The Youth Violence Reduction Partnership: Philadelphia's Approach to Combating Youth Crime

A Forum — December 1, 2006

This forum on Capitol Hill discussed the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, an effort by an array of criminal justice, city, and non-profit agencies to lower homicide rates in the most violent parts of Philadelphia by focusing on those youth under the age of 25 who are most at risk of killing or being killed.

John Delaney, Deputy District Attorney for the Trial Division of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, outlined the situation in Philadelphia prior to the partnership. More than 40 percent of the city’s murder victims and more than 60 percent of its alleged murderers between 1996 and 1999 were younger than 25. Most of those victims and murderers had common backgrounds: They were repeat offenders from low-income, high-minority neighborhoods where guns and drugs were omnipresent, and they had numerous contacts with the police, prosecutors, courts, and probation officers. “If you can get them to their 25th birthday, their odds of getting to age 75 skyrocket,” Delaney said.

“But the law enforcement side was not cohesive,” Delaney said. If a family included a 19-year-old on adult probation and a 17-year-old on juvenile probation, their probation officers, who worked for different agencies, were unlikely to speak to or even know about each other, much less interact routinely with police, prosecutors, judges or the families. “The social service side was even less cohesive,” Delaney added. Most organizations specialized in a narrow area – such as physical health, public schooling, after-school programs, drug and alcohol abuse, mental health or housing – rather than the full range of societal supports that can promote safer behavior.

Drawing some lessons from Boston, where a similar collaborative that had combined intensive supports with intensive surveillance had lowered the city’s homicide rate substantially, representatives of key law enforcement and youth-serving agencies in Philadelphia decided in 1998 to find out whether a similar approach could “lead to a dramatic reduction in youth homicides” in Philadelphia. They created the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership (YVRP), which opened as a pilot project in one of Philadelphia’s police districts in June 1999. Today YVRP is active in five of the 24 police districts.

The partnership’s strategy includes (1) identifying specific “youth partners” who would receive help by reaching a consensus among the agencies on which youth 14 to 24 years of age in the targeted areas are most likely to kill or be killed; (2) connecting the youth to community supports and programs through “streetworkers” who develop personal relationships with the youth partners; (3) intense supervision of the youth partners by teams of police and probation officers; (4) graduated sanctions for non-compliance, with the ultimate being a request to a judge to return violators to custody; and (5) gun suppression through a strict zero tolerance policy for any youth partner who had or handled a gun. “Because we’d rather come to your sentencing hearing than your funeral,” added Delaney when explaining the need for these last two parts of the strategy.

Denise Clayton, Coordinator of the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, said each of the YVRP districts has around 100 youth partners. “Five nights a week, two cars are out in each YVRP district with two (plainclothes) police officers and two probation officers in each vehicle. They visit each and every home of the youth partners on each probation officer’s list,” Clayton explained. Each probation officer supervises up to 25 youths; this much lighter caseload is given on purpose so that the officers can intimately get to know the youth they are supervising. A streetworker from the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network is assigned to work with the same 25 youths. Between the streetworker and the police-probation team, the youth partner is seen about two dozen times a month. The police and probation officers focus on compliance with probation conditions, which can range from curfews to regular payment of child support. The streetworkers – most of them young adults from the same part of the city – emphasize helping the young people reach safe and productive goals. They offer in-the-home and on-the-street counseling for the youth partners and their families. Their support can be as simple as a ride to a job interview or an after-school basketball program or as complex as expediting the entrance of the youths into public schools, literacy programs, drug treatment, mental health counseling, or job placement programs run by other partnering organizations.

Delaney said coordination and accountability is stressed at all levels:

• A steering committee, which consists of either the chief executive officer or deputy CEO from each agency, meets quarterly to review strategy, develop funding, and intercede with organizations outside the partnership.
• A mid-management team meets monthly to deal with inter-agency issues and to review performance data and adherence to minimum standards within the partnership.
• An operations committee of about 20 supervisors from the partnering agencies meets every Tuesday to select candidates for intervention and monitor individual cases, as well as to review recent shootings and arrests of youth ages 14-24 in all YVRP districts.
• Each team (one streetworker and one probation officer) appears three times a year before the operations committee “and for two hours, they get cross-examined about every case in their caseload,” Delaney said. New strategies for handling some of their cases, alerts to inter-agency snafus, or tips from one team that could be used by others, often emerge from this process.

