out
bags of food to needy families.
Wilson also supervises the Collective's "basement crew." He
works full days for a small stipend, overseeing the shop class
where students learn to build everything from cabinets to dry
walls. He is also responsible for keeping up with the garbage cans
the organization has placed thro\jghout the neighborhood, and for
the frequent "sweep downs" of surrounding blocks.
"I don' t have time for the streets anymore. The Collective has
opened my eyes to many things," Wilson acknowledges with evi-
dent pride. "I slowed down a whole lot. I guess if I hadn' t come
here I might be dead or way upstate somewhere in the mountains
for probably like 15 or 20 years. That's the way I was going. I was
going like a madman."
Richard Green, the Collective's slightly graying cofounder and
director, knew better than to fear Wilson. Sixteen years after he
started the organization by opening his own living room to the
young people of Crown Heights, Green still prides himself in that
type of wisdom, in that kind of love and passion for young people
regardless of their past.
"How you gonna stand and what you gonna stand for?" he
asks rhetorically. Perhaps an interesting question coming from a
man who has taken steady fire from the black community for what
he terms "coalition building" with the Hasidic Jews of Crown
Heights following the 1991 riots there. While he is often ques-
-4
Paul Wilson. 22.
turned his life
around with the
help of a Crown
Height. youth
group. He stands
beside a box
painted with the
names of some of
his murdered
friend
-
bottom with plaques, awards and statements of recognition, but
that is not what he sees. Instead he holds up a Baggie completely
stuffed with obituaries and funeral programs-memories of
young people who died too soon. "I look at this every single
morning," Green says. "This is my motivation.
"Youth services change lives, I'm telling you," he says.
"Sometimes it saves them."
he current DYS budget is on a par with that of 1991,
before the administration of former Mayor David
Dinkins trumpeted a new, proactive philosophy in
working with the city's youth. Dinkins more than dou-
bled youth services funding, boosting programs
focused on street outreach, organizing, leadership,
and after-school educational opportunities. As
Mayor Giuliani boasts about declining crime rates, few who work
in the youth sector believe police work is the only factor. "It was
the huge investment made in youth services," says the director of
one Manhattan youth agency that has lost nearly half its budget.
"We will now see the crime numbers going back up. Juvenile
arrests are already skyrocketing."
Tuootby Whelan, general counsel for DYS, insists the city still
bas a vested interest in youth programs but is simply too belea-
guered by a budget deficit to maintain the level of funding
Dinkins achieved in 1993. "It wasn't that agencies were shut
down, it's just that they were scaled down due to mid-year modi-
fications," be says. "Programs received less money but enough
money to operate with. Naturally, it created some level of disrup-
tion in service."
Many youth service providers insist that the defunding of pro-
grams bas been politically motivated, a charge officials deny.
'1ames BaM used W say the wo.rst persoft ift the w.,rld t., deal
these yo.q,.g people do.fI't hare aftJthiag wire f(Jr - They haag .,ut
tioned about where his real interests lie. one look inside the
Collective makes the answer clear.
On a Thursday evening at the multiservice center on Franklin
Avenue, he stands like a shepherd in a sea of children, many of
them very young.
"Hey, Mr. Green. What's up?" they say. "Check this out,
Brother Green."
The Collective is a holistic learning center and at any given
time you can find young people of all ages doing a host of differ-
ent things, from baking to debating. They have even established a
charter school, The Collective Fellowship and Peace Academy.
Since the budget cuts came down, the organization has lost
more than 60 percent of its city dollars, totaling about $250,000.
But Green says the numbers of youth who come here seeking ser-
vices has dramatically increased, partly because other neighbor-
hood groups have shut their doors. "Everyday there are more
young people looking for jobs, young people looking for counsel-
ing, young people just looking," he says.
Directly outside of the Collective's door is a wooden box
painted with the names of some of the young men from the com-
munity who have died violently. The ironic thing about being
inside of a place as alive as the Crown Heights Youth Collective is
that you absolutely know death has touched the lives of every
young person there.
Inside his cluttered office, Green could merely glance over at
anyone of his walls for inspiration. They are covered from top to
What they cannot deny is the deeply felt fear that most directors
of youth agencies have of speaking out publicly about the demise
of DYS. Most will speak only under a guarantee of anonymity out
of fear of losing what is left of their city contracts. They are all
afraid of what could happen in next year's budget.
"I have tried in a very positive way to build relationships and
offer constructive criticism," says one Manhattan agency director.
"But every time I appeal in the news, we get cut.. .. There is no dia-
logue. This has been a government that's not inclusive or interac-
tive. It is tightly sealed."
The view is echoed in interview after interview:
"Retribution from this administration is like nothing I've ever
seen," says one organizer.
"Under the Giuliani administration, nobody wants to talk. It's
the one administration I've seen where punishment is really doled
out to people who speak against it," says another.
'This is a politically tempestuous climate. We don't want to
open ourselves up to more problems. We have a lot at stake and
don't want to jeopardize it," says yet another.
Youth services providers have found an alternative to frozen
silence, however. Collective rather than individual efforts to lobby
for City Council support and public recognition can be effective
and relatively safe. In an attempt to ensure that specific centers are
not singled out and "punished" for speaking too candidly about the
cuts and the Giuliani administration, youth providers have formed
coalitions. Michelle Yanche of the Neighborhood Family Services
ClTYUwrrs
Coalition agrees that the bottom line to saving dollars is "massive
collective organizing, advocacy and outcry." Leading the efforts
today are the Emergency Campaign to Restore Youth Funding, a
coalition of nine groups, and Youth Agenda, a youth-run collective
of more than 120 organizations.
These groups have had some successes, winning the support
of the City Council and the restoration of several million dollars
in cuts last year.
But Councilman Victor Robles, chairman of the Youth
Services Committee, believes the fear and intimidation are taking
a toll. He says popular outrage has begun to dwindle.
"Community-based organizations and young people cannot be
silent," he says. "I'm disappointed that [in the spring] the council
didn' t receive the letters of protest we did last year. No one can
better represent young people than themselves. Of course, com-
munity organizations have to be more vocal and aggressive and
not just worry about whether or not they get their contracts
renewed. The squeaky wheel gets the oil."
.. fier 15 years of providing an after-school peer-
iI
tutoring program for teens at a local elementary
school, Howard Knoll finally had to tum kids
away. Knoll is director of the Stanley Isaacs
Center, an Upper East Side-based comprehensive
family center that serves hundreds of low income
families. In the weeks and months following the after-school pr0-
gram's closing, his former students continued to show up, hoping
for a miracle. "In the beginning they would come back day after
day," he says. But he simply couldn't staff the program.
