Sunday, April 26, 2009
News, In this Issue...

Right back on the streets

How the juvenile “point system” works—and fails

 Patrick Bray

Part Two in a Three-Part Series: Gangs, Juveniles and Crime

BY STEPHANIE RAMAGE

For the Atlanta Police Department’s gang unit, these are busy times.

Maj. Debra Williams, who heads the unit, acknowledges crime is up among the city’s youthful cliques, crews and posses.

“There has been a recent sharp increase in the amount of violence perpetrated by neighborhood gangs,” she says.

That correlates with findings by The Sunday Paper. According to APD reports obtained by the paper under Georgia’s open records law, robberies and assaults committed by three or more perpetrators—the legal definition of a gang is three or more people who work together to commit crime—since last October were on the upswing through January, the most recent month for which statistics are available. October saw 61 such crimes committed. November saw a dramatic downturn—to 39—followed by a striking upturn to 54 in December. The rise continued in January to 65.

Williams says the most affected areas are Zone 1, which includes the northwestern corner of the city and the area north of Georgia Tech, and Zone 3, which is home to Grant Park and Ormewood Park. Zone 6, the area of Inman Park and Kirkwood, has seen an increase in gang crime, she says, thanks to the closing of the Thomasville Heights housing project.

“The gangs used to be concentrated in Atlanta Housing Authority apartments,” she says, “but those have closed, so now they have been dispersed out into the community.”

There is a federal statute that can be used against adults involved in gangs, but Williams points out that the juvenile status of many gang members makes it impossible to use the federal law against them to stiffen their sentences and keep them off the streets longer.

It’s even hard to arrest juveniles, never mind convict them. Why?

“Because of the point system,” she says. “You’ve heard about the point system, right?”

Indeed, I have. Since first entering my records request with the APD in February, I’ve gotten an earful on “the point system” from Atlanta residents and cops alike, so I decided to find out what, exactly, it is. It turns out, as much as residents and police hate the point system, it has its champions in the juvenile system. Even its detractors admit that in Fulton County, at least, the point system has simply been misused. And a law recently passed by the state legislature could help police in gang-prone jurisdictions arrest juveniles regardless of the point system, if the officers would use it.

How many points is a burglary worth?

The point system, according to Steve Teske, president of the state Council of Juvenile Court Judges, and chief judge of the Clayton County Juvenile Court, works like this: Points are assigned to crimes according to their seriousness. The more serious the crime, the higher the number of points. The highest number of points possible is 12.
 
A burglary usually scores eight points. Anything under eight points, like vandalism or loitering, allows a child to be released to his parents without monitoring. Eight to 12 points means the child should be put in some kind of monitoring program. Twelve points means the child should be considered for detention in a youth facility. All of this applies to sentencing after a conviction, not merely an arrest—so police are required to call someone at juvenile court to discuss the probability of a conviction before even placing a juvenile under arrest. 

Antavius Weems, who left the Fulton County Juvenile Court, where he was a senior child advocate attorney, to start his own practice in 2006, believes that Chief Juvenile Court Judge Belinda E. Edwards is “a breath of fresh air” and is working to improve the court, but the court is stymied by a lack of resources and an overwhelming caseload.

“The problem is the intake line,” he says, referring to the phone number police officers are required to call when they pick up a juvenile. “In the past, the court has had people answering that intake line who had no experience or legal background whatsoever. It’s supposed to be the judge’s designee—not just someone who has just graduated from high school and is doing grunt work. But it became grunt work because the phone rings so much, because there are so many kids getting in trouble in Fulton County.”

Lacking the confidence that comes with experience, the people who answered the phone often basically told the cops to let the kids go.

The intake line aside, Weems cites problems with the point system itself.

