Themes about partnerships within the community emerged from the public forum “A Town Meeting on Youth and Violence” held in May at the Chicago meeting of the American. The panel was introduced by Mark Smaller, chair of the Committee on Foundations and co-chair of the Public Information Committee. By way of introduction, Smaller read the freshly penned APsaA position paper designating violence as a public health issue [see page 17].
John Callaway, former host of the “Chicago Tonight” TV show, moderated the town meeting. Panel members included Elijah Anderson, Charles and William Day Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Ghetto; Paul Vallas, CEO of Chicago Public Schools; Steven Marans, Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychoanalysis at the Yale Child Study Center and director of the Child Development-Community Policing Program (CD-CP) and the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence; and Douglas MacDonald, assistant chief of the New Haven Police Department and co-director of the CD-CP program.
Callaway began by noting a lesson learned in the course of public service decades earlier: A huge shift in the economy, for good or ill, can have more impact on children than all the social service efforts combined. Panelists agreed that while current statistics may weigh on the side of prosperity and decreasing crime, the experience of families does not necessarily match the numbers.
Anderson underscored that the inner-city poor feel the crunch despite corporate economic success on the global level. Vallas observed that 74 percent of students in Chicago schools live below the poverty line. Further, children are more isolated, given latchkey status or single-parent households.
Marans noted that the malignant transition from being the abused to becoming an abuser is occurring at increasingly earlier ages. In fact, empirically identified predictors of future anti-social behavior, such as reports of abuse, school truancy, and substandard housing, are on the rise. These perspectives made the public health ramifications of violence palpable for the audience.
At “ground zero” the good people — such as police officers — do not function as community partners and are not perceived as such. Anderson drove this home by noting that repeated experiences of 911 emergency calls having forty-five-minute response lags, and incidents where enforcers are blaming and disrespectful of the victims, cause people to take matters into their own hands. Being armed and ready to protect oneself and one's family, even preemptively, becomes the moral code of the street.
MacDonald did not quibble with these formulations; he pointed to the tunnel vision that characterized his department's past mandate to get to the scene fast. But this, in retrospect, is not community policing. The emphasis on enforcement skipped over the essential steps of prevention first and intervention second that have been actively developed in the New Haven CD-CP program.
With this acknowledgement of limitations, panelists reached a consensus about the toll exacted in the absence of community partnerships. Most obviously, one system of law enforcement may be exercised for underprivileged African-Americans and another system may be available to privileged whites. Perhaps less obvious is how the lack of partnerships between law enforcement, schools, and mental health practitioners undermines the effectiveness of them all. Individual programs addressing sweeping social problems have not worked. Efforts are hobbled by compartmentalized solutions. Thus enforcement at the point of crisis — whether by incarceration, school expulsion, or involuntary commitment — becomes a last resort.
Discussion turned to how community partnerships help tackle the limitations of compartmentalized solutions. For example, in the New Haven CD-CP program, it is key that police be seen as figures of stability who can help victims reconstitute their psychological equilibrium after trauma. Although this perspective resonates with familiar psychoanalytic concepts, Marans repeatedly emphasized that the teamwork necessary for effective interventions required building relationships between “the shrinks and the cops.”
One valuable result of such interdisciplinary relationships is that together the partners can help each other tolerate taking off the blinders inevitably created by each distinct point of view. Once this benefit is grasped, it takes little effort to extrapolate how other partnerships can form: A community police presence in schools, and follow-up by police officers and teachers who have built relationships with individual families, can also serve a stabilizing function.
In Chicago a variety of outreach programs help the schools and the community pull in the same direction. Because the safety and security officers in the schools are off-duty cops, there is a direct line of communication that fosters relationships between police, educators, and families. If a student is caught up in violence, ministers and concerned citizens are on call to offer support at the crime scene. Going a step beyond zero tolerance for violence, the schools will post rewards for information when one of their students is shot or assaulted, no matter where or when the incident occurs. Efforts are being made to have school officials informed about any domestic incidents involving the family of a student so that the child can receive follow-up in school the next day.
Additionally, more than 800 parents have been enlisted as truant officers. They know the kids in their neighborhood and can use those relationships as leverage. Their motivation to see their own kids stay in school, together with the empowerment by educators and police, has had impressive results.
In conclusion, the panelists agreed that it would be a tragic mistake to assume that community partnerships can substitute for the basic developmental building blocks children need within their homes. Yet through support for decent jobs, emotional well-being, adequate education, and the provision of safety, families and children have a much better chance to live generative lives.
Sallye Wilkinson, Ph.D., is an instructor at the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Menninger School of Psychiatry.
The public forum, which was videotaped for rebroadcast on TV, was nested within a two-day Conference on Youth and Violence hosted by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and organized under the leadership of Robert Galatzer-Levy. The richness of that program cannot be adequately described in this space. Suffice it to say that the range of papers, panels, and discussion groups included research on genetics, infant development, delinquent behavior, gangs, media, and parenting.
Clinical issues addressed included traumatic bereavement, adoption, and the self psychology of violence. Speakers presented, compared, and contrasted interventions through schools, community mental health centers, child analysis, and the legal system. Macro-level interventions through public policy and jurisprudence were also discussed. The range of topics reflected the recipe put forth in the public forum: Look at the largest possible array of issues underlying violence, and address the problems through a collaborative, multi-pronged approach; fold in psychoanalytic understanding as needed.