"Fundamentally, these programs contribute to the quality of
life in the community just like churches, schools and other insti-
tutions do. We should naturally support them," Knoll insists.
with is ODe who dOesD't hare IlIyttHg to. Ire fo.r. Will abo.ut that
at the ChiDese restaurallit the brOthers sit " to.p of .sters."
'There are places for senior citizens to go and we clearly need that
same thing for young people. Children have developmental needs
that have got to be met. The city needs to develop a sense of vision
of what it wants for its children. Right now there is none."
It's a passion to be found across the board among the city's
youth providers, whether or not they feel secure speaking out pub-
licly. 'The city could find dollars if it wanted to," says Richard
Green. 'They found over $6 million in overtime for the cops in ten
days when Crown Heights crashed. If you took that same money
and put it in youth programs, it would have a tremendous impact.
Consider what it takes me to provide for Paul [Wllson] for a
year--$3,000. When you lock him in Rikers for nine months, you
spend $30,000. If you send him upstate to one of the peniten-
tiaries, it's up to $80,000.
''It's a matter of, 'Where are your priorities? Prevention or cure?' ''
He adds. "James Baldwin used to say the worst person in the world
to deal with is one who doesn't have anything to live for. Think about
that; these young people don't have anything to live for ....
"You look outside, take a walk down the block, there's noth-
ing. They hang out at the Chinese restaurant, the brothers sit on
top of dumpsters. It's disheartening. I'll be honest with you. To me
it's like catching water in a basket. Because I know we could
change this whole thing. These youth out here, they want to
change right now. Just want someone to show them how. Nobody
is saying, 'This is what we want to do for the youth of New York
City.' Everybody talks about the budget, about who's going to save
MOVE ... BER 1"5
the mayor's money. Nobody says, 'We have a straight, strict vision
for the youth of New York City."
he Door, A Center of Alternatives, is a 24-year-old
agency that offers a vast amy of services to young pe0-
ple from bealtb care to legal help. "BasicaJ]y, we have
to do a lot of resbaping and a lot of reconfiguring," says
Sabrina Evans, a development associate at the organi-
zation's four-floor complex near Canal Street. 'The
becC)lDlIlg very disruptive."
After school, young Door members come in to take advantage
of their free access to physical and creative activities, or to seek
professional, one-on-one counseling. About half of The Door's
funding comes from the government, both city and state. When
the cuts came down, they lost about $400,000.
Though the agency has tried to avoid scaling back programs by
cutting administrative costs, The Door has undergone two recent
rounds of employee layoffs and is in the process of planning a
complete internal reorganization. Remaining staff have heavier
workloads and more responsibility. Try as they might to lessen the
blow to services for young people, some change& are inevitable.
"We cannot replace counselors or teachers as they leave;' Evans
concedes. 'The biggest impact on the quality of service to young
people is the amount of time you can spend with them."
Evans projects that in the near future some entire programs
Richlrd Grlln
stertld thl Crown
Heights Youth
Collective 19 yeers
Igo in his living
room. HI believes
only sllf-sufficiency
will keep the group
elive.
-
-
within the agency will have to go. Because they were forced to
layoff both their music and their basic skills instructor, those pr0-
grams will likely crumble. Even though, Evans admits, they were
popular progrims kids depended on.
Social service cuts by both the stale and city have bad a DOOe-
too-subtle impact as well. For young people who aren't on
Medicaid, for instance, there is no longer any access to the free
mental health services that were available only one year ago.
SeveraJ programs for pregnant teens have disappeared as well.
The Door could once refer their members to whatever services
they needed when a crisis struck. Now the agency's pared-down
staff bas to deal with crises every day; the referrals are corning to
them rather than from them, because there are few other places for
troubled teens to go. "Kids are getting hit by the cuts from all
angles. Just about every social service they depend on is disap-
pearing," Evans says.
"We are seeing an increasing number of runaway and homeless
youths," adds Maria Nicolaidis, who supervises The Door's coun-
seling services. "We are seeing a lot more with emotional and psy-
chological trouble. A lot more crises." Is it changing the nature of
The Door? "Of course," she says.
The same holds true for many other agencies as well. There is
an interdependence among social service agencies from day care,
to welfare, to shelters for the homeless. The Valley, a multiservice
agency for youth based in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, has
lost roughly $2 million in funding for its various programs. Its
$420,000 drug treatment program for adolescents has been com-
pletely defunded, and its nine-year-old employment opportunity
program for young people who have dropped out of school is gone
as well. Neither of those were DYS programs. Indeed, the sum
total of closed youth services once funded by other agencies out-
weighs the total cuts in DYS.
aying off employees, doubling up responsibilities,
shortening staff hours and, sometimes, cutting pro-
grams are only some of the tactics groups are using to
survive. At The Valley, teens who need drug counsel-
ing are being funneled into other programs within the
agency and staff give whatever help they can. Not long
ago, members each contributed a few days of their work
without pay, saving the organization $60,000.
It takes nothing short of an undying commitment from the
folks who run the community-based groups to keep them going.
"I literally took out a second mortgage on my home to keep this
program running. We needed immediate money when contracts
were held up in December," says Green at the Crown Heights
Youth Collective. He didn't get his money back until the City
Council restored a portion of his funding last spring.
Green's survival plan for his cherished collective is rather
ambitious but it is also what folks in black nationalist circles have
been talking about for years: self-sufficiency. "You can't depend
on city dollars anymore." Green concedes, although until this year
the group depended on the city for close to 80 percent of its fund-
ing. "It's incumbent upon us to be able to survive no matter what
they throw at us. We've got to start building from inside."
So far, Green is putting his money where his mouth is; earlier
this year he invested in a 20-acre apple orchard in upstate New
York to serve both as a source of revenue and a place to take kids
when they need to get out of the city. Young people will be farm-
ing and harvesting and selling apple products. The Collective has
even purchased trucks and hopes to begin a small construction
business. Older teens trained in the Collective's basement shop
will contract out their services.
Other agencies are using similar survival tactics.
"Tbese cuts are extreme," says Wendell Ramsey, assistant
director of the Valley's Beacon School community center at
Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem. 'They've affected us so
severely that our already short staff has had to spread themselves
thinner. It's gotten so tight that security personnel has had to
become tutors and recreational aids," he says. "People have to
wear many hats. Specialization has gone completely out the win-
dow. When we hire, we look for a background that is diversified.
