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Community Policing Article

September 25, 2007

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Houston PD hits classrooms to fight gangs

By Lindsay Wise
The Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON, Texas — At 13 years old, Caleb Hunt has already felt pressure to join a gang.

"I've had to run from them before, and I've seen them beat people up," said the seventh-grader at Sharpstown Middle School. One time, a group of older kids jumped on him when he refused to "claim" any gang affiliation, Caleb said. "They asked what did I claim and I said, 'I don't claim nothing,' and they started hitting me."

Last week, Houston police launched a classroom-based program designed to help students like Caleb stay away from gangs and out of trouble.

"This whole program's not just about gangs," said officer Steven Dau, one of Caleb's instructors. "It's about making better choices in life, less violent choices, and on top of that, we're trying to build a better relationship with law enforcement."

Taught by specially trained officers, the 13-week Gang Resistance Education and Training course (GREAT) will begin as a pilot program for students enrolled at Sharpstown, Jane Long and Key middle schools, all of which are in neighborhoods identified as heavily affected by gang activity.

If the experiment is deemed a success, GREAT could expand into more city schools, said Sgt. Craig Fletcher, the program's supervisor.

"This is something that is so needed in this city because the crime issues are so tied to the gang issues," Fletcher said. "I mean, if we could do away with the gangs, we could probably do away with half the crime in Houston."

According to HPD, gang-related violent crimes and other felonies are up 9 percent in Houston since this time last year. Police attribute the rise, in part, to more aggressive tracking of gang members.

Police Chief Harold Hurtt said general concerns about a citywide increase in gang activity prompted HPD to fund GREAT. The department spent about $325,000 on salaries and training of a supervisor and six officers who will teach courses at the three schools, as well as three civilian counselors from the Mayor's Anti-Gang Office.

Hurtt first became familiar with GREAT at the Phoenix Police Department, which created the program with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 1991.

"It was a different approach to dealing with the gang problem," said Hurtt, who once served on the program's national board. "A lot of the time we talk about enforcement, but we don't deal with the root of the problems," Hurtt said. "You can't just keep chasing the bad guys and not doing something up front, and that's why we'd like to focus on prevention."

But like its predecessor, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, GREAT has been criticized as ineffective when it comes to actually changing students' choices and behavior.

A five-year study funded by the National Institute of Justice and published in 2004 reported that GREAT has demonstrated "modest positive effects" on improving students' attitudes toward police and reducing high-risk factors associated with gang membership, but no effect on actual gang involvement or delinquent behavior.

GREAT is not a "silver bullet" that can magically rid cities of gangs, cautioned Terrance J. Taylor, an associate professor and one of the researchers who worked on the study at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

"There's no quick fix, but I do think there is reason to believe that programs like GREAT can have an effect on attitudes and behavior, although those changes take time to actually develop," Taylor said.

Sharpstown Middle School Principal Jeffrey Amerson said he's eager to give the program a chance. "One of the reasons kids are enticed by a gang is that it's friends, it's family, a place to belong. And we want to show them there's other alternatives to that," Amerson said. "Because really the consequences for joining a gang are usually either jail or death."