Baltimore Police PAL cuts
Back in 1996, I met Darryl Parker, a 13-year-old who had a choice to make: “He can pocket $200 a week selling cocaine for his cousin or play soccer with Baltimore police officers.”
Then, he chose soccer. I have no idea what happened to Darryl, who I talked with a year after the first Police Athletic League opened as part of a sweeping take-over of failing recreation centers by the city’s police department. Now, 13 years later, the experiment is over. The city announced with great fanfare yesterday, as part of sweeping budget cuts, that 14 of 18 PAL centers still left (there used to 27) will be turned over to the Department of Recreation and Parks, two will go to the school system and two will close (more details are in my column today).
PAL centers were never a very popular idea with rank and file police. Former Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier hailed it as his signature program and at one point had assigned 87 officers to the centers, solicited grants and donations from city CEOs and from the White House and won accolades across the county for his innovative ideas (At left, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III and Wanda K. Durden, director of the city's Recreation and Parks Department, announce end of the PAL program. The photo was taken by Baltimore Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri).
Back home, homicides continued unabated, district commanders had a hard time filling police cars and recreation center workers loudly complained they were victims of an armed coup. Who were cops to say they can mentor kids better than the people schooled to do so?
But their cries went unheard and, at the time, rightly so. The centers they ran were in dismal shape. Many closed when school closed, which defeated the whole purpose, they were dirty and dingy and overrun by crime and drug dealers. They were simply out of control, and the city’s top cop, who described himself as a “social worker with a gun,” felt that a paramilitary-run recreation league — registered as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization — was the only way to go. Millions of dollars poured into PAL centers as the city slashed the budget for rec and parks.
Frazier described PAL centers as building “social capital” with youngsters such as Darryl, banking good-will at 13 that he hoped would be repaid by Darryl staying out of trouble when he reached 17. “Every time a cop helps a kid in a computer lab, I put $1 in social capital in the bank account,” Frazier told me back then. “That’s what PAL is. The theme of the Police Department is that we are part of the social fabric of the city.”
The former commissioner spent a lot of his time scouring the city for weights and exercise equipment, and in his first year he raised $217,000 in private funds. He bought television sets and popcorn machines and cops knew that a way to advance was to joint he PAL program. He sponsored a midnight basketball program that attracted 540 kids and put 70 new computers in the Canton Middle School.
His cops spoke frankly of the city’s problems. Maj. Frank Malcavage headed the PAL program in 1996 he told me that he “found that a lot of the recreation centers were closing early because people were afraid to open them. Well, police officers are not afraid to open them.”
At the time, the spokeswoman for the city’s recreation department, dismissed any notion that her agency was engaged in a “turf war” with the police. It was, she said then, a simple misunderstanding common when two partners combine efforts.
Now, we’re going back to the way it was:
Yesterday was not a good day for the city.
It never is when you have to announce budget cuts, slash library hours, close pools and end programs like PAL. City department heads have to trot out and put a good face on a problem, reassure residents that their tax money is still being used for good things. But there is a difference between spinning bad news and trying to portray it as the best thing that could ever happen to a great city. (At left, Shiretta Henderson laments the closing of the Rosemont PAL center in West Baltimore).
That’s what Wanda S. Durden, the director of the Department of Recreation and Parks, tried to do yesterday. She tried to make the closing of the PAL centers into an opportunity for the city. They chose to deliver the news at a recreation center that was not a PAL center, thus avoiding having to confront, or worse yet, allow TV cameras to confront, angry parents and children. Instead, they shamelessly paraded happy children with cameras, members of a photography class, to join reporters at the news conference.
I’m betting the kids at the closed Rosemont PAL center in drug-addicted West Baltimore don’t have cameras (I have no way of knowing for sure because I wasn’t allowed to go inside, told by a maintenance worker City Hall officials had told him to ‘Shut up.’)
But here we were in Bolton Hill, on a bright sunny day with a sunny mood to match. Budget cuts? That was barely mentioned. Durden called it an opportunity “to move forward in our progress here to make sure we provide the best city services in regards to programming for all of our citizens. ... Commissioner [Frederick H.] Bealefeld and I are not here to talk about closings but to talk about the future ....”
She talked about how adding 14 PAL centers expands her inventory to 57 rec centers (she didn’t mention how with budget cuts and a hiring freeze that wouldn’t mean less services for more kids) and how “this is an opportunity to right-size he agency for the city, to make sure we have the best facilities, the right facilities, the right programming in our community. We are seizing the opportunity that our present budget situation has put upon us. ... We’re actually ecstatic about this.”