You basically have to be able and willing to do it all. Hey, I sweep,
mop and tie up trash bags."
From where does the motivation come? The kids, naturally. In
this Harlem community where drugs and delinquency are in over-
whelming abundance, so is talent. In the school's lunchroom,
which tonight is doubling as a gym, Ramsey stands back and
proudly watches two ll-year-old girls spar in karate. They are yel-
low belts. "These are our children. We must take care of them." he
says. "Sure, the budget cuts have limited our abilities to equip
each program with things that would greatly aid us, but we make
a shift. We get parents involved. We struggle."
Ramsey speaks to what may be all of the surviving agencies
toughest assignment finding the will to keep struggling. "Staying
alive is an uneasy task," admits Richard Green, again peering over the
sea of young faces. But on his wall is a quote from Frederick
Douglass. It reads simply: "Without struggle, there is no progress."
ClTVUMITS
R
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...
By Kim Nau'f
fVfIItm-Y.ir-oI4 1m JOhllSOll, Jr. is not .uily put off.
Hollering above the screech of the uptown Number
6 train, the Vanguard High School senior beseeches
two of his friends to take an interest in the subway
fare hike, and the fact that the city might eliminate
student transit passes. They just smile, slightly
embarrassed. Disembarking in East Harlem, he con-
tinues the tirade, ticking off injustices committed by
the mayor, the governor and the president. This is
everybody's fault, he says pointedly. People deserve
what they get because they didn't vote.
But the subject of the police is a different matter. For kids in
his neighborhood, mostly blacks and Latinos, facing down arrest
y@ar Giuliani bKaJD@ mayor.
With l10 young p@opl@ pla(@d
in handcuffs @v@ry day, aff
N@w York's poli(@ boosting
publi( saf@ty-or sowing s@@ds
of hat@ and f@S@ntm@nt?
has just become part of the daily routine. Nothing, it seems, can
be done about that. "You're black. You're six-foot. It's what you
got to expect," Johnson says.
Apparently so. According to crime statistics just released by
the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, juvenile arrests
jumped by almost 30 percent in the first year of Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's term. In 1994, police arrested 98,413 children and
teenagers on everything from loitering to murder. Youths who
were arrested more than once that year, would be counted repeat-
edly in these statistics. Still, the figure represents more than IO
percent of the city's teenage population.
Importantly, four out of five of these arrests were for nonvio-
lent crimes. More than 41,000 were for violations known as "non-
CITY LIMITS
fingerprintable offenses" such as drinking and disorderly conduct.
The statistics show that Police Commissioner William Bratton,
true to his word, has turned up the heat on low-level street crime,
often committed by children and teenagers. But the numbers also
show that police are present to a greater degree than ever before in
the lives of inner-city kids.
Backed by the thinking of an influential new school of crimi-
nologists, Commissioner Bratton has argued that catching kids
doing small things, like turnstile jumping, will avert them from
commiting more serious crimes, like subway robberies.
Moreover, the strategy provides police with an excuse to search
more teenagers, and to catch those carrying weapons or drugs.
Finally, there's the generally held belief that increased police
presence will make everyone feel safer and more willing to report
crimes they see.
The result, say students citywide, is that more youths than ever are
being handcuffed and hauled into station houses. Often the charges
are dropped or are too minor to be adjudicated. (Officials in Family
Court and the District Attorney's offices say their caseload, while ris-
ing, does not reflect a 30 percent increase in arrests.)
Community activists warn that new officers, rarely residents of
the neighborhoods they patrol, are often ill-trained and incapable
of distinguishing which young men are the real street criminals.
They say that sweeping arrest policies are, at best, insensitive and,
at worst, an invitation for kids to lash back, getting themselves
into even deeper trouble with the law.
"It's a whole cycle," says Joyce Hall, executive director of the
Greater Brownsville Youth Council. "Having no place to go, kids
are hanging out on street corners. The police want to move them
along and some of them get caught up. The police don't talk to the
kids respectfully-and the kids react."
At different times over the last year, Hall reports, all 10 of her
male staffers and peer counselors have been stopped for police
questioning; some have been stood up against a wall and frisked.
Such reports have become so frequent in East New York, Hall
says, that she is planning to teach a course this winter on how kids
should handle the police.
"We're going to go to the kids and saying, if you get caught up
in the sweep, just do what they ask. Keep your head. Don't react
if they call you 'nigger.' Just try not to react at all.
"But that," she adds dolefully, "is one of the most difficult
things for a young person to do."
H
ili iIId COIIIIIIUIIity Idivists 1ft not ~ tINt tilt poIkt
department ignore youth crime. Gang and drug-related vio-
lence have long plagued neighborhoods like East New
York, Washington Heights and the South Bronx and their
problems now mirror national trends.
While overall crime rates have been going down in cities
nationwide, juvenile arrest numbers have kept climbing. In
August, the U.S. Justice Department released a study tracking
youth crime. The authors reported that juvenile violent crime
arrests jumped 47 percent between 1987 and 1992. Noting that
the nation's teenage population is expected to increase another
20 percent during the next decade, they predicted that violent
youth crimes could double in frequency by the year 2010 if cur-
rent trends continue. The number of murders, they added, could
increase by as much 145 percent.
Other researchers caution that these statistics-which make
for glaring headlines--<:reate the perception that the young com-
NOVEMBER 1995
mit most inner-city crime. Nothing could
be further from the truth, says Marc Mauer,
assistant director of The Sentencing
Project, a respected Washington-based
think tank. Fewer than one-fifth of all vio-
lent crimes are committed by juveniles, he
notes. Still, this minority, committing
increasingly high-profile crimes like mur-
der and armed robbery, are setting the
juvenile justice agenda for police depart-
ments nationwide.
''There's a feeling going around in the
media, and the public to a certain extent,
that a lot of 14, 15 and 16 year olds are just
beyond any hope. They're completely irre-
deemable," he says. "Yet the number that fit
that description are a relatively small frac-
tion of what's going on. For many, it's the
whole circumstance of their lives, the
impact of drug policy and addiction. If there
were some constructive intervention, a lot
of these kids could be turned around-
they're not just crazed psychopaths."
The mayor and police commissioner,
pointing to the fact that overall crime rates
are declining, have repeatedly asserted that
their crime strategy is working just fine.
While neither Bratton nor Giuliani's
spokespeople would talk specifically about
the administration's juvenile justice policy,
a police manual outlining Bratton's youth
crime strategy shows that the department is
relying almost exclusively on increased
police presence and the use of force.
