November 2007
Top Cop Says Invest Now
Most people don’t associate words like Head Start and prenatal care with law enforcement. But in addition to his day job as Seattle Police Chief, Gil Kerlikowske is chairman of “Fight Crime: Invest in Kids,” a nationwide group of thousands of law enforcement leaders who advocate for programs to help children.
The group offers many statistics to raise support for early childhood education. Among them:
- A Chicago study found that 3- and 4-year-olds left out of the city’s Child-Parent Centers were 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime by age 18, compared to those who were enrolled.
- A long-term study of children enrolled in the High/Scope Perry Preschool program in Ypsilanti, Mich., found that at age 27, those at-risk 3- and 4-year-olds who had not attended the program were five times more likely to be chronic law-breakers than similar children who attended the program.
- A study of children from low-income families who were not enrolled in childcare centers with North Carolina’s Smart Start quality improvement assistance were twice as likely to have behavior problems in kindergarten than those who were enrolled. The behavior included aggressive acts, poor temper control, anxiety and hyperactivity -– problems that have been linked to delinquent behavior later in life.
Seattle’s Child’s Ben Bergman recently sat down with Kerlikowske in his downtown Seattle office.
Seattle’s Child: We usually think of police chiefs as putting police on the street and criminals in jail. What made you want to lobby for kids’ programs?
Gil Kerlikowske: I came to this after a tragedy that happened when I was a young police chief in Fort Pierce, Florida, which was a very impoverished community. We had a young officer shot to death by a 19-year-old. During the death penalty phase of the trial, we learned a lot about this kid. He had broken into cars and into his neighbor’s house. Before that he had shoplifted. And before that, his mother called the police department and said her son was out of control, and that was when the kid was 8. We also found out the mother abused alcohol when she was pregnant.
Later, we looked at what the department should do to prevent similar tragedies. We looked at all the things you would normally examine -– training, equipment, better holsters. But then a couple of people in the department said, “Why don’t we look at how we can intervene with these kids earlier?” So we wrote a local grant and hired an officer’s wife who had an MSW (master of social work). Officers would leave her police reports and she would follow up with getting kids the right help.
We also went to the health department to talk about providing information on prenatal care. We told officers, “If you are responding to a burglary call or maybe a domestic violence call and if the woman looks pregnant, why don’t you ask if she’s getting prenatal care?” It sounds like an odd question, but it was quite amazing how many young women and really young women weren’t getting any care. We didn’t look at it as some big social service initiative. We pretty much looked at it as officer safety 20 years before a possible incident.
SC: You make this sound relatively easy. And it seems as though few people would disagree with being more involved in kids’ lives. So, what are the barriers?
GK: There are folks who think we can jail our way out of problems. Or that we only need tougher laws – and I’m not opposed to a lot of that stuff and I’ve fought for those issues. But in the long term, it’s not a smart solution and it’s not going to lead to a safer community. Because no matter how long the prison sentence, the person’s going to get out.
Sometimes we don’t communicate well with social service agencies. We’re trying to say we’re all in this together.
SC: What are some examples of things your department is doing to reach out to kids?
GK: Seattle has a lot of street kids. We get a lot of complaints about older kids who drop out of school and are hanging out in the University District. Business owners say they’re shooting up or lying in doorways. The kids are saying that no one understands them. So, we brought together a group of street officers and these kids to have a dialogue.
For the younger kids, I think the best examples are what has been happening in South Park in the past few years. We’ve been supporting boxing. And we just graduated 10 kids from a “CSI” program. They had mock crime scenes. The real beauty of it was they had to do photography, measurements, math, and write reports. These kids were getting hard science and writing skills while interacting with the police and also while having fun.
SC: I’ve read that juvenile crime is the worst at three in the afternoon when kids get out of schools. What do you do about that?
GK: If there’s a problem in school it often either began before school or after school and it translates to a problem in the neighborhood.
We wanted a better relationship with the schools. It isn’t a top down relationship. If you’re a school principal, you own that school. So when an officer gets there, we tell them that as long as it’s in our guidelines, they should do the bidding of the principal, not what we’re telling them to do.
SC: Do you know from looking at
a 3-year-old that this child, when he’s
19, is going to end up in trouble?
GK: No, we don’t.
But what we’re trying to do is help in making sure that services out there are being utilized. We come across people in all walks of life. We’re the only ones out there at 4 o’clock on a Sunday morning. We have an easy to remember phone number. We’re in uniform and we’re in marked police cars. One of the things we did was equip downtown officers with BlackBerries®. It lets officers access information about warrants. But it also gives them information about what services and programs are available.
SC: Is there an age when you’ve just lost a kid?
GK: No one wants to come out and say it’s ever too late. But it breaks a police officer’s heart to deal with someone at 14 or 15. Sometimes at that age, they’ve already had so many problems, so many run-ins with the laws; they have so many things stacked against them. We say we’ll try with this kid, but we’re not all that hopeful. We’re not trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, but we do wish we would have gotten to that kid sooner.
For more information on “Fight Crime: Invest in Kids,” visit www.fightcrime.org. If you have any comments on Gil Kerlikowske’s views, please send them to editor@seattleschild.com.
Ben Bergman is an editor/producer
for the NPR show Day to Day.
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