Clayton said full implementation of YVRP would require placing it in nine of the city’s 24 police districts. “But [implementing it in] each new district costs approximately $1.6 million, and obviously you still have to pay for the ones that you’re already in,” she said. Starting in one district in 1999, YVRP added four more districts between 2000 and 2006. Juveniles accounted for one-third of the initial caseload, and provide about one-fourth today, but federal funding of juvenile accountability block grants, which were used to help start YVRP, has been diminishing year by year. The recent expansion of the scope of the partnership was made possible by state legislation and by earmarks placed in the federal appropriation bills by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

Wendy McClanahan, vice president for research of Public/Private Ventures, a national nonprofit organization that has been evaluating YVRP from the beginning, said her research shows that the program has reached the most endangered and dangerous youth in the city’s most violent police districts.

Compared to other youth under court supervision, YVRP youth are more likely to have been in jail, to have siblings who are also in the justice system, and to have been arrested for a violent, drug, or gun offense.  The 85 percent who had been incarcerated previously included 30 percent who had been in jail four or more times. Almost all are male. Reflecting the demographics of those low-income clusters of neighborhoods, more than 95 percent of the youth partners are from minority groups (mostly Hispanic or African American).

In the three districts that have had YVRP long enough to judge trends, P/PV research shows that the number of homicides has decreased by between 32 and 62 percent. The homicide rate continues to decline in one district. In the other two, there have been recent increases, but at rates slower than the increase in the citywide homicide rate. While the original goal of cutting the city’s youth homicide rate has not been met, it is likely that YVRP contributed to the improvement of conditions in the districts where it is in place, McClanahan said.

Since 1999, more than 2,100 young people have gone through YVRP. Of the participants, Delaney said, “We’ve lost 15 youth; 12 were murdered, two committed suicide, and one was killed in an automobile accident.” In addition, he said, “Twelve have been accused of homicide – four have been convicted, two were found not guilty or the charge was withdrawn, and the other cases are still pending.”

Delaney and Clayton said they saw five lessons for other cities trying to reduce youth homicides.

• Creative partnering of all types of entities creates more momentum and structure. YVRP requires partnering between streetworkers from a youth service agency, probation officers who report to chiefs, who then report to the courts, and police officers who report to their chief, who then reports to the mayor and city council. In order to be sustainable, changes in how they work together must be agreed to at all levels of their organizations, rather than relying on ad hoc arrangements between street-level personnel or, at the other extreme, orders from a few officials at the top.
• The cost is high, but the alternative is more expensive. The program is indeed expensive, admitted Clayton. For example, each YVRP probation officer concentrates on 25 young people, as does each streetworker. That contrasts with the typical adult probation officer, who is assigned more than 200 cases. But any cost-benefit analysis should measure the greater safety, not just of the probationers, but of their families and neighborhoods. (An additional point that was made was that the federal government spends much less on crime prevention among young adults [aged 18-24] than it does on juvenile delinquency prevention, but in reality, only 16 percent of those arrested for violent crimes in 2005 were juveniles, while 29 percent were ages 18 through 24.)
• Coordination is difficult but necessary. While a partnership takes longer than a top-down model to make decisions, its decisions are much more likely to be actually carried out.
• Support from top officials is vital to the project’s survival. Continued buy-in and leadership by elected officials, including a mayor and school superintendent who came into office after the program began, has been essential to its survival.
• Accountability and data collection help inform the project. The collection and analysis of detailed data on everything from drug violations and arrest rates to days in school or at work can be used both to adjust the program and to document its impact. Though tedious, this helps ensure that the program can “sustain itself over time regardless of personalities.”

Policymakers and practitioners at the presentation had many questions and comments.

One youth worker suggested that it might be better to devote limited funds to prevention efforts for younger children, rather than trying to rescue those who had already been involved in repeated crimes. To this Clayton answered, “You have to do both concurrently. In a perfect world, if you threw all the money into prevention, and we fixed all the problems before they got this far, you wouldn’t need YVRP. But the reality is, this is where we are now, and these young people will never get another chance at these kinds of services.”

One forum participant asked if the home visits endanger probationers by making their neighbors think they are police informants. Delaney said Philadelphia has witness and victim protection programs for those who are threatened. On the other hand, the monitoring sometimes also works as a plus, as it can make drug dealers decide not to involve the YVRP youth partners in their business.

One advantage over routine probation, another questioner was told, is that youth partners who have just been released from custody can get into school in just seven days instead of waiting 90 days for records to transfer. Another advantage is that youth partners hop to the front of the line for waitlisted drug treatment programs.