Published last year, the manual includes
five law-and-order initiatives, most of
which have already been implemented.
They include designating truant officers to
get kids back in school, reassigning detec-
tives to strengthen cases against violent
kids, setting up a citywide juvenile data-
base to track youth crime, and tripling the
number of youth officers to investigate all
crimes, "serious and petty."
The strategy manual also notes that
police should enlist the help of families
and school officials to find safe places
where kids can spend time after school.
Yet this goal, the only one that could be
considered in the spirit of community
policing, receives a mere two paragraphs
at the end of Bratton's 32-page booklet.
In the long run, this approach won't
succeed, says Geoffrey Canada, president
of the Rheed1en Centers for Children and
Families and author of the recently pub-
lished book, "Fist Stick Knife Gun: A
Personal History of Violence in America."
High-crime neighborhoods need polic-
ing-but they need fair policing, he says.
-,
"Most young people believe they are
all treated the same," he says, regardless of
whether they are honors students or
thieves. That leads to a cynical view of the
police, a sense that police officers can't be
trusted. In tum, young people begin to
believe that no one is there to protect them
from real criminals, he says. "They begin
to deal with their own issues. By looking
for personal revenge. Or by simply not
reporting acts of assault and other types of
crimes they see." None of which, Canada
notes, is terribly helpful when police are
trying to solve youth crimes.
I
f IrIttH .'t Mlim c.Ni, lit shoulel
... with SOIIIf school chikIrtn. A lot of
young people, including many who
have never had run-ins with the police,
say they distrust their local officers now
more than ever.
"Sometimes I worry, because the police
are murderers," says Adiana Molina, a 13-
year-old girl from Washington Heights.
''They're killing people who are innocent,
especially Latin people. And you know
what? Because they are the police, they
don't do nothing about it.... It's very bad.
It's not fair."
When asked if she would ever ask the
police for help, Adiana replies that she would
like to, "but I'm afraid" Her friend Roxanne
Maria, also 13, chimes in that she would be
willing to talk to the police. But she has only
one pointed question: "I want to ask them,
'What do you think your job is all about?'"
Commissioner Bratton and Mayor
Giuliani would do well to think about this,
criminologists say. While both can be just-
ly praised for getting police back into the
streets of high-crime neighborhoods, such
strategies only increase the level of "for-
mal" social control, says Mark Moore, a
professor of criminal justice policy at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University. He says many of his
colleagues believe any successful long-
term effort must somehow foster "infor-
mal" social controls, the kind that families,
pastors and youth leaders provide. Such
work is labor-intensive, he adds, but it has
been proven to work in smaller cities
throughout the country. "That is what
community policing and community
courts are all about."
Bratton's shotgun approach is also mis-
guided, says David Kennedy, a senior
researcher at Harvard. He believes police
work can be targeted more effectively,
explaining that much of the worst violence
and bloodshed can be traced to just 2 or 3
percent of the kids in a neighborhood.
Using more refined police techniques,
which he and others at Harvard are devel-
oping, officers can track the activities of
these juveniles, get them off the streets and
into secure programs designed specifically
to help them. Young people who do not
show the same propensity toward violence,
Kennedy adds, can be better helped out-
side of the juvenile justice system, free of
their most intimidating peers.
Above all, youth advocates say, it
shouldn't be the police department's job to
keep teenagers off the streets. That's the
responsibility of parents, schools and com-
munity-run programs, says Lonny
Shockley, a coordinator at Friends of Island
Academy, a youth group that works with
older teens released from Rikers Island.
Mayor Giuliani should be supporting youth
programs with this goal in mind, he says.
"I have a four-year-old daughter," says
Shockley. "If I tell her she can't do some-
thing, I try to have another option. I don't
just say, 'Don't do it' and leave it at that.
The same is true of these kids. There have
to be alternatives instead of just saying,
'No, no, no, no, no.' Don't take drugs. Don't
hustle. The next question is, 'What am I
going to do? How are you going to help
meT To me, it's a very legitimate question."
Rich McClain, who, having been sent
to Rikers Island three times himself and
now counsels young men through
Shockley's program, says that despite their
hardened image, the young people in these
neighborhoods are impressionable and can
be reached. "At fouf!een, fifteen years old,
it's easy to put anything into their heads.
The drug dealers know that. The cops
should know that too." _
Crossland
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CITVLlMITS
:J:'
-!!
Z
andra Myers has been working at the Claddagh Inn, a
soup kitchen in Far Rockaway, for seven years. She
remembers being in church in 1988, literally praying to
God for a job, when the minister asked for volunteers.
She showed up.
Today her title is executive director and when she talks about
working as a volunteer on a soup line, she mentions how impor-
tant it is to talk, listen, allow people their humanity. That last
speaks to much of what is wrong and right with the industry with
its executive titles, its career tracks in charity, and Myers' real-
ization that every policy, organization and service plan is only as
good as where worker's eyes are focused when a crackhead,
homeless vet or alcoholic is telling the story of his day.
The Claddagh Inn serves 400 to 500 plates of food Monday
through Saturday, offers free clothes and serves as an informal
referral and counseling service for
this depressed neighborhood dotted
with rundown seaside bungalows
and public housing projects.
.. - . - - - ~ ....... -
NOTORIOUS
Why care about Zandra Myers? Another profile touting the
human interest party line and eliciting the predictable response:
She helps these poor souls; Yeah, that's really nice; Must be
religious. Consider: Zandra Myers lived for years in the
Edgemere housing projects where she heard gunshots every
night. She had a serious drug problem, she comes from pover-
ty, she was pregnant at 16---all the prerequisites for a career of
apathy and bitterness. But instead she works every day in a
small, crowded building, with people constantly wandering in
after hours seeking help, donors dropping off clothes asking too
demandingly for a receipt for tax purposes. Everybody wanti-
ng too much and leaving her drained.
She tells a story of sitting at the window of her apartment in
the projects and spotting someone walking by wearing a shirt
No Simple Charity
with Breezy Point Lumber written on it, another
with an Inwood Volunteer windbreaker-and she
started crying then, half laughing now, at the tragi-
comic phenomenon of very poor men and women
walking around with the labels and symbols of the
By Kevin Heldman
stable and the working class,
and in the simple realization
that she was clothing her neigh-
borhood.
