A year ago Norman Boone was spending his time on the streets “beefin’” — stirring up fights with kids who wandered into his Dixwell/ “Tribe” territory. Today, he’s learning painting in a job training program, is enrolled in adult ed for his GED, and, to use his phrase, “I’m on the right road and am going to keep going.”
Norman was on the original list of 47 severely “at-risk” teens referred by police to a new team of former gangbangers-gone-straight known as “Street Outreach Workers.”
He was proud exhibit number one at the first-year anniversary celebration of the SOW program, held Wednesday at the New Haven Family Alliance, under whose supervision it operates.
There officials pronounced it one of New Haven’s great success stories. They called for doubling the size of the half-million dollar program in the years ahead from its current nine workers. Click here to read about the launch of the SOW last year, and here to read about the truce they struck three weeks ago to end a wave of shootings.
New Haven has been reading these days about another teen referred to the outreach workers — Quinell Payne, a troubled young man who walked away from a city summer job, then raced a stolen dirt bike into a van and died from his injuries. Click here to read a Register account of the different ways the city tried to engage Payne, to no avail. His story has served as as evidence for the argument that troubled teens need to be locked up, not engaged in social programs.
The stories of other teens like Norman Boone don’t make news — because these teens have been reached, and aren’t causing trouble.
“The Street Outreach Workers program is nothing short of remarkable,” said City Hall’s point person in the effort, Community Services Director Kica Matos. She cited hundreds of mediations between individuals and groups that the workers had conducted, including the recent gang truce.
“A measure of the trust that’s been established,” said Tyrone Weston (to Matos’s right in photo), the supervisor of the SOW, “is that in the case of the kids on Winthrop, they called us in. They called Maurice “Blest” Peters, and we helped them solve it for themselves. Some of the slogans, the mantras about behavior they were saying, they had learned from us and made their own.”
Matos said that the outreach workers, assigned to six neighborhoods, have regular contact with 267 kids. The larger universe of people being helped — those involved in the job trainings, life skills classes, basketball league and other activities radiating out from the SOW through the Alliance — numbers closer to 400.
“Of the core group in danger of resorting to gun violence, grown to about 200, ID’d by the police for concern,” added NHFA director Barbara Tinney, “about 49 who originally had court involvement did not re-enter the court system, which is extraordinary.” She also cited 100 kids who pledged not to engage in violence, some 75 who had completed life skills courses, 53 who have gained employment, and 21, including Norman Boone, enrolled in adult ed.
A Constant Prescence
Outreach worker Doug Bethea, Norman Boone said, had been in his life for many years. Bethea was there when Boone dropped out of Hillhouse at age 16. Bethea was there when Boone didn’t want to leave his homeboy when the cops were coming, Boone said; although it was his friend who had just stolen a bicycle, Boone too was arrested and spent a month in jail. “I had bracelet violations too, you know, staying at home violations, and all that,” Boone said. “My mom was home, but my dad and his family were all in the South. I liked being on the streets. That was the problem,” he said, with a sense of talking about another person.
Finally, a year ago, as the Street Outreach Worker program was getting started, a beefing incident was leading to potential violence with Boone and others. Officer Shafiq Abdussabur and Doug Bethea kept after Boone to knock it off. They brought him to Sandra’s soul food restaurant on Whitney Avenue for a meal, and some tough talk about the illogic behind continual beefing. Boone began to change his ways.
On a trouble scale of one to ten, Boone said he would have rated himself an eight, but now that’s behind him. Boone was a little uncomfortable being interviewed by the press, Bethea said, with his hands all covered with paint from his internship at Monterey Place. But that, of course, was the point. After the internship ends, Bethea will be working with Boone to apply for full-time jobs with the skills he has learned.
Nobody expects magic to occur. “Just last week,” Boone said, “Me and my homeboy were riding our bikes on the sidewalk, downtown, near the bagel place at Grove and Whitney, and the cops arrested us.”
For what? a reporter wanted to know. For riding bikes on the sidewalk. (A police dispatcher actually told a caller in an unrelated incident this week that bicyclists are supposed to ride on the sidewalk.)
“What happened,” Doug Bethea explained later as he and Tyrone Weston were enjoying some first anniversary treats, “is that there had been a robbery. And you know what happens. The cops were looking for people. You know what happens in this city. They see Norman and some black kids riding their bikes. He was going from Fair Haven, where his friend lives, home, and they stop them and ask them if they know anything about a robbery. Norman said he didn’t know. The cops gave summonses anyway for trespassing with the bikes or whatever. Booked them at Union Station. His mother called me, and we were down there in an hour, and we advocated for Norman and the others, and we got the PTA [promise to appear] and then the charges dropped. That’s what we do.”
Might the outreach workers take on the task of combating “no-snitchin’”?
“The mission focus has to remain on youth advocacy,” Kica Matos said.
Added Weston, “We know that ‘no snitching’ is suffocating our community. Believe me, when we visit kids in the hospital, we talk about not retaliating … If kids want to help, yes, we help them with that, but we don’t promote it. At the heart of what we do is a 100 percent rock-solid sense of confidentiality between workers and the kids they rescue. Without that we wouldn’t be where we are today after a year.”
The Street Outreach Workers program this year is funded by grants from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, United Way, Yale University, Empower New Haven, and the State of Connecticut, the same funders who made the first year possible.
PROPS TO NORMAN!!!
Here's a kid who can see the future. And big up to the SOW program for getting things done in the hood.
BUT...
let me get this straight. Our community can have a debate about white adults riding bikes on sidewalks, but when the police see black youths doing the same they are arrested.
...
How can we trust the police to protect and serve our community when many of them share a strong bias against minority youths.
When I reported my bike stolen the officer said he saw kids on bikes all day and he knows 99% of the bikes are stolen. I was shocked that he assumed that though I think he knew he was exaggerating. Maybe he was trying to make me feel better.
This is why the SOW program is so important. We need to fix our community from within. We can't expect the police to correct our children. If you see something, you better say something!!