City in Sound; Youth Bureau

This is Jack Angel with city in sound, stories out of Chicago, city of the greatest movement on earth, city of all things, one among them, the juvenile. Okay, Joy, they tell me you came in from St. Louis today. Yes, sir. All by yourself? Yes, sir. How old are you? 14. A very big guy at that. What are you doing, St. Louis? Going to school? Yes, sir. Do you like school? Yes, it's okay. How about your dad and mom? I'm going to go out there. He'd come in from St. Louis on a bus. He was 14 and he had no business here except to get away from home. He was not exactly a tourist. He was a runaway and as it turned out, not without friends. These he made with policemen of Chicago's youth bureau, the fastest growing and to some minds, the most important instrument of a

big city force. The story of the youth bureau needs telling. Its men are first and last police officers, but the margin between is still great and is largely filled with new techniques and attitudes. These are officers among youth who seek to arrest the problem even before it becomes necessary to arrest the offenders. They work out of three small rooms at central headquarters and in the neighborhood districts. They work in plain clothes, many with college degrees which are regarded as neither a special privilege nor a particular handicap. All have a heart for it and it is not a matter of mere praise to say that they comprise one of the best youth forces in the nation. It is a fortunate fact. Lieutenant Delaney, your department here is kind of mushroom from a relatively small bureau to one of the major

arms of the police force within the last ten years. Does this mean that there is more teenage crime, juvenile crime, or does this mean that we are doing more about it? I believe that percentage wise, why we are, probably I don't know more, but I believe that your law enforcement people are beginning to realize that this is a very important phase of their police work. And for that reason there has been an increase in the police department in the city of Chicago in 1954 we had about 75 men in this particular unit at the present time we have over 200 that has been augmented to that figure since last November. Does this juvenile work give you kind of a new concept of police work, the concept of working with these young people to try to help them rather than merely try to apprehend them and bring them to justice? And the thought of

it isn't no, but at least we are putting it into becoming active with the thought that something can be done and we feel that you do not have your adult criminals without having your youthful criminals to start with. Do you have any chance to see the fruit of your work around here, young lad who is straight clear, helped? Well, that's the only, the greatest compensating factor that we have in this type of work. I mean we're dealing with generally people who are always in trouble, family problems, if you don't have any difficulty at all in creating an interest there and we do find in many, many instances where our youngsters have become friendly with the juvenile option because of the activities and their contact with our youth officers that they have rehabilitated shall we say and have redirected their work and have very satisfied and kindly made and have made friends of the police officer. Do you get most of your men

off the regular force? All our personnel are from the ranks, yes sir, and they are selected, we screen them periodically and we've been very fortunate getting some very confinement. Lieutenant, what about your own background? Where did you come from into the youth bureau? Well, I've been on the department for 26 years, my self -hime with college graduate from St. Vider, college that has done number bonus Illinois and I have very much been athletic background. I've associated with youngsters throughout my lifetime, family, my aunt, I have seven children of my own, I have some experiences however I find that many times it's easier to deal with, that is then my own, so I'm sure that it helps you to become quite understanding. And as I said, I get a close contact with schools and children through my athletic background of officiating and so on. Do you

feel that the community is somewhat hamstrung by our juvenile laws which is to say that a lad under a certain age knows he can't be prosecuted or severely punished for committing a certain crime, say under 16, so he goes out and does it? I think there's a misinterpretation of the laws, I mean you're not affected in any way, you're not restricted in any way, if I mean our main purpose of course is to rehabilitate the boy and give all due consideration to the individual youth in vown, but if there is a felonious or serious offense, why then of course the community comes first, and your state's attorney has a perfect right to prosecute that child before the grand jury in a criminal court just like any other person. Is it true that the overwhelming majority of youth delinquencies come from family problems, family relationships or lack of those? Oh very, very definitely yes, yes, you can see in the