She's a member of the local
community board, vice-presi-
dent of the Kiwanis, co-chair of
the housing task force, director
of a youth ministry. Her civic
resume, however, doesn't list
another mother coming into
Claddagh who's son has been
murdered, organizing another
"Stop the Violence" rally, with
another flyer listing boys and
girls killed. Or Zandra and the
mother commiserating on the
humiliations of going to C-
Town to beg for food to feed
the people who come out to
mourn, and the carelessness of
the printer who misspelled a
dead boy's name on the flyer.
It's difficult to sustain char-
ity work on platitudes or the
constant gratitude of the peo-
ple you're helping. What if
they're angry, what if they
resent your charity and still
need it? Zandra Myers does it
nonetheless, and in doing so
holds herself and a good num-
ber of people together .
~ L - ____________________________________________________________________________ ~
NOVEMBER 1995
-
......... ---,..., ... ".-
REV I EW
"Crews" by Maria Hinojosa with
photographs by Gerrnan Perez. Harcourt
Brace & Company, 1995,
168 pages, $17 hwdcover, $9 paperback.
I
n the fall of 1990, Topo, a 19-year-old immigrant was
gunned down by Pee Wee on 175th street and Amsterdam
Avenue over a tenitorial dispute. Gasping in disbelief as he
was falling, Topo begged for mercy. His last words were
"A mi?! Ami?!"
For those of us who had known the two teenagers, it was
hard to accept and understand the horror of it all because Pee
Wee was Tapa's best friend. They had grown up together,
lived in the same building, one apartment above the other. Pee
Wee was even engaged to Topo's youngest sister at the time of
the shooting.
We asked ourselves, why? How could someone with so
much history shared with another detach himself so completely
Fighting Words
By Moises Perez
and end the life of his best friend?
In "Crews," journalist Maria
Hinojosa poses similar questions to
eleven young New Yorkers and
attempts to shed some light on why
youth violence has become so perva-
sive.
The book, a collection of inter-
views done for an award-winning
series aired on National Public
Radio, offers a rare view of
youths involved in what are
commonly believed to be gangs,
but what the teenagers them-
selves call "posses" or
"crews." The book was devel-
oped in conjunction with
German Perez, a multimedia artist from the
Dominican Republic. His photographs are highly expressive
and add significantly to the presentation of the material.
Llst. n and LHrn
During the course of Hinojosa's interviews, we learn much
about the experiences, background, ways and values of these
young men and women-all of it from their own perspective.
When she speaks with these youths, she may as well be speak-
ing with young people throughout New York City.
Hinojosa's interviews were inspired by the well-publicized
1990 death of Brian Watkins, a young tourist stabbed to death
by a Queens teenager as he tried to defend his family from a
subway mugging. The killer, it turned out, had wanted money
to go dancing. ''To go dancing?" writes the author. "I had a hard
time understanding this, just as lots of people did." So she set
out to ask, listen, and learn.
We hear from the young men and women about the value of
"respect." Without respect from peers and adults, growing up is
hard and dangerous. Without respect, you are a "no-body."
Respect is perhaps the most sacrosanct of values.
Like sharks in their watery domain, these youth are tenitor-
ial. "You gotta protect your neighborhood," they tell us. But
unlike sharks, the wellspring of this violence, they tell us, is
anger. They tell us they are trapped in a vicious cycle of vio-
lence that began early in their childhood with parents that did
not want them. "How would you like to be eight years old and
thrown out of your house on Christmas night?" we are asked.
While many of these lessons are timeless, readers should
remember that the New York street scene is vibrant and con-
stantly changing. Already much of Hinojosa's material is dated.
Her posses and crews have been largely replaced by more
sophisticated organizations. They operate like fast-food fran-
chises competing to open chapters and achieve a citywide pres-
ence. They respond to names like the Netas, Zulu Nation and
Latin Kings.
MlsSM Opportunity
In several respects, "Crews" represents a missed opportunity.
There is no attempt at analysis, so the presentation of the prob-
lem of youth violence is shallow. It is important for readers to
know that, unlike ever before in American history (for this is
truly an American phenomenon) we are producing a generation
of young men and women completely disengaged from family,
school, community, work, church and God, their peers-and,
finally, from themselves.
All of Hinojosa's young people are products of families that
have abused and neglected them. They speak about dropping out
of school. They speak about tenitoriality, not community, where
people in their neighborhoods only fear them. Lacking the most
basic of skills, none are truly engaged in work. They speak about
social injustice and anger towards society.
Most of all, they speak about their crews as being the most
important dimension of their lives. But this peer group is clear-
ly a major source of their problems. "Seeing your own friend
hitting you" one youth complains, "it makes you feel bad, like
you can't be totally friends."
Finally, they seem incapable of achieving even the most
basic goals. Hinojosa points out in the final chapter that many
of the young people she interviewed "seemed to believe that
where they were ... was where they were going to be for a long
time." The time that they had to speak to Hinojosa, to hear from
someone who expressed an interest in their lives, was, in
Hinojosa's words, "one of the few chances they had for self-
reflection."
Overall, Hinojosa and Perez are to be commended for bring-
ing us these voices. We must listen if we are to play any serious
role as responsible adults in the difficult task of re-engaging
young people. Otherwise, the Topos and the Brians will only
continue to make the news, in the very worst way.
Moises Perez is executive director of Alianza Dominicana, a youth
and social services organization based in Washington Heights.
CITY LIMITS
W
e live in a society where complex and con-
tentious national issues are debated with catch
phrases designed to fit neatly into sound bites
and headlines. The aim is to attract attention and
to score political points. But catch phrases confuse and mis-
lead, and they rarely help us devise solutions.
Drug legalization, a euphemism for ending drug prohibition
and the so-called War on Drugs, is a provocative idea. Its sup-
porters have an overwhelming wealth of evidence to describe
just how destructive current drug policies have been to our
criminal justice system, our cities and our country. Yet legal-
ization's advocates have been losing the public debate because
they have failed to propose a sensible regulatory alternative to
assume that, by ending prohibition, such drugs
as cocaine, heroin and crack would become
freely available without even a doctor's pre-
scription, that drug use would rapidly increase
and that vast social damage would follow in
legalization's wake.
CITYVIEW,
. ,
People have been encouraged to make such wild assump-
tions by the pronouncements of prominent individuals such as
A. M. Rosenthal, former editor of The New York TImes, who
now enjoys the privilege of regularly disclosing whatever is on
his mind on the op-ed pages of that paper. In some 21 columns
he has written during the last seven years, Rosenthal has
repeatedly denounced legalization with unsubstantiated
assumptions about its meaning and the dire consequences it
would occasion. Earlier this year, Rosenthal characterized
legalization as "one of the most cruel and selfish movements in
America" and freely predicted that it would "create more
addicts, more abused children, more victims of muggings and
robbery, millions
Reframe the Drug Debate
more every sin-
gle year."
