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- How one organization wants to help reduce violent crime in Memphis tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Patrick Lawler, CEO of Youth Villages.

Thanks for being here.

- Great to be here.

- Along with Susan Deason, who is the Executive Director of Memphis Allies, a program that's been launched underneath Youth Villages that we'll talk a lot about today.

Also here is Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We were just talking and you had previewed this program.

Youth Village has been around for quite some time.

We'll talk about the people, the programs that you do as well that people are maybe more familiar with.

But with the spike in violent crime that is both a national problem and very much a Memphis problem.

With homicides up 30% over the last 2 years or the last year, certainly up this year already.

It's been a huge problem and a huge tragedy.

And that you had told me that you all wanted to get involved and try to help.

What was the process and what was briefly... And then we'll dive deep into it with you and with Susan.

What was the process of getting there and your thoughts on what you all could do given your background to try and help with this problem?

- Well, in the fall of 2020, the numbers us were spiking dramatically in Memphis on terms of murders and homicides.

But also it was unique that year about the number of young people that were being killed throughout the year.

And we said, you know, "What are we doing about this?"

We started looking at our own organization and we weren't heavily involved in working with the most seriously delinquent and violent young people in the community.

So we started asking ourselves, what could we do more?

But we started lookin' at the problem, and this is not a problem with children.

Ninety percent of the murders in our community are committed by adults.

While often young people and children and juveniles get the headlines, they only represent about 10% of the people that are really involved in gun violence.

So we asked ourselves, you know, if we get heavily involved in just working with young people, we're really not gonna have much of an impact on the overall problem in our community.

And really just started lookin' at what others were doing in our community, what other cities are doing around the country, and felt that we could just do so much more.

- Yeah.

So you're heading up this program within Youth Villages.

Give a snapshot of what you all are trying to do.

I mean, just some numbers that you wanna hire over 300 staff.

It's a $60 million program over 4 years trying to reduce the homicide rate by 30% over that period of time.

You also recently just got a big sort of out-of-the-blue gift from MacKenzie Scott, who's been giving away billions of dollars nationally.

Got a $25 million gift that will go to Youth Villages and maybe partly applied to this.

And I think you've raised what 11 million plus before that towards this program?

But is that all those numbers, right?

And two tell people about the program and then we'll dive deeper into it.

- Yes, and we're tremendously grateful for the donation.

A complete surprise.

We're thrilled.

But this problem is gonna take the whole community coming together to solve it.

So where we are right now is in trying to understand who are all the other organizations in Memphis who can come together with us that we can coordinate this effort.

And so we've also begun building a new model that will help reduce gun violence.

This is something we do have a track record of success for in building new evidence-based practices.

So really exciting.

We've hired new staff.

There are three teams right now on the ground starting work in the Raleigh-Frayser community.

We're working at this moment with 30 to 40 individuals that we're looking at to participate in service.

- And again, and then I'll get Bill in here.

Apologies to Bill.

It's a very hands-on, very intensive program of trying to identify...

I'm gonna do a bad job of this, but trying to identify kids or young people at risk or young men, it's mostly men, maybe not just maybe adults as well, because this is not just a youth program, and try to get them the counseling, the support, the wraparound services to not then go down the road of violence.

Is that a fair way to describe them?

- That's right.

Many of them already are on that road though.

This is delivering services to those who are at highest risk currently.

So that means they are currently in a gang, clique, or crew.

They have had extensive legal involvement.

Likely not employed or in school.

So there's specific criteria that identifies someone as highest risk.

- Okay, Bill.

- One of the features of our city's ongoing discussion about violent crime is that I think we tend to say, "Okay, we have nonviolent offenders here and we have violent offenders here," and people with day-to-day experience with this problem, have all said, "It doesn't break down that way.

You're not in one camp or the other."

One camp can lead to the other.

Is that your experience?

- Yes.

I mean, most of the people involved in gun violence have been involved in crime for a very, very long time.

Probably many most of their life.

- And so is this intervention that we're talking about?

