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Daytona Youths Poor And In Need Of Direction

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The Associated Press

Published: June 2, 2008

DAYTONA BEACH - When the police got a tip that Bonner Elementary was being hit for the second time in a week, they rushed three squad cars to the school. As they were cordoning off the grounds, the burglars emerged - dashing out a front door and across a field.

Norm Kenaiou, a veteran officer, caught one burglar struggling to hop a chain-link fence. The shock came when he spun his suspect around and saw two, doe-like eyes blinking back at him: the eyes of a terrified, 8-year-old girl.

Should he read the child her Miranda rights? Handcuff her? Kenaiou couldn't bring himself to do that. Instead, as he later described it, "I took her hand and, just as a father would lead a child, walked her back to my patrol car."

That another 8-year-old, a 9-year-old, two 12-year-olds and a 14-year-old were also arrested for the New Year's Day break-in was just as troubling. "It was a real gut punch," Kenaiou says.

In this working-class tourist mecca, a party town best known for motor racing and spring-break frivolity, crime has never been an outsider. Today, Daytona Beach's crime rate is more than double Florida's and the nation's, having jumped 13 percent in 2006 alone, according to the most recent state figures available.

But what especially unsettles law enforcement here is that juveniles - some as young as 7 - are being arrested for a larger share of the city's felonies.

Mike Chitwood flagged the problem two years ago, soon after taking over as Daytona Beach's police chief. It wasn't just that poorer neighborhoods were being pounded by burglaries, or that cars were vanishing from dealership lots, or even that assaults and sex offenses were up.

The crimes were happening under the noon sun - and not far from the city's schools. Initially, Chitwood ordered truancy sweeps. Then he had his officers fingerprint kids caught skipping school. After running the prints through the FBI's national database, he saw his suspicions confirmed: Kids were behind the spike.

It didn't take long for the police to link rings of teens to burglaries, car thefts, carjackings and even armed robberies. "We even had kids taking stolen cars out of stolen-car lots," Chitwood says.

But more arrests do not a victory make, as the chief came to learn.

What Will It Take?

In a city such as Daytona Beach - where poverty lives among the weeded lots and sagging houses off the palm-lined, neoned strip, behind the triple-bolted doors of tenements in the shadow of the International Speedway - teen crime and even preteen crime have proved to be resilient adversaries.

Here and in other cities, chronically high juvenile crime rates - those ranging above the national average of children younger than 15 committing 5 percent of violent crimes, 7 percent of robberies and 9 percent of burglaries - fray the patience of judges and politicians and pop up on newspaper front pages. Each spike in offenses prompts a new round of questions, namely:

•What will it take to keep our children out of the juvenile justice system - for some, just a pipeline to the prison system? More aggressive policing? More social services? Harsher sentences? Or something else?

•Would programs to modify the behavior of children as young as 5 help? Or would taxpayers dismiss that as just more nanny government, especially at a time of economic slowdown?

Chitwood doesn't hesitate in answering.

"I've got 8-, 9-, 10-, 11-year-olds committing burglary and stealing cars now. What are they going to be doing when they're 21?" he says. "Hey, either you pay when they go to state or federal prison, or you're going to clean the crap up now. But somewhere along the line, you are going to pay."

Catching Them Early

When children commit or even plan violent crimes, America takes notice.

But the "rookie" offenses, the ones that start children on the journey to a life of crime, often don't get the attention they should, says Dan Mears, an associate professor at Florida State University's College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

"There's an at-risk population of kids in our country, particularly those in poverty - 8-, 9-, 10-, 11-year-olds - who get no attention from our juvenile justice system. Even in our most progressive states, we wait until a kid has committed a really bad crime ... to do something."

And even then, he adds, "the response is much more focused on being punitive, rather than asking, 'Jeez, what can we do to prevent them from getting enmeshed in juvenile justice?' - which would cost us a lot less money than eventually having to incarcerate them."

