"Gangs and violence will come to where people are not involved in their community."
Graffiti blights many areas with high rates of juvenile crime.
Paolo Vescia
Graffiti blights many areas with high rates of juvenile crime.
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Federal leaders are interested in making sure people are involved. And they're using Arizona as the first test site of a new kind of holistic prevention program.
The U.S. Department of Justice, Arizona State University and Governor Jane Dee Hull's office are in the planning stages of developing a pilot program called "Sustainable Safe Communities." Although a few efforts have been made in individual communities around the country, this will be the first statewide program of its kind, says George Weisz, Hull's criminial justice adviser.
Federal funds, state grants and other revenue will be bundled together and focused on just a handful of communities: urban, rural and tribal. The idea is to focus not just on law enforcement, but on social and economic factors -- prevention programs, job training, infrastructure development -- that contribute to a safe, sound place to live.
Weisz says, "One of the toughest things we see, and it happens a lot, is cops go in and they're going to do a very good job of sweeping an area clean for a short period of time, and it just comes back. And the reason is, you don't have the follow-up with a lot of the resources you need to stop crime to begin with."
The program is similar in its philosophy to the Phoenix Violence Prevention Initiative, a sweeping plan that hopes to give individual communities the money and encouragement to get a grip on violence in their own neighborhoods.
Weisz says he's unsure what the pot will ultimately hold, but it could be as much as $30 million; state leaders are also talking to private foundations about additional donations.
So why have our leaders waited so long to do something that appears so smart?
Because, Weisz says, it's not an easy political choice to make. Some communities may lose out.
Yes, he admits, a job training center in a community that is not one of the half-dozen targets may not get as much money as it has previously.
But the hope is that if the pilot program is a success, it can be expanded to include more communities.
Along with this new effort, Weisz promises, will come increased accountability, for all prevention programs -- a chief concern of his boss.
"You know, there's a lot of good, quality programs out there that are all well-intentioned. They're not necessarily the best use of the funds or producing as good results as other programs are," he says. "What kind of accountability standards are there? . . . How do we know they're working? And you ask people and they say, 'Well, we don't know. We've heard this success story on this program, we've heard this person say it's changed their life, we've obviously had failures, too.'
"But how do you know whether it's really working?"
The Arizona Prevention Resource Center is sponsoring a conference in December that will address the issue of accountability, something that leaders admit has been ignored until very recently.
"There's going to be some tough stuff," Weisz says of the upcoming conference. "We're going to tell people, 'Hey, this program isn't working. Sorry, guys, but it's just not.'"
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