At no time
during the course
By Theodore W Kheel
Theodore W.
Kheel is a
lawyer who
has been
engaged in the
practice of
conflict preven-
tion and resolu-
tion for more
than 50 years.
NOVEMBER 1995
prohibition. With the issue framed
today as legalization versus war, war
easily prevails. Americans like the
idea of a war against something evil.
This is unfortunate because the
facts belie the rhetoric. In 1991,
New York State spent more than
$8.6 billion on its judicial and
legal systems, according to a
recent report by the Association
of the Bar of the City of New
York. Between 1983 and 1992,
the state built 29 prisons and
almost doubled its prison
capacity. Nearly half of the
state's inmate population has
been incarcerated for drug
offenses; 15 years ago that number was only one
in 10. Meanwhile, black males constitute almost half of the
prison population nationwide, thanks, the Bar Association
reports, to selective enforcement that targets the urban poor
"while rich and middle class drug users are permitted to
indulge without serious fear of legal consequences."
This so-called war has demanded more time, more dollars
and more prison space, year after year. The cost is tremendous.
Something has to be done.
Wild Assumptions
The advocates of a drug war will prevail, so long as sup-
porters of legalization fail to propose an alternative defining
exactly how government might regulate the sale and distribu-
tion of drugs. In the absence of such a plan, many people
of his campaign
has Rosenthal been called upon to evaluate any specific regula-
tory regime that could take the place of prohibition, because no
such regime has been offered by pro-legalization forces. No
wonder he has felt comfortable in claiming, without benefit of
statistical support, that the vast majority of Americans including
politicians are against legalization. If people assume, as I
believe they do, that under legalization drugs would become
freely available to anyone, then Rosenthal is probably right in
his estimation of America's views.
Two months ago, the anti-legalization Center on Addiction
and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University issued
a white paper in which the authors provided their own list of
"policy options" that would follow legalization, including the
establishment of "an open and free market for drugs." They
then proceeded to denounce these options. The center's white
paper cannot be lightly disregarded. The credentials of its offi-
cers and directors, including such luminaries as Joseph A.
Califano, Jr., Betty Ford, Douglas A. Fraser, Barbara C.
Jordan and Nancy Reagan, compare favorably with those of
A.M. Rosenthal.
Not one of the supposed policies described by CASA, it is
worth noting, contains any significant recommendation on reg-
ulation. In sum, for the purposes of its attack on legalization,
the center identifies the forms of regulation being proposed as
consisting simply of a ban on the use of drugs by minors and
restrictions on advertising, dosage and place of consumption.
Needless to say, with this description the center had little dif-
ficulty convincing itself that ending prohibition would dramati-
cally increase drug usage. Rosenthal immediately seized upon
the CASA white paper to write stilI another column denouncing
legalization. Again, he included no mention of any regulatory
[Continued on page 30]
-

[Continued from page 29]
regime to replace prohibition.
CIT Y V lEW Do legalization advocates
of how far on the spectrum a given drug
should be moved, or how to accomplish
such a movement." The article was pub-
lished in 1990. The same observations are
equally applicable today.
-
believe that you or I should be
able to buy heroin or cocaine
without at least a prescription? Of
course not. Nobody in their right
would want that. I think it is fair to con-
clude that legalization advocates favor
some form of regulatory regime to
replace prohibition.
InadequacY
But you wouldn't know this from reading
most pro-legalization studies and reports.
A Hofstra Law Review article by Mark
A.R. Kleiman and Aaron 1. Saiger, entitled
"Drug Legalization: The Importance of
Answering the Right Question;' observed
that "[p]erbaps the most prominent inade-
quacy of current legalization arguments is
their failure to specify what is meant by
'legalization.'" They also noted that "while
legalization advocates do not deny that
some sort of controls will be required,
their proposals rarely address the question
As long as proponents of the War on
Drugs are allowed to set up and attack
their own straw-man versions of a post-
legalization future, they will win the pub-
lic's favor. I know enough l!bout conflict
resolution to understand that the phrase
"legalize drugs" is not going to fly by
itself. It will strengthen the other side.
There's no way the public will buy legal-
ization unless they understand its limits
before it is introduced.
Successful resolution of any conflict
demands a clear definition of the issue and
careful assortment of relevant facts. This is
especially necessary in any highly emo-
tional conflict. For those of us who under-
stand that the costs of drug prohibition are
exorbitant and its benefits negligible, a
sharper and clearer discussion is urgently
required .
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AugusilSeplember. No. of issues published annually:
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Music and Politics In the Subways of New Yorll
SUSIE J. TANENBAUM
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The New York Times
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[Continuedfrom page 4]
McGovern even contemplate the enonnity
of the tragedy from the point of view of the
infant whose right to protection and to
basic medical treatment has been cruelly
violated.
McGovern would like us to believe that
she and the mv LAW Project are "pro-
tecting" the interest of women. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Women
need to know about their condition and
that of their babies so they can make
important health care decisions; they need
to know that they themselves are infected
in order to avoid infecting others; they
need to know so that they can make deci-
sions on future pregnancies; they need to
know so that they can make arrangements
for the care of their children when they can
no longer care for them themselves.
Denying women this information is dis-
crimination in its worst form.
McGovern and the mv Law Project
are part of the politically correct chorus
who are determined that the wall of secre-
cy around AIDS be protected at all costs-
even if it means sacrificing the lives of
helpless infants. Nevertheless, there is now
a tremendous groundswell of support from
the public, the mass media, and the over-
whelming majority of legislators who are
determined to end a policy that has been a
death sentence for the most innocent and
helpless victims of the epidemic.
Nettie Mayersohn
Member of the State Assembly
Flushing, Queens
E-mail Awak ... lng
I've been a subscriber for the past few
years and look forward to your insightful
articles and reporting. I am glad you are
moving into the 21st Century! Thanks.
Marcia H. Lemnwn
via pipeline. com
We love City Limits!
Seth A. Miller & Elizabeth L Faraone
via allvn. com
Congrats on the new look. We think it suits
you well.
BrallLmuier
Fifth Avenue Committee
via igc.apc.org
I just received the new issue and I'm very
impressed with the new logo and format. I
NOVEMBER 165
think the expansion and the growing up
(growing old!) idea is super! Having been
both a state and city housing official
(recently dumped by the Pataki adminis-
tration) and long-time City Limits sub-
scriber, I look forward the new adventure.