extreme majority of cases that the family background is, it's a terrific bearing on that in the reaction to the child, and that's how it's done. Do you find any particular pattern in our juvenile delinquency, any definite type of offender from any definite stratum of society or any particular community group? Is there any established level to the juvenile offender? I don't believe you can forget any type of economic bracket or stratum of society, I believe that they all in one way or another will be involved, I mean in different types of offenses. In the case of need of course we come from more of your lower economic bracket where they might be a desire, maybe they want something clothing or candy or a luxury or some kind of course they'll steal for it, out of the pelt find that you find in your parking meters is up to date, you don't find that on in your better residential sections or business sections but you do find in your lower

economic areas, however you've got different types of offenses in your other brackets, I mean you have drinking and you mean car thefts and the likes you are riding and things of that nature. All right, you've been on the force for 26 years, if you had it to do over again, would you like to be in this branch of the department? I did not get in this in 1954 and I find it the most interesting place where it is. And I do believe that it's probably the most important. Something where you can send your men out and get a return on it. Some years back I had a youngster but I handled by the name of Pete. Pete was a young boy, he was nine or ten years old in that area and a very polite and nice youngster. He was in a restaurant one morning on a Monday morning and he had displayed a very large amount of money in his little

wallet and a very alert officer noticed the boy with the money and brought him into the district and turned him over to myself. It was the youth officer at the time. So I began to question the boy as to where he got all this money and he told me he made a chaining shoes. We counted the money and found out there was approximately $180. So I confronted him with the idea that it takes an awful lot of shoe chaining for $180. I continued questioning Pete and he was a very polite youngster as I said. Yes sir, no sir, it didn't seem to be rattled or it didn't seem to be afraid at all. Going through his wallet then I noticed that he had a little card in there that said that he belonged to Hoppe Long Cassidy's Straight Shooters Club. I told the boy I said, well, Pete, looks like I'm going to have to contact Hoppe and have a talk with him.

Of course he immediately opened his eyes and said, why? I said, well, if I don't get the proper story here, I'm going to have to tell him one of his troopers who are kind of hinging on the truth, not telling me the truth. In the media, Pete, the boy began to cry and he pleaded with me not to call Hoppe Long Cassidy and he told me that he would tell me the story of how he got the money. Well, actually, $180, he got in a burglary. The boy on a Sunday morning used to meet a bakery driver and during the course it was unloading the truck at the baking company. The boy went up into the upper part of the office section of the store or the baking company and he opened the fire door and left it a jar. Then when the bakery driver had gone and the Sunday morning everything was closed up by, he went up the fire escape and went into the office upstairs and took some of the proceeds who were lying around there. He didn't take any checks, he just took cash money.

Well, we were of course surprised and astounded with the youngster of this age to know how to manipulate a scheme like that. But the thing I thought was most important was that this boy did have a genuine appreciation of someone and it was Hoppe Long Cassidy and whatever happened to him in his life. The most important thing to that youngster is that he didn't want Hoppe Long Cassidy to know that he had violated the law. We only hope now that Phidea is going to grow up and be a good citizen. We're fortunate that we got him at this early age because there's all indications that he may be a good boy and of course be a good citizen later on in life. This is Officer Ted Gore who works out of the youth bureau here. He does a lot of field work and has the most unusual job working not only with the boys but the agencies that also work with the boys. How do you do

this? Last summer in June, I believe of 57, the mayor decided that he wanted to coordinate the efforts of the community to get the various agencies to work together with the youth officer and the local police officials in order to handle most of their own problems that are occurring in these various communities. So Lieutenant Mike Delaney, who's in charge of our bureau, sent down Bill Cribbins and myself to handle this phase of the work on the advisory committee. So we feel that if we get out there and have the various agencies operated capacity by capacity, I mean if they're on a first -name basis with their local police officers, the local youth officers sits in at these meetings relative to tensions, crime waves, everything else that might occur in a community and we form a committee and we actually set it up so that many of the problems are handled at the community level. We set up these

