By MICHAEL LAFLEUR
Lowell Sun (Massachusetts)
Copyright 2006 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
LOWELL, Mass.- Build trust with both neighborhood residents and gang-involved youths.
Keep a close eye on the children and siblings of state prison inmates, who are the most at risk of falling into the gang lifestyle, especially after the convicts return home from jail.
Encourage private business owners to support local organizations working to curb youth violence.
Ask local teens and young adults for their ideas about how to curb youth violence. Involve them in the process.
Soady Ouch, a 36-year-old resident of Lowell’s Lower Highlands neighborhood, said she would like to see the police have a more visible presence on the streets, without making more arrests.
“Jobs, too, would reduce the crime,” she said. “They wouldn’t have as much time.”
Those were but a few of the ideas and topics broached yesterday during the city’s fourth gang summit, held in the Federal Building on Middlesex Community College’s downtown Lowell campus.
About 50 police officers, city officials, prosecutors, neighborhood activists and Lowell residents gathered to hear a panel of speakers that included Harvard University criminal-justice professor Anthony Braga; the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, of the Union Baptist Church in Cambridge; Lowell Police Superintendent Edward Davis; Boston police Lt. Detective Gary French; and former prosecutor Gerry Leone. These experts sounded off on a variety of crime-prevention topics.
“This isn’t a flash-in-the-pan meeting,” Davis said. “We need to build a net under these kids to make sure this homicide problem doesn’t occur here.”
Braga, of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, presented an analysis of Lowell murders since 1993 that showed there have been more killings this year -- 10 -- than any other year in that span.
Police believe three of this year’s murders were gang-related.
There were two murders last year, and five in 2004. Three of the 2004 murders, in June and August, were gang-related and considered particularly brazen. They are what prompted city leaders to begin the series of gang summits last April. Neither of last year’s murders were considered by police to be gang-related.
However, Braga said aggravated assaults involving firearms in the city decreased slightly from 2000 to 2005. Such crimes rose to a high of 62 in 2002, fell to a low of 36 the next year and climbed back to 54 last year.
Braga added that Lowell’s per-capita gun-assault rate in 2005 -- 51.7 per 100,000 residents -- was lower than any Massachusetts city. Springfield topped the list with 212.3, he said. Lawrence had 70.4.
“Even though you did have this increase, it’s still, relative to other cities, a very safe place,” Braga said of Lowell.
Davis said he hopes to continue the downward trend with help from a new, $820,000 grant from the state Executive Office of Public Safety that is funding a full-time city building inspector to target the dilapidated apartment houses where gang members congregate. The grant will also help fund a variety of community programs focusing on things like truancy prevention, assistance for high-school dropouts and summer jobs programs, Davis added.
“It’s not the Police Department that’s able to prevent crime,” he said. “The Police Department can act as a lever to bring resources into an area.”
Brown, a co-founder of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, noted that anyone can be a “change agent” in their neighborhood or community.
“I’m often asked, ‘What kind of person does it take to start some kind of anti-violence campaign?’ ” Brown said in an interview after his speech. “I say, ‘It takes a person like you. It takes everybody and anybody. If you have the spark and inspiration to do something, you need to act upon that.’”