Regards to you all.
Nancy Travers
via ids. net
You are insightful and inspirational. Keep
up the thought-provoking work.
Greg Trupiano
viaaol.com
U"and.,..h
Thank you so much for your October 1995
feature on child welfare. It is a real credit
to you and your publication that you have
provided a forum for the considerable tal-
ents of Rob PoIner, Rita Giordano and
Michael Powell. The sudden demise of
New York Newsday was a grave loss to the
city on many levels. In particular, no other
daily matched NewsdtJy's concern for and
understanding of child welfare issues.
s
_ .......... - .. ".
Recent budget cuts and their
accompanying rhetoric have
been very punishing to child and
family service clients, providers, LET T E R S
and advocates. One of the most
demoralizing aspects of the
relentless assaults we've withstood is the
deafening media silence which has too
often greeted our protests. Thank you for
giving this often-overlooked area of public
policy the front-page status and quality of
coverage it merits. The conSequences are
life and death. The values at issue are defin-
ing values of our society.
Sincerely,
Michael Arsham
Director for Social Service Policy
Council of Family and
Child Caring Agencies
Send your letters to:
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CO TRO
VI RSIAL?
Where else will you hear:
Yeah, usually.
a courageous Registered Nurse Rred from
her job for exposing the barbarity of circumcision?
Dick Gregory telling it like it is about milk:
"Milk, it's one of the #1 killers on the planet!"
Dr. Samuel Epstein of the University of Chicago accusing the
US government of secretly irradiating its own citizens?
Dr. Koren Davis describing the danger of eating
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Attorney at Law
Meeting the challenges of affordable housing for 20 years.
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217 Broadway, Suite 610
New York, NY 10007
(212) 513-0981
DEBRA BECHTEL - Attorney
Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-Profit Law
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Twenty-seven years experience ready for you
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aTYUMITS
LOAN OFfICER for nonprofit lender. Underwrite complex real estate
loans, package financing, structure and negotiate transactions with
non-profit borrowers and third party lenders. Requires strong skills in
financial analysis, excellent communication/presentation ability, high
levels of initiative and creativity. Candidates with experience and/or
knowledge of community lending, and/or housing development pre-
ferred. Salary commensurate with experience. Benefit package
includes individual health and dental. Send Letter of interest and
resume to UHF/SLO, 29 John Street, Suite 803, New York, NY 10038.
UHF is an equal opportunity employer.
URBAN HOUSING SPECIAUST. Responsibilities: counsel residents (ten-
ants & owners) regarding housing rights and responsibilities and hous-
ing stabilization resources and advocate for code compliance; provide
technical assistance to tenant and block associations in order to
increase organizational development and effectiveness; plan, publicize
and conduct workshops; research housing issues and develop articles
for publication in BNIA's newsletter; provide leadership training and pro-
vide assistance in strategic planning. Requirements: candidate must
have a demonstrated commitment to empowerment and self-help and
be available to work evenings. A bachelors degree and a minimum of
one year experience in housing, community organizing, social services,
urban planning or related field or high school graduation and 5 years
experience, or satisfactory equivalent combination of education and
experience. Central Brooklyn resident preferred. Salary: 24K. Send
resume to: Brooklyn Neighborhood Improvement Association, 648
Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11238, Attention: Personnel
Department.
COMMUNITY DEVnOPMENT SENIOR PlANNER. Pratt Institute Center for
Community and Environmental Development (PICCED) seeks an experi-
enced planner to direct our HU[)'funded program in developing and
implementing comprehensive/integrative neighborhood revitalization
plans; provide project-specific technical assistance and training in plan-
ning, real estate & housing to nonprofit community-based development
organizations in Brooklyn, NYC and vicinity; conduct occasional
research on urban policy issues affecting low-income neighborhoods,
both locally and nationally. MS in planning and 5 to 7 years experience
in hands-<>n low-income community development and related policy
issues (or equivalent combo of education & experience); facility with
planning and development computer applications (e.g. Lotus, Dbase,
WordPerfect, Mapinfo, etc.) required. Spanish speaking plus. Salary
$40,000 plus benefits for this grant-funded position. Review of
resumes to begin immediately and continue until position is filled.
Send to: Dept. SP, 379 DeKaib Ave., 2nd R., Brooklyn, NY 11205. An
AA/EOE. Women & minorities strongly encouraged to apply.
Friends House in Rosehill, a new 5().unit residential community for peo-
ple with AIDS, seeks a DIRECTOR, a CHIEF RESIDENCE MANAGER, and a
CUNICAl. SERVICES COORDINATOR. This three person team will be cho-
sen on the basis of commitment to the organization's housing and sup-
portive services mission, background in personally serving people with
AIDS or histories of mental illness and homelessness, and experience
in organizational development and community building. Friends House
will be operated in accord with Friends' convictions about individual
divinity, dignity, self-<letermination, and group determination. Women
and members of minority groups are encouraged to apply. The DlREC-
TOR will be responsible for the overall operation of Friends House,
ensuring that all residents receive appropriate and professional care in
keeping with Friends House's Mission. She/he will be responsible for
all administrative functions, including fiscal affairs, development, per-
sonnel, contract and regulatory compliance, and for the quality of the
physical facility and social The CHIEF RESIDENCE MAlI ..
will be responsible for the physical environment of the Friends House
building and the provision of housing, food services and security for the
residents. She/he will establish and oversee house rules holding meet-

ing to promote communication and mediate grievances. She/he will
manage response to medical, personal and building emergencies. The
ClINICAl. SERVICES COORDINATOR will be responsible for the provision of
social and health services including the assessment and monitOring of
each resident's individual social service needs and the social interac-
tion of the entire community. She/he will be responsible for all individ-
ual and group counseling and referrals. Education and experience in a
related field is preferred for all positions. Qualified professionals
should send a resume and letter of interest to: James D. Morgan,
President, Friends Quarters HDFC, 15 Rutherford Place, New York NY
10003
SOCIAl. SERVICE DIRECTOR to oversee program planning and administra-
tion of social service program. The individual should have strong man-
agerial skill and at least two years experience in the areas of housing
and employment and at least three years of experience working with
homeless and low-income populations. Salary will range in the high
twenties to low thirties. Send resumes to: Bushwick Information,
Coordinating and Action Committee, 1639 Broadway, Brooklyn NY
11207. Attn: Dunbry Development Associates.
HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVnOPMENT SPECIAUST. Affordable Housing
Network, New Jersey seeks highly qualified housing/community devel-
opment speCialist. Responsibilities include assessing nonprofit devel-
opment organizations' technical assistance needs and providing in-
depth, on-site assistance in organization development, community plan-
ning, project development, property management. Requirements: sub-
stantial experience working in community-based organizations on real
estate development projects and in community planning/organizing.