- Yes.

- The sort of life coaches.

I mean, there's a great example in some of your stuff about, you know, I think it's a fictitious person based on real circumstances Marcus who is kind of on the edge in the way you're talking about this and has something happen in their life.

I think it's a cousin is shot.

I mean, it's the way these things get triggered and maybe walk through that.

- Yeah, there is a progression.

Obviously many of the adults who are at highest risk started off as at-risk or high-risk young people.

So that's why we will continue developing services and expanding our services to work with those young people who are at highest risk.

But when someone is exposed to violence at a young age and grows up in a community or in a family where that's normalized they've been maybe in a gang at a younger age, this becomes day-to-day.

And while that may seem strange to someone who's never come from an environment like that, it's normal for someone and for many of these individuals they don't know that there are other opportunities.

They haven't been offered those other opportunities.

And so it is intervention.

It's the most intensive intervention that we've developed to date.

It's new.

We're just starting off.

We know it's going to take time for it to be effective.

That's why it's a four-year plan for right now but we want it to be sustainable.

And to your point, it is a wraparound in that we have four different professionals who are providing services directly to each participant and all of them work together as a team to provide the right kind of support.

- So is this stopping retaliation?

Is it getting to people at that level before they decide to try to even the score?

- Yes.

Retaliatory violence is the most serious problem we have in our community right now with respect to violence.

- And the key to this model is we've gotta identify who those highest-risk people are.

That's the first part of this process and in a city our size, the research it's pretty clear across the country as well.

It's probably about 3 to 500 individuals who are involved in about probably 50 to 70% of the gun violence.

And that's who we're looking for first to identify.

Then we connect with them, then provide the necessary service.

And this takes time.

They don't, you know, say they want to get on board to be a participant the first time we talk with them.

It'll take some time and then some trusting relationships to be built.

- Give me an idea because Youth Villages has been involved in this.

It's not like you just woke up one day and decided to get involved in this.

So talk about some of the history of what Youth Village has seen in this that informs this approach.

- People hear about Youth Villages and often think we're just a residential program out in the community.

We served over 32,000 young people last year across 24 states in about 100 locations.

And over 30,000 of those young people and young adults were living in the community.

They weren't in a residential facility.

So we have built two specific models that have tremendous data and research to support that they're very successful.

So we have experience workin' in the community with high-risk people up to the age of 22.

Going above the age 22, that would be new to us.

That would be new.

But even though we work with young people up to the age of 22, we're still working with their parents and their grandparents and the adults in the community in the home.

So doing community-based work what we've been doing since 1994.

So that's where most of our actual experience is.

So we're building a model now that's working with young adults up to the age of 30, 35.

And so that'll be somewhat different.

And obviously the level of violence is different for us but we've spent the last year and a half traveling the country, hiring the best national experts, and building the most comprehensive plan we've seen to address this issue.

And we believe with the staff we've hired and we've learned over the past year and a half, that we will be able to reduce gun violence.

Other cities have done this using similar interventions and models and so can we.

- Part of Memphis Allies seems to be to also serve as a clearing house because there are a lot of people doing a lot of different things.

And some of this is quite frankly based on just frustration.

Like we have to say something, we have to try to do something.

So this puts more of a focus on that, right?

- Yes.

I mean, we're building a new model that we will ourselves use and that we will also work with other organizations to help them implement but we want everyone in this community who's invested in this, who's trying something, to be a part of this initiative.

This is really about bringing everyone together and doing something effective.

- Does that include [coughs], excuse me, the criminal justice system?

So whether that's law enforcement, that's the jail, that's detention center, that's the courts?

- Yes, it does.

There are many stakeholders in the community that are involved in this in some way.

So that's working with the District Attorney's Office, the Public Defender's Office, working with law enforcement.

Our services are separate from that.

The intervention is separate from that, but identifying high-risk individuals and trying to ensure that everyone gets a chance who has that capacity for change.

- You alluded to this, and I want to kind of pick up on that.

You're not settin' up a storefront, I don't think.

