BMORENEWS.com

"The news before the news"

By Steven T. Mitchell

(BALTIMORE - October 25, 2009) - There's a crisis in our community.

When I first saw the video of 16-year-old Derrion Albert being beaten to death in Chicago, it was as if an alarm went off. Maybe it was just the fact that in the 21st century, something has to be captured on video to seem real, but it immediately hit me that this could be the one: the incident that would wake us up and cause everybody to say that it's time to do something.

It's widely believed that most people don't care about the fact that our young people are killing each other at an alarming rate. I believe that most people do care. I also believe that there is a tremendous sense of hopelessness out there because people don't believe that there is anything that they can do to truly make a difference. People honestly believe that the violence among our young people is so intense, so pervasive, so out of control that there is nothing that we can do about it. They think, "What's the point"?

The fact is, we can make a tremendous difference on this issue of crime and violence among our youth. A recent Baltimore Sun editorial focused on early intervention as offering "the best chance to save both the victims and perpetrators of juvenile homicide." A recent study cited by the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer noted a "Profile of Hardship"- eight common factors shared by virtually all youth in America who kill or commit other violent crimes. Those factors are:

1. Absent or uninvolved fathers

2. Birth to a teenage mother

3. Involved Involvement with drugs

4. Relatives who are involved with drugs

5. Coming from a low-income neighborhood

6. Previous arrest record

7. Family members with criminal records

8. Being a high school dropout

Virtually all youth arrested for violent crime have some combination of these traits - or all of them.

We have a tendency to want to make a difference in everything at one time. None of us can do that. But if we "pick our spots" - find that one area where we feel we can make an impact - enough us pulling together can make a difference.

One of the ways in which we can make an impact is by mentoring kids, which has a direct effect on the dropout rate. The statistics on the correlation between the high school dropout rate and violent crime in our inner cities is quite startling.

According to USA Today, 75 percent of juveniles charged with murder or other violent crime have dropped out of school or weren't attending school on a regular basis. Nationwide, nearly one in three U.S. high school students drop out before graduating. That's nearly 1.2 million students per year - about 7,000 every school day, or one every 36 seconds.

A report by Time magazine noted that, for a young person entering the seventh grade today in America's inner cities, it is far more likely that they would end up having some contact with the criminal justice system by age 18 than that they would end up in college.

It seems like almost a cliché for us to talk about taking the time to mentor a kid, but the fact is, it does make an impact. Every day, our kids are faced with choices and decisions that could affect their lives for many years to come - if they live that long. The choices that they make are often affected by the influences - positive or negative - that they are exposed to in their everyday lives.

There is a saying: "Your exposure determines your focus. Your focus determines your reality." By mentoring kids and focusing on things like staying in school, we are helping to reduce the dropout rate, increase the graduation rate and, as a result, decrease the crime rate.

This is where we can make a difference. We often use the term "high-risk" when describing our youth. We need to replace the term high-risk with the term "high-potential." Every young person in our community has the potential to graduate high school, go on to college, and do amazing, incredible things. Every kid that we lose to violence is a potential doctor, a potential lawyer, or scientist, or architect, or, yes, even president of the United States.

It's up to us to help make sure they get there.

Steven T. Mitchell is president and founder of Take Back the City Inc. and is founder and coordinator of the Winning Teams Mentoring Program.

Tags: abuse, Baltimore, violence