ACT Op Ed: City's next mayor must make youths a top priority

May 18, 2008  |  Sacramento Bee

According to the Office of Youth Development, the city of Sacramento has more than 850 gang members. Each month the police identify an additional 30 youths as gang members. At the rate we are going, we will have more than 1,000 identified gang members in the city by the end of the year.

As two young people who grew up in Meadowview and who have personal experience with youth and gang violence, we have something crucial to say to the mayoral candidates about what it will take to reverse this trend.

The first step is for the next mayor to make the future of young people a top priority. Gang and youth violence is a matter of life and death. No one is going to die if we don't build a new arena for the Sacramento Kings or bring more shops to K Street. Young people are dying in our community on a regular basis.

The second step is to make the right moves. Some of the mayoral candidates believe that the way to reduce violence is to hire more police.

More police is not the best way to go about a lot of these issues. Many youths have been through the revolving door of getting arrested, getting released and going back to juvenile hall. Getting arrested just instills more hatred in the hearts of young people who have to deal with the justice system. Being incarcerated for the majority of their adolescent years results in youths not being able to deal with society due to institutionalization.

We can hire more police, arrest more young people, and it will have little effect. In our community, many youths have been harassed by the police and view them as an enemy.

Many youths who are involved in gangs are very talented. Some can play instruments, many are great athletes and some read and write exceptionally well. But where can they go to showcase these talents? Who can they talk to about their dreams and aspirations? Social outlets for these endeavors are very limited. Thus, they get engulfed in this great bubble of gang violence.

Most of the young people who live in Meadowview come from low-income families. The pressures of having decent housing, food on the table and clothes for school are felt every day. Staying in the "hood" is detrimental for us because we are not getting the basic necessities that we need in life.

Last fall, we were part of a group of youth leaders who surveyed more than 250 young people in Meadowview about what they thought were the best solutions to youth violence. Their top priority: Jobs for young people. More jobs for youths will significantly decrease gang violence because young people will be able to gain responsibility while getting paid. They would rather cash a check than shoot a gun.

Many adults don't have the patience to train young people. Many adults feel young people aren't knowledgeable enough to be hired. We say adults need to be more receptive to us because when doors continue to close, hopelessness floods the streets and selling drugs and gangs become more enticing.

We also learned in the survey and our follow-up meetings that most young people want to go to college, but few know how to get there. Many do not have adults in their lives who support them. We need the next mayor to lead the way on helping more students graduate from high school. We need to send more young people to college.

What troubles us the most are the politicians who come into our community with promises of reform but have no idea what it is like to walk in our shoes. We need political leaders who will take the time to walk with us. We need the next mayor to spend as much time with us as they do with downtown developers. We need the mayor to negotiate with those developers over jobs for young people.

Young people need to feel like they matter in the world.

From 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Monday, we will be holding a forum with mayoral candidates on youth issues at Luther Burbank High School. We are going to fill up the auditorium and can guarantee that this will be a well-attended forum. We have invited all the candidates who are campaigning for mayor. All the candidates except Kevin Johnson have promised to attend. Anyone who is interested in changing and saving the lives of young people should be there to witness the candidates' response to our youth platform. All candidates should be there so youths know they are valued.
Of all the issues under debate among the candidates, this is the one issue that is a matter of life and death.

About the writer:

Delecia Sydnor and Shuntae Campbell are organizers with Sacramento Area Congregations Together.