And waitin' for people to walk in.

- No.

- So the hard work of reaching these and someone who is forced into a program as you know an alternative to going to jail or something like that's a different thing.

I kinda see you shaking your head.

You're trying to reach people in a much more organic way.

And correct me if I'm wrong, it's often with people.

A lot of the people you'll hire have some experience on the wrong side of these sorts of behaviors.

- Yes, and they are critical to this process.

That's what we're learning already is that this wouldn't be successful without staff working on this who have that same lived experience, who have walked that path before.

So they are much more likely to be able to engage someone who is on the wrong path currently than someone who has had no experience like that.

So.

- And one thing we've learned over the years, the last year and a half especially, is that, you know, I had the question as we visited other parts of the country where we learned about gun violence, why would someone want to change their life?

And what we learned is that most of the people out there involved in this gun violence that they want out.

They don't know how to get out.

You know the choice for them right now is kill or be killed or be arrested.

And so we're offering them another alternative, a way out and they can have a difference in the future of their life.

But most of all of our staff have had a history of criminal activity that we've hired.

'Cause they're the ones who'll be connecting with the people in the community that are in involved in many of these gangs and crews, and it takes those kinda relationships.

But those men that we've mostly men that we've hired working in this field they become trusted mentors to these young people and these young adults.

And that's really what starts moving them to thinkin' about having a different life.

Hey, you were in prison.

You're out and you have a life now.

You have a job, you have a family.

And maybe that can happen to me as well.

So that's the first part of this process.

- So if in the course of this work you see something in the criminal justice system that would suggest that maybe that practice needs to change, what do you do with that?

- You know, first of all, we're already workin' with the criminal justice system in relation to that in terms of mental health.

And we are offering some recommendations.

We're working closely with the Chief Davis and her team and they're very, very open.

We did ride alongs last year with the police department, and I will tell you it was a wonderful experience.

They have a very hard job.

Those are very, very difficult jobs in very dangerous communities.

And they want to do whatever they can to impact the community favorably and they have been very, very open to feedback from just early on in working with us, yeah.

And they've been wonderful to work with out in the community as well.

They know where a lot of who these high-risk people are and they know they need help.

- Is it hard to talk to a victim of crime and say, you know, "This person who did this to you, "who violated you and in whatever way, "deserves a second chance or we think a second chance could work for them"?

Is that a difficult discussion?

- Well we've had a few discussions with some victims and you know it's interesting you use the word second chance.

I'm not sure a lot of these people in these communities even have much of a first chance when you hear about their histories.

You know, I'll let Susan... We had an event this past weekend where the parents of a child were there who had been killed.

A young man named Rocky downtown a couple weeks ago.

And it was a very difficult moment but there were 150 or 200 people out showin', you know, how much they cared about this family.

And you might wanna talk more about your experience in talking with those families.

- I was gonna say, I think the answer to that's really complex.

We are all impacted by gun violence in our community but there are communities that are disproportionately impacted by that.

So yes, we are trying to bring services to individuals who are engaging in violence, and we're trying to help those communities that are being torn apart by gun violence.

That's something that we can, I believe all get on board with.

That's something that resonates with all of us, whether we've had a loved one directly affected by it or shot or killed, or whether it's, you know, someone who is engaging in it themselves because they didn't see another opportunity.

And so I believe that we can come together to support victims as well as the perpetrators.

- I'll just add this.

Look many people involved in gun violence are not arrested.

They're livin' in the communities, okay?

And those are the people we're lookin' to help.

- Well I think, I mean, that is interesting.

I mean, isn't it something like 40% of homicides don't get solved?

I mean maybe 50% depending how you count it.

It's a pretty high number that aren't solved and there's a lot.

I mean, you'll hear...

I can think of Chief Rallings, a former police chief being on before saying about a given incident, "There's someone out there who knows who did this, "there are people who can call us and they don't.

They don't call."

Where are you all in that spectrum of information about people who haven't been arrested, who maybe are suspected you're trying intervene?