(Here's some additional information from the budget: Department of Recreation and Park is getting an extra $1.4 million to run the 14 PAL centers as recreation centers. It's cheaper for the city because rec and parks counselors cost less than uniformed police officers, which now can be put back into patrol. The city also will be saving money by ending contracts to 37 retired officers who also worked in the PAL program).
For once I’d like a city official to tell it like it is. The people I met over at Rosemont, the place the city didn’t want us to be, were not exactly ecstatic about this. They were angry. The nearest rec center is .8 miles away, which might just fine for a parent living in Bolton Hill, but might as well be the Eastern Shore if you’re an 8-year-old with parents with no car and drug turf to cross to visit a friend across the street.
Come on. Be honest. You’re a department head faced with stinging budget cuts and there are programs in place now that you just can’t afford. So you’re cutting them. And you hope you don’t hurt the kids too much or upend efforts to provide after school care in a city where the single biggest complaint of youths is that they don’t have anything to do. Left unsaid, and I must admit unasked by reporters, was how the Rec and Parks plans to pay for this “expansion.”
Durden tried to say that “the children aren’t going to see much of a difference. They may see a new coat of paint. They will see recreation staff with a staff shirt and khaki pants. But other than that they are going to see programming, and reprogramming opportunities (yes, she said ‘reprogramming opportunities’). We are going to call upon them, what is that you as young people in the community want to do.”
A parent I talked with at Rosemont, Shiretta Henderson, said the cops gave her 8-year-old son structure and discipline. The kids will see more than new paint and new people and new uniforms. But listening to Durden and Bealefeld, I realize that they were telling us something important about PAL.
To them, this was a new opportunity, an opportunity to get rid of a program they really never liked in the first place. And they aren’t alone. Beat cops and the police union in the 1990s hated the program, thought it was a waste of cops and money and a public relations stunt. Durden perhaps was guilty of being too honest: “We don’t want to waste officers’ time on managing a recreation center.”
Bealefeld was more tactful in his assessment:
“Let me start by saying what I think has made Baltimore better over the last year and a half, two years or so, is finding, recruiting, developing and exploiting the talents of the right people in the right jobs, and people staying in their lanes. For us that means being pro-active in public safety, developing strategies that target the most violent offenders in our community and figuring out deployments that make neighborhoods safer.”
In other words, he wants cops on the street and not running PALs. It’s a legitimate argument. He noted correctly that the Baltimore of 2009 is not the Baltimore of 1996. Rec and Parks might be fully ready to run centers the way they should be run, and the time of PAL might indeed be over. But then why can’t they just say that instead of trying to sell the silly notion that drastic budget cuts will lead to good and better programs for the city, that PAL no longer is practical and that after 14 years the city is ready again to let rec and parks run the centers?
As Bealefeld said, getting out of PAL doesn’t mean cops won’t interact with kids:
“When I said teaching children to read is public safety or teaching kids to play baseball is public safety or teaching kids music is public safety, I really don’t know how better to maximize that resources then to team up what we’ve been trying to do for a number of years with the experts, to develop the types of programs that make sense and are most effective in our community. This doesn’t mean an end to involvement with kids. We cover a wide spectrum of youth initiatives, whether its police explorers or reading to kids in libraries or boy scouts or little league teams. Law enforcement officers all across the city are doing a variety of things and this is a great opportunity for us to focus in our lane and contribute and maximize the resources of the city. I don’t think this is a conclusion but frankly a real good promising start to how to do something better.”
Bealefeld finally admitted the money problem: “There are limited resources in the city. That’s a reality whether you live in Towson, Baltimore or Annapolis. There are limited resources, and to make things better ... we really are calling on the citizens of the city to come and volunteer their time in their lane to figure out to make us stronger, to make kids stronger. So come on out, teach kids how to play ball. Come on out, teach kids to play music. All of that is going to make this city better and greater and safer.”
The commissioner said he still wants cops in rec centers.
“The officer that patrols this neighborhood is going to be in here a lot. In fact, there are three of them. There are three officers that patrol this area in the 24 hour period. So just as the guy on day work ought to have a certain interaction, the officer on four to twelve ought to have a certain interaction and the guy or gal on midnight ought to be making sure no one is hacking a hole in the roof and making off with all the computes. Everybody has a responsibility and a role to play. ...It’s a great opportunity for us to develop real relationships, not just with the 24 officer stationed in PAL centers right now, but it’s a great opportunity to develop relationships with hundreds if not thousands of my officers.”
I don’t know if the Darryl Parkers of the city I met back in 1996 will do better or worse with or without constant mentoring by city cops. And it’s true that being forced to cut programs can lead to reviews and changes that might in fact be better. But let’s not try to spin this as anything more than it is: a budget cut that gave the city an excuse to get rid of a program that they didn’t like and may have worn itself out.