Daytona Beach is no New York, no Chicago. Criminologists don't look here for national law enforcement trends. Yet, Daytona Beach suffers from economic and social maladies that plague many U.S. cities with high youth-crime rates.

For example:

•Seventeen percent of Daytona Beach's families live below the poverty line, nearly double the national and state averages of 9 percent. The median household income, $25,439, is not two-thirds of the national average of $41,994, according to U.S. Census data.

•The percentage of single-parent households in Daytona Beach is higher than that of two-parent households. Nationally, there are three times as many two-parent households as single-parent homes, the census notes.

•Fewer than half of Daytona Beach's residents own their homes, far below the average for the rest of Florida, where 70.1 percent are homeowners, census data show.

And this city has yawning demographic disparities: In Daytona Beach, where a third of the population is black and half is white, eight of 10 children arrested in 2005-06 were black; just 16 percent were white, according to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

"These poor, minority kids always fall between the cracks," says Jeffrey Butts of Chapin Hall, a child and family research center at the University of Chicago. "Their law violations scare away child welfare agencies, but most times their initial crimes are not serious enough to merit aggressive intervention by the juvenile justice system."

A Patchwork Approach

What to do, then, in cities such as Daytona Beach?

"We'll never have the tax base and political will to bring outside solutions into every neighborhood," Butts says. "What it takes is creative organizing - to find positive people in each community and to build them into a force for change."

There exists a patchwork of nonprofit groups that endeavors to dent this city's child-crime problem. Then there are foot soldiers, such as Georgia Williams, who works for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

"Miss Georgia," as the children respectfully call her, is director of the Palmetto facility in 32114, Daytona Beach's poorest ZIP code. Her responsibility: 166 children, ages about 6 to 12. Her staff: Two.

In physical terms, Williams' workplace is modest: a one-story structure of graffitied brick that a decade ago served as a low-income housing project. This club has no basketball court, no pool, no soccer field, not even a flag for its flagpole - just a faded sign hung crookedly in a barred window: "Safe Place."

What it does have, though, is fundamentally important: rules.

Here, bad behavior isn't tolerated: not fighting, profanity, backtalk, forgetting to brush one's teeth or fluffing off homework. At 52, Williams is old-school, likes order. "These kids don't come here to get their character developed," she says, "but they wind up getting just that."

Spanking is a no-no, but she has other tools, such as "time outs." Those punished in this way sit alone for 10 minutes or perform cleanup duty. More serious offenders receive two-day suspensions, and do neighborhood cleanup.

Williams' larger purpose is to groom these children for life "on the big stage," starting with lessons in hygiene and other basics. She and her helpers drill the kids on the importance of a good breakfast, telling the truth, staying in school.

And, adds Kamri Skillings, 11, on the pitfalls of illegal substances. "Cocaine, marijuana, meth - the biggies," she says. Anything else she has been warned to avoid? "Um, diseases that can be spread from kissing and stuff."

This all might seem rudimentary, but it's vital to children who often don't get the basics from a grandparent who's raising them or a single mother who's working multiple jobs to pay the rent, says Joe Sullivan, who oversees 11 Boys & Girls Clubs in east Central Florida.

"A lot of these latchkey kids need boundaries - how to act, how to behave. They need somebody to pay attention to them," he says.

Despite all these groups' efforts, this is going to be a hard year. Private donations and government dollars are getting scarcer. Consequently, the Boys & Girls Club will shutter two facilities in the county, spreading kids among its remaining clubs, Sullivan says.

Gail Hallmon, operations director at The House Next Door, a support agency for troubled families, commiserates. Her organization lost $100,000 last year in funding from the state and county - a 5 percent budget hit. This year, she expects more cutbacks.

"In times like these, all social services are getting cut, and the first things to go are the programs designed to keep kids from becoming criminals. There isn't really any organized attention and funding to help those kids who haven't broken the law yet - only for kids already in the juvenile justice system."

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