I mean, how do you sort out the ethics and just the realities of that situation?

- Well we want to give that person that knows who someone is involved in this community in gun violence they could contact us to help that person.

You know, obviously, you know, we're not involved in the police work and the investigative work and everything, but, you know, if you know of someone who's been involved in gun violence, your choice now is to do nothing or call the police.

And we're hopin' now that maybe they would call us and say, "This person might need some help or some support or some supervision."

We won't get involved in obviously the legal part of that.

- You mentioned tourin' the country going to looking at other programs.

Where were some of the places you went and what were some of the things that you saw?

- New York, DC, Chicago, Oakland, and Stockton, California.

Chicago had a program called Chicago CRED.

Tremendous organization started by a man named Arne Duncan.

And one of the first things we asked is, "Arne how'd you get these organizations to do this work?"

He said, "I went to a bunch of youth-serving organizations and asked them to work with older people," exactly what we're doing here.

This is where we learned how to develop this model.

The model, it's called SWITCH and we develop our own model.

Our model's built specifically for Memphis.

It's much more intensive than the other models we saw and much larger than the other programs we saw because we have such a large problem.

But they taught us.

I mean, we've had hundreds of hours of training by Chicago CRED already.

As a matter of fact, they were here just a few weeks ago.

We had two visits to Chicago to learn about their... And people say, "Well Chicago?"

Our murder rate is almost twice as high Chicago in Memphis.

And they've been doing this a lot longer in a coordinated effort as well.

- And that's murder rate per 100,000.

- Per capita.

Per 100,000.

- Per capita.

- That's right.

It's per capita.

- To kinda even that, yeah and we're top three, top two, when you look at it that way.

- Right.

- Go ahead, yeah.

- Yeah, I was gonna add to that, that a critical part of this is working with people who live in these communities.

So that means organizations who have already been doing this grassroots work on the ground and bringing them into our effort because they have the credibility in their communities.

Most of the people don't look like me.

[chuckles] And so we need to hire staff who look like the people that we're delivering services to.

And we wanna make sure that the organizations here in Memphis who know...

They have a wealth of knowledge about this problem.

They care about their communities.

And we wanna come together and provide them support and resources to help their effort.

- The two things that we learned the most travelin' around the country was one, this has to be a priority for everyone in this community.

Government, business, the nonprofit sector, everyone.

This has to be our priority.

And secondly, it's gonna take all of us workin' together to solve this.

It's gotta be a collaborative effort where we're working closely together and connecting the dots.

And that's why it's not just about Youth Villages.

That's why it's Memphis Allies.

We're working with many other not-for-profits already.

And we'll be expanding it broadly throughout the next few years.

- Bill.

- Does this include legislation?

Because, as you may know, a lot of our criminal justice system leaders think that the legislature made this problem worse by doing two things.

Number one, passing a bill that said you can have a gun in your car.

And the other was that they passed a law that eliminated the need to have a permit to carry certain types of weapons.

So is that a factor in this?

- You know, we've had a gun violence problem here long before that legislation passed, okay?

There are some people in this community that probably don't need a gun, okay?

We're not involved in the legislation.

We are not advocates for people who are dangerous for having weapons.

That's not something we would support whatsoever but we've pretty much stayed out of the legislative process.

- Memphis Allies will support safety when it comes to gun ownership.

We want responsible gun ownership and we'll continue to promote that.

- Going back.

And we've probably done a disservice to people who aren't as familiar with Youth Villages.

Talk about if I'd had you on the show two years ago, probably should have, what does Youth Villages do?

- We care for seriously, emotional-troubled young people primarily in the child welfare system.

About 25% in the juvenile justice system or people in danger of coming into those systems.

We have 3,300 staff across 24 states.

We primarily work with the highest risk young people in danger of being removed from their family to put in the child welfare system.

And then if they are placed in the child welfare juvenile justice, trying to return them back to their families.

We also have residential programs.

We have two large programs here in Memphis.

We have one in Douglasville, Georgia for the highest-needs young people.