Statewide travel, flexible work hours. Competitive salary, excellent ben-
efits. Minority candidates encouraged to apply. Send resume to Martha
Lamar, Affordable Housing Network, PO Box 1746, Tenton NJ 08607
CREDIT UNION MANGER. The Lower East Side People's Federal Credit
Union is a 9-year-<>ld, $2.6 million community development credit union
with 2,500 members, serving a predominantly low-income, multi-ethnic
community. The Manager oversees all daily operations, reports direct-
ly to the Board of Directors and has fiscal responsibility for the entire
credit union. Required qualifications: A proven commitment to commu-
nity development; A minimum 2 years credit union or banking manage-
ment experience; Excellent written and verbal communication skills; A
Bachelor's degree. Preferred qualifications: Spanish/English proficien-
cy; Lower East Side resident. Responsibilities include: Bookkeeping
and financial planning, funds management, lending, loan servicing,
supervision of staff, oversight of collections, and policy implementa-
tion. Salary: $30,00 with fringe benefits. Women and Minority appli-
cants encouraged to apply. Send resume and cover letter to Ana
Rosenblum, LESPFCU, 37 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009. EOE
COMMUNITY HOUSING COORDINATOR. Sinergia. Inc. is a citywide nonprof-
it which provides housing and services to individuals with developmen-
tal disabilities and their families. Its Community Housing Department
provides home-finding assistance and advocacy to low-income families.
Responsibilities: The Coordinator will serve some families directly, and
will coordinate the work of two Housing Specialists. Qualifications:
Knowledge of welfare issues and subsidized housing programs, com-
puter literacy, good organizational skills and basic writing proficiency
required. Bilingual (Spanish) a plus. Salary. $28 K-$31K. Reply to:
Singeria, Inc. 120 West 105th Street #Ll New York, NY 10025 (212)
Fax: (212) 749-5021 Attention: Donald A. Lash.
Columba Kavanagh House. Inc., a nonprofit corporation which spon-
sored supportive SROs in the Harlem area, has received a grant which
provides for these five positions: MICA COUNSELOR, IIV COUNSELOR,
OIIWGER, INTAKE PERSON ... JOB DEVD.OPEIL Experience
in field is necessary. Send resume to: P.O. Box 6385, New York, NY
10128{)()()4
.-mlFi3I __ _
Cuns d Hoses
i
~
By Nick Chiles
he fire box sits exactly at the intersection of Cumberland and Park avenues and the sprawling concrete land-
scape of the Walt Whitman Houses of the New York City Housing Authority, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The box
is a grungy red, its sparkle long ago dimmed by the black exhaust of the overhead traffic on the Brooklyn-
Queens Expressway.
Though popularly referred to as a "fire box," it actually has
two buttons, one for the New York City Fire Department and
another for the police. Confronted with an emergency, you get
to take your pick: the squad car or the big red truck? Guns or
hoses? The crime fighters or the fire fighters? Simple, right?
Wrong. Ask the fire fighters at Engine Company 20.
Increasingly in recent years, they say, they have been called
from their headquarters at Carlton and Myrtle avenues to
respond to all varieties of non-fire emergencies: car accidents,
gunshots, assaults, bullet wounds, stab wounds, a machete
attack. You might expect locals to demand a law enforcement
response, not fire trucks. The residents of Whitman Houses see
things a bit differently, however.
"I think they're afraid of speaking to the police," says Joe
Scararnuzzino, a fire fighter who lives in Howard Beach.
''There are two buttons on that thing. When a brother and sister
were shot in the projects, they pressed us."
In this neighborhood, when the big red trucks rumble
through the streets, the fire fighters are keenly aware of the
waves and kindly nods of their public. It's not affection, exact-
ly, but an acknowledgment of their status as life preservers.
About the only public flak the fire department ever gets is for
the remarkable uniformity of its crew: white and male.
The cops are another matter
entirely. When they cruise
around in their squad cars, they
throw off enough hostile
stares to pave the streets
with enmity. And the
screaming headlines year
after year announcing
police corruption scandals
tell us all we need to know
about many cops' ciVility
in encounters with the
public. They can't be
trusted.
"Without a doubt, it's more acceptable to come to us," con-
tinues Scararnuzzino, leaning on a truck just inside the station's
huge red door. "When cops are there, they have to enforce the
law. People might not agree with the way they enforce it. We're
there to help. Always.
''That doesn't mean the cops are wrong," Scaramuzzino
quickly adds. "But people don't always agree."
There's a beauty to this. Call it civic justice. The police have
engendered so much ill will over the years that residents of
Whitman Houses are striking back. Sure, the fire fighters usu-
ally end up calling the cops anyway, but the message still
comes through at eardrum-piercing decibels. New York's
Finest are not wanted here. Though unorganized and unoffi-
cial, it's a boycott of sorts.
Steve Giuffrida, a nine-year fire department veteran from
Staten Island, says the fire house has long been a refuge for
youngsters and residents seeking help. "Somebody's always
knocking on the door." he says. "Last night, a homeless guy
knocked. He had been attacked and was afraid to go to the cops.
He was embarrassed to go to the precinct."
Some skeptics may suggest that in Whitman Houses,
dragged down by heavy drug trafficking and its attendant vio-
lence, there are those with underhanded reasons for calling the
big red truck rather than the squad car. The street just around the
comer from the fire house is a well-used drug market. Fire
fighters concede their presence is less menacing to wrongdoers.
But fire fighter Ernie Medaglia, an eight-year veteran who
lives in Rockland County, knows the residents of Fort Greene.
"Most of the people around here are good people," he says.
"I lived around here for a year .... It's just a small percentage of
people who cause the trouble."
Sylvia Roman, 32, who has lived in Whitman Houses all her
life, has seen and heard enough over the years to know that her
neighbors aren't fire fighter groupies, not by a long shot.
They've just got some common sense. Roman lives about 50
feet away from the fire box at Park and Cumberland. She
sweeps her hand around, gesturing at the expanse of the only
home she has known, and where she is raising her own family,
and says she would press the red button, too, not the blue.
''These days, the police are as bad as the criminals around
here," she says. "I feel more comfortable with the firemen."
Nick Chiles is a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger
~ ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~
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ClTYUMITS
NOVEMBER 1995
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