Too Much Too Soon

The life and death of a highly touted youth violence prevention program.

by Andrew Thompson

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Mar 25, 2009

Andrew Thompson A MAN WITHOUT A PLAN: Mitch Little worked for the now-defunct AVRP. When asked what's available for kids now, he laughs.

bureaucracy now

In 2005, as the homicide rate in Philadelphia rose frighteningly, the Street administration had an idea. It would take the highly reputed Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, a program that closely monitors youths age 15 to 24 at high risk of "killing or being killed," and adapt it to a younger group. The new program would be for kids age 10 to 15 who were already showing signs of chronic delinquency, and it would aim to rehabilitate them before they wound up in the criminal justice system, or dead on the street. The motto of YVRP was "Alive at 25"; for the Adolescent Violence Reduction Partnership, it might have been "Record clean at 15."

AVRP began in two police districts — the 12th in Southwest Philly and the 25th in the northern badlands. Mayor Street called the $700,000 spent to launch it "the ounce of prevention that hopefully will keep us from having to spend a pound of cure." Then-Councilman Michael Nutter said, "Finally, we'll be getting the desperately needed services people have been asking for."

But over the next couple of years, AVRP ballooned into a $16 million citywide program that, Nutter's Deputy Mayor Donald Schwarz says, "wasn't getting enough bang for its buck." In interviews now, city officials and community organizers describe it as a good idea that was run aground by mismanagement and blind-faith support. The Nutter administration began to phase out the program almost the minute the financial storm clouds started rolling in, shortly after Street's once similarly heralded curfew centers were shuttered. It went out of existence entirely in December.

Critics of Nutter's decision readily acknowledge mistakes in AVRP's handling, but view the shutdown as shortsighted. I asked Cheryl Weiss, executive director of Diversified Community Services in South Philly, which ran an AVRP program, and Mitch Little, who was an administrator there, what services remain in the neighborhood for problem kids, now that the program has been shut down.

Little laughed.

Diversified Community Services is headquartered in Point Breeze, next to a housing project and a run-down commercial corridor. The area regularly has among the highest crime rates in the city.

In summer 2006, tensions in the community reached a head when a stray bullet landed in the leg of a little girl, and "no snitching" protocol still prevailed. The person eventually arrested in the shooting was just 13, and the city decided to make Point Breeze host to the city's first curfew center and third AVRP program.

Residents were relieved that a program like AVRP, which many felt was long overdue, had finally come to the area. Volunteers were recruited for the curfew center, and people were engaged. "It was a pretty powerful process," says Little.

AVRP's predecessor, YVRP, is basically intensive probation: An officer visits a released convict more than 25 times a month. The intention is to watch the person's every move short of installing surveillance in his home, and step in the moment trouble seems brewing.

AVRP modified this model for younger kids, and added a second portion that included counseling and conflict resolution.

The way Weiss remembers it, the program made an immediate difference. In the two surrounding police districts, between 2005 and 2008, juvenile arrests fell nearly by half.

"The reality was that this place no longer looked like the shooting at the OK Corral," she says of Point Breeze.

But, says David Fair, problems were starting for AVRP. Fair was, at the time, the director of Community Based Prevention for the Department of Human Services. He oversaw all the money going to AVRP. Fair describes the program's handling as an absurdist comedy directed by Street, who Fair says was convinced that if AVRP could work in some districts, it would work everywhere else. Street increased city funding for AVRP dramatically and got a big matching grant from the state to expand the program citywide.

Street also outsourced the program's administration to the nonprofit Safe and Sound, which was led by his wife, Naomi, from its 1998 founding to 2002, which closed in June 2008 after the Nutter administration reduced its funding. Safe and Sound in turn hired small community service agencies like DCS, some of which, Fair believes, lacked the experience to run the program.

For a while, Fair says, Street actually considered transferring all of the funding for school-based prevention programs over to AVRP.

"He was making decisions that he was not really competent to make," says Fair, who's now a vice president at the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania. "On some level, he was so emotionally committed to seeing these types of social services work. If he used AVRP the way it was initially designed, it would have targeted a much smaller group of kids who we knew were at very high risk of violence and smother them with attention, like with YVRP. That's what he wanted to do, but he couldn't figure out a way to make it happen and wouldn't listen to anyone else to make it try to happen."

The program got big, fast.

"It was like anyone who wanted to send a kid to AVRP could send a kid," he adds.

Asked about AVRP by e-mail, Street says he believes that "setting up the program was absolutely the right thing to do."

"It has great potential to help families and schools who are having trouble with students who need an intervention but do not belong in the juvenile system," he writes. "I believe the program was fundamentally sound and well thought-out. As always, this program, like most others, would benefit from regular review and appropriate adjustments as our experience suggested."

Because AVRP was administered by numerous small groups with varying levels of experience, one natural question to ask is whether some of those groups got better results than others. Unfortunately, no such information exists. Only one study was done on the program, a short process analysis ordered by the Nutter administration in 2008, long after the expansion. James Moore, the city's director of Policy and Evaluation, oversaw the study; he says that group-by-group comparisons were made, but that he no longer has those numbers.

In any case, when it looked at the aggregate numbers, the Nutter administration saw an initiative that was broken. Less than half of the kids served by AVRP were completing the program, and it had grown into a larger beast than the highly focused YVRP: YVRP works with 900 people; AVRP had grown to 2,000. YVRP works in five police districts, AVRP spanned the city. YVRP costs $8.5 million, AVRP cost nearly double that. The budget shortfall convinced the city to shut it down entirely.

"The story of AVRP was not that it was a bad program," says Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Everett Gillison. "I don't think it was bad at all. I just think it was ramped up in a way that was not sustainable because you need an opportunity to grow the program into areas that you can sustain it." He says the city might revisit the program when finances return to normal, but "in a way that's sustainable."

Asked why the city shut down the program across the board instead of continuing it on a much smaller scale, in districts where it was needed most and with groups that had proven their efficacy, Gillison says that the situation was complicated.

"It's not just black and white; there are a lot of shades of gray," he says. "You can write what you write, but my point is that it's not always one or the other."

One of Mayor Nutter's commitments upon taking office was to create a government based on efficiency and the reliability of numbers. If programs could be empirically shown to work, they would continue. If they didn't, they would be chopped or changed.

In AVRP's case, the numbers clearly weren't there.

AVRP's champions worry that this reliance on numbers is shortsighted — that studies didn't take into consideration the time necessary to get a program off the ground, or that AVRP might have been working in some districts but not others.

"If you're talking about a study, we don't have a study," says Weiss. "But what we had was a program to trust."

Perhaps the bigger problem, though, is the vacuum left in its wake. Whether through AVRP or something else, there's a whole population of potentially delinquent kids now not being served. Weiss doesn't see that ending well.

"I'm going to suggest," she says, "that in due time we're going to see crime rates start to climb."

(andrew.thompson@citypaper.net)

We Could Do Worse
The Air-Quote Budget
The D.C. Boys
The Bell Curve