Description
Prevention
- Conduct a communitywide assessment of risk and protective factors for delinquency and gang involvement.
- Conduct a communitywide assessment of the gang problem.
- Acknowledge the gang problem.
- Form an agreement among stakeholders to work together in addressing the gang problem.
- Set goals and objectives.
- Develop and integrate relevant services, strategies, and graduated sanctions.
- Form an interagency Intervention Team that targets gang members for services and sanctions and provides case management.
- Create a one-stop center that addresses gang involvement and general delinquency involvement with individual problem assessment, services, service referral, and recreational activities.
- Implement an evaluation of outcomes.
- Develop a strategic action plan to address the interrelationship of juvenile delinquency and gang problems, consisting of prevention, intervention, and suppression programs and activities.
- Involve community stakeholders in establishing clear and consistent social norms and effective social policies.
Intervention
- Target potential and current serious, violent, chronic gang-involved juvenile offenders for resource priority.
- Provide case management by a particular agency for case conferencing and to coordinate services to offenders and the families of gang youth.
- Provide mentoring of at-risk and gang youths, counseling, referral services, gang conflict mediation, and anti-gang programs at schools in the community.
- Provide close supervision and monitoring of gang-involved youth by agencies of the juvenile/criminal justice system and also by community-based agencies, schools, and grassroots groups.
- Provide intensive probation supervision linked with more structured behavioral and/or skill-building and multimodal interventions.
- Provide direct placement and referral of youth for employment, training, education, and supervision.
- Provide alternatives to gang involvement, including remedial and enriched educational programs for gang youths with academic problems and vocational and apprentice training.
- Intervene with victims in the community or in hospital emergency rooms to break the cycle of violence.
- Provide job training and employment opportunities in juvenile and youthful-offender facilities and during reentry.
- Provide rehabilitation services in juvenile and youthful-offender facilities.
- Provide stepped-down control and support services for reentry of confined offenders by linking them with court-based and community services.
Suppression
- Sponsor Police Athletic Leagues that provide recreation and mentoring.
- Analyze crime data carefully when designing interventions.
- Social services should balance law enforcement efforts to the extent possible.
- City leaders should provide concrete forms of support to the municipal agencies involved.
- City leaders should hold the municipal agencies involved accountable for the results.
- Cost data should be collected to determine whether the project merits continuation.
- Serve as teachers in school-based education programs, such as Gang Resistance Education And Training (G.R.E.A.T.), that, among other things, educate youth on the consequences of gang involvement.
- Provide mentoring, grief counseling, referral for social services, gang conflict mediation, and case conferencing on individual youths for at-risk and gang-involved youths.
- Provide community policing that enlists community support, shifts police focus from individual gangs and crimes to the neighborhoods, and recognizes the importance of strategies and tactics other than what the police can provide.
- Provide law enforcement intelligence, enforcement/suppression, investigations, and prevention activities; ensure that these functions are integrated with core policing units.
- Conduct anti-gang programs in the community.
- Simultaneously enforce curfew and truancy laws and regulations.
Date Created: December 16, 2020