And we also provide therapeutic foster care across Tennessee as well.

But I guess our most broad program across the country is called LifeSet for young people aging of the child welfare system.

That's serving young people 17 to 22 years of age.

- That are no longer eligible for foster care or homes.

- Yeah.

Well they could be in the aging out part of the foster care system but yeah, most of them are leaving the foster care system and trying to live independently.

- People who've gone through the traumas that you're talking about and then are aging out, which is a sad thing to say but they're aging out, how at risk of are they of falling into crime?

I mean, is that part of what you're... You've dealt with this for decades, apparently.

I mean that high-risk situation.

- And many of 'em have been involved in crime.

I mean, often a young person in the child welfare system but they probably been involved in juvenile court many times, but the judge just made the decision to put him in the child welfare system rather than the juvenile justice system.

- Yeah.

So a similar question and Bill had my question which was about legislation, but if you just look at policies, you mentioned the juvenile justice system, you talked about working with Chief Davis, the Police Chief of Memphis Police Department, how much will you advocate for changes in policies that various parts of the criminal justice system have?

The courts.

Again there's the laws that are set, that's one thing, but then there's the kind of implementation and so on.

Will you try to sort of advocate for the criminal justice system operating differently?

Or does that get too political and get out too far?

- No, I think we'll... We've already had some conversations about possibly us having a greater impact of working with young people with mental health issues with the police department.

No, we'll be heavily involved in that.

I see us much more involved in that than we would necessarily be involved in legislative issues in Nashville.

Yes.

- You're nodding.

I mean, do you find that the criminal... Again I'm saying it as if it's a system.

I think all the shows we've done and I've said this a bunch of times, especially through the fall.

We did a lot of shows on the sheriff, the DA, the mayor talking almost exclusively about crime and so on.

That it isn't a system it's a series of sort of islands often that don't necessarily work as well together as they would have liked to work.

But fundamentally, do you find that the justice system, again back to my probably useless phrase, is receptive to these kinds of diversions and alternatives and so on?

- Yes, I do.

I mean, we've already had preliminary conversations about how could we create diversion programs that would feed into our new intervention?

So I think they're incredibly open to it.

I think it is incredibly complicated.

It's a huge system and you're right.

Sometimes there are communication breakdowns but I think that's where we could also facilitate some good change.

- Whether it's with Memphis Allies or your history of working with kids that are at risk or have a criminal by background, I mean, how often do you run into people, whether it's a cop or it's a prosecutor, or it's just a person who maybe you're a nonprofit you're going to people for support who says, "These kids need to go to jail.

"That's the answer.

"They need to be taught a lesson.

They need to be removed from society."

I mean, people really just wanna lock up.

How often do you run into that and how do you respond to them?

- Sure we run into that, you know, often and some young people need to be removed for safety reasons and put in, you know, a juvenile facility or residential treatment facility but the real work needs to be done when you return them back to the community.

What are you really gonna change in that community?

Young people for that matter all of us are reflection of who we're with and what those people are doin'.

And if you don't change the community and the environment, the family circumstances, the situation where they return back into, there's not gonna be much change by just takin' 'em away and putting 'em in an institution for six months or a year.

As a matter of fact, they may come out worse.

So that's why in all of our programs we work tensely with the family while the young person may be in our foster care residential program to try to return them safely back to the community and make sure that there's things that have changed in their world.

Whether it's school, whether it's job, whether it's the family dynamics, or even where they're living.

But that's where the real work comes.

- There's 15 seconds left and ow bad has COVID been, and the lockdowns, and the separations, and the kids not in school in person?

- It's been terrible.

It's been terrible.

I mean, our own organization, you know, families couldn't come visit their children at residential programs.

Kids could not go home and visit their families from residential programs.

They couldn't go off the campus.

It's terrible.

- Yeah, all right.

Thank you both for being here.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, Bill.

And thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the full show at WKNO.org.

You can also search for the show on YouTube, or you can get the podcast of the show on the Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much and we will see you next week.

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