“The point system is a huge disservice to the residents, and to the children committing the crimes,” he says, explaining that the point system is such common knowledge that adult offenders use children to commit crimes for them. Meanwhile, the predatory adults—the kind of folks one might see “supervising” children asking for donations to shifty causes in grocery store parking lots while scouting for easily-broken-into cars—maintain enough distance from the crime itself so they cannot be arrested. Furthermore, he says, for children who are growing up in chaotic environments with unconcerned parents, the point system only reinforces a perception of the world as a place without order and without consequences.

“Why would you release a child found pointing a gun at someone at a MARTA station at 2 a.m., for example, back into the custody of the very parents who allowed them out at 2 a.m.?” he asks. “Why would you think that would change anything? There should be no child who has committed a violent crime in Fulton County who has not been arrested. That simply should not be.”

Leslie Gresham respectfully objects. Gresham is a former Clayton County Magistrate judge who served as a pro tempore juvenile court judge, and is now a special assistant attorney general for the Department of Human Resources specializing in child custody cases.

“I snuck out of the house at 2 a.m. when I was a kid,” she says. “Maybe the parents don’t know. Kids do stupid things.”

Juvenile court, unlike adult court, Gresham says, must concern itself with an offender’s family.

“I had an actual case where a girl was arrested for shoplifting with her mother. To whom am I supposed to release that child?” she asks.

Gresham advised on the crafting of Senate Bill 292, which, if passed in the next legislative session, will set in motion a rewrite of Georgia’s juvenile code. She doesn’t know if the rewrite will affect the point system but, for now, Gresham feels the point system adequately makes allowances for “kids who do stupid things” and those who commit serious crimes. 

“There simply are not a million beds available in the juvenile justice system, and you don’t want that kid who has spray-painted a building to be taking the space that should go to a kid who has shot someone,” she says.

Many of the complaints e-mailed or phoned in to The Sunday Paper have come from residents who have witnessed juvenile offenders back on the streets less than 24 hours after being picked up by police.

“They are released back into the custody of their parents,” says City Councilwoman Carla Smith, who represents a portion of Zone 3. “The parents were not doing what they were supposed to be doing in the first place or the kids would not have been out on the streets committing crime.”

But, counters Clayton County’s Judge Teske, “For a misdemeanor, an adult would be back on the streets, too.”

He explains that misdemeanors include things like criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, fighting and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. “Once arrested, an adult can make bail in a couple of hours,” he says. “A child can’t. In many instances, adults get out quicker than children do.”

The gang factor changes all that, anyway. Two years ago, says Teske, the state legislature passed a law so that juveniles involved in gangs can be arrested and prosecuted even for minor offenses and stuck with a tough sentence, provided it can be proven that they were committing a crime to further a gang.

“If they commit a misdemeanor, even something as minor as spray-painting a gang logo, that’s a designated felony under the state’s gang law, and it carries a sentence of one to five years, if that’s what the judge decides to do,” says Teske. “But if that case were to come before me, I wouldn’t do it.”

Instead, he says, he would prefer to sentence the child to two years probation and hold the possibility of serving a one-year-to-five-year sentence over the child’s head to make sure he or she adheres to the conditions of probation. Teske says he doesn’t want to lock up most kids who end up in juvenile court. There is a question of what will actually turn the child away from crime, as well as one of resources—and often, the resources are abused.

“We have a lot of parents who will call the police to come lock up their kids for doing the sort of thing that my mother would have simply taken a belt to me for,” he says. “So sometimes those kids, who really haven’t done anything serious, might end up in a detention facility, taking up the space that would have been better used by a serious offender. The point system can be helpful in making sure the resources are not abused in that way.”

Clayton County, he points out, has seen its juvenile recidivism rate drop by about 50 percent over the past several years. He attributes the decrease to a close relationship between his court and school teachers, as well as police officers.

“It takes having real neighborhood policing,” he says. “And that takes time, so there has to be an adequate number of police officers.”

He also credits the discretion built into the point system: “The point system is merely a guideline. A judge can take into account aggravating and mitigating factors. It is up to the judge to decide what happens to the child.” SP

Fulton County Juvenile Court Judge Belinda Edwards was presiding over court and could not be reached for comment.