Why is Philadelphia’s murder rate rising?, a forum attendee inquired. McClanahan said that recent P/PV research shows that Philadelphia’s skyrocketing murder rate is rising faster for those 25 and older than among younger people, but these reports do not explain why. Delaney offered one reason for the increase as easy access to handguns under the state’s loose gun-sale laws. “We have the highest percentage of homicide by handgun of any city in the United States,” he said. In 1999, when YVRP started, murders in Philadelphia were primarily about drug use, debt, or competition. “But in the last two years, that has become superseded by arguments,” which can turn homicidal if a participant has a gun, Delaney said.

When asked about federal policies that may help efforts such as the YVRP program, Delaney emphatically said, “Federal policymakers need to understand that youth doesn’t stop at age 18.” Youth between 18 and 24 years old still very much need supports, structure, and positive reinforcement to be able to become healthy, productive citizens. Federal juvenile justice grants should be funded for youth aged through 24, he said.

Lastly, when asked if there are additional partners that YVRP should be involving as it moves forward, Clayton noted that both the Philadelphia business community and the clergy are not currently involved but definitely should be moving forward.

Resources

Butts, Jeffrey A., & Snyder, Howard N. (2006). Too soon to tell: Deciphering recent trends in youth violence. Chicago, IL: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago. http://www.chapinhall.org/article_abstract.aspx?ar=1437

McClanahan, Wendy S. (2004). Alive at 25: Reducing youth violence through monitoring and support. Philadelphia, PA: Public/Private Ventures. http://www.ppv.org/ppv/publications/assets/174_publication.pdf

Public/Private Ventures Inc. – Two new YVRP reports, an implementation study and a streetworkers manual, are to be posted by February 2007 at www.ppv.org.

Presenter Bios

John P. Delaney, Jr., a native Philadelphian, earned his bachelor’s degree in government and international relations from the University of Notre Dame, and his juris doctor from the Villanova University School of Law. He joined the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office in 1981 as an assistant district attorney. From 1991 to 2002, he was the Deputy District Attorney supervising the Juvenile Division. He has been a trial prosecutor and served as the chief of the Child Abuse Unit and the Juvenile Court Unit. Today he is the Deputy District Attorney supervising the Trial Division. On behalf of DA Lynne Abraham, Mr. Delaney helped to launch, and serves as the co-chair of, Philadelphia’s Youth Violence Reduction Partnership. In addition, he was the founding chairman of the PA District Attorneys Institute’s Juvenile Prosecutors Network, was a member of the Supreme Court Committee that drafted Pennsylvania’s first set of procedural rules for juvenile court, is a member of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Committee of the PA Commission on Crime and Delinquency, and serves on the board of directors of the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance.

Denise Clayton was appointed as the City of Philadelphia’s coordinator for the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership (YVRP) in Philadelphia in February 2006. Her responsibilities are to ensure that the operations of YVRP are correctly functioning programmatically and fully supported financially, and that the partnership is working together to enhance YVRP’s mission of reducing youth homicides in Philadelphia. For over seven years prior to this position, she was the deputy director of Philadelphia Safe and Sound. She was also an Administrator with the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, Division of Juvenile Services, for 13 years. In addition, Ms. Clayton worked closely with Philadelphia Family Court in the supervision of a jointly staffed unit which assisted juvenile probation with planning for difficult youthful offenders. She has over 30 years of experience in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, having begun her professional work in Toronto working with dependent children and their families. She has a Masters of Social Work degree from Syracuse University.

Wendy S. McClanahan (M.S., Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University; Ph.D., Criminology, The University of Pennsylvania, expected December 2009) is Vice President for Research for Public/Private Ventures. An expert in quantitative methods and impact, process and outcome studies, she has focused extensively on evaluations of programs and initiatives designed to assist very high risk populations, such as ex-prisoners and violent youth. Ms. McClanahan is the principal investigator of P/PV’s evaluation of the Ready4Work Demonstration, a 17-site, national ex-prisoner reentry initiative, she is the director of P/PV’s random assignment impact study of America Works, a private employment company located in New York City, and she is the primary researcher for the multi-year YVRP study. Ms. McClanahan is the author and co-author of numerous reports, including Murder is No Mystery: An Analysis of Philadelphia Homicides from 1996-1999; Alive at 25: Reducing Youth Violence Through Monitoring and Support; and Enriching Summer Work: An Evaluation of the Summer Career Exploration Program.

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