committees in the schools, the police department, the welfare agencies, the Laundale Community Committee, the conservation committee and we coordinate their efforts. And they've actually got a picture out there now where boys who have been committed to one of our institutions are visited by members of these local committees who are more or less volunteer. They're visited as St. Charles or Pontiac wherever there might be and when they come back into their neighborhood some effort is made to rehabilitate them by having a job waiting form or they have the feeling that they're not entirely lost or thrown out of a neighborhood because they committed some crime that they have a suffer for. Well this is quite a departure from the police work that you were trained for, I assume. Is this interesting? You say it's quite a departure, it isn't. Originally this bureau was called the Crime Prevention Bureau and then I

feel is what your youth officers are doing. They're actually setting up this situation so as to prevent crime. Some of our field workers and some of these agencies do a marvelous job and all they need is the proper police contact. We have many detached workers in the field. Now the way MCA and other community agencies give us detached workers. They work with the gangs on the street. As a result the gangs are guided into legal and lawful and sporting enterprises rather than hanging around a street corner to commit some type crimes such as jackrolling or something else. What causes a gang? Do you have any ideas on that? Well I certainly feel that we all like to belong to something. That's human. A gang on a corner is just as common and as ordinarily as anything you might say. You have to belong to something jack. If you don't belong to the gang on the corner you kind of belong to the gang in school or the club. And we try to

offer them some type supervision even though they might not see it and it might be unseen. It might be the type supervision that you... As long as we can get them to get away from these illegal things, some of these gangs break loose as you know and they steal cars that commit various robberies. Well then our committee will step in and we'll put in a worker with that gang and he'll try to steer them right. Then I gather that the gang system isn't as evil in your eyes as we've been led to believe. No, I would say it's a very natural thing, gangs. And we're going to have gangs regardless of how else we feel about it so we might just as well do something to lead them rather than try to disperse them. It doesn't work very well though, trying to disperse them. Joe is this your first time in? Yes sir. Hope it'll be your last. Yes sir. What did they catch you doing? I was still on camera of a car. Are there any gangs down

your way of groups of boys that collect together and do things? It was, yeah there's one, sir. I know, they're pretty bad. Well they're the saints, the dukes, the clovers. The clovers? Yes sir. Do you belong to that gang? No sir. Do you know boys who do? I know a couple of them by the name. I have a fight with a couple of them. What's the attraction of belonging to a gang what you say? Why do boys do it? Well they try to take the money from the rest of the kids and everything like that. And still stuff together. These people carry guns and knives? Yeah they have long knives. Kind of a rough group of people, huh? Yes sir. How about the good neighborhood organizations? Do you ever run into any of those? All the

YMCA or the youth groups? Yes sir. The CIO, what not. What's wrong with them? I'll come with... You can't have some fun with these people. Well there's nothing wrong with going to the wire. I like to go to the wire. I'm 10. Did you ever been there? Yeah I've been to the wire. Are you going to go back maybe? Yeah I like to go to the wire. I don't know what it's getting. George do you feel you're in a situation here where you need help from somebody besides yourself? Yes sir I think I do. How have you been treated here at the youth bureau? Oh nice. Good. But these officers tried to help you? Yes sir. They talked to you? Yes sir. Tell you what you did wrong? Yes sir. Try to straighten you out? Yes sir. Are you going to take their

advice? Yes sir. Well let me ask you this just as a last question. You came down here to the station and they didn't kick you around. They didn't beat you up. They didn't hit you. They didn't try to embarrass you. Do you think that's too soft a treatment for a guy? Do you think that makes as much impression on you as if they got real tough? Do you think that it's a greater incentive to straighten around and start a clean house with yourself? Yes sir. I do. I do a lot of the kids. They all say well, police there ain't no good. They always beat you up and kick you around. That's why they're getting in gangs and things. To defend themselves? Yes sir. Yeah they said well if you get caught, police and all that. Some of them think it's fun to go to juvenile. Go to St. Charles. They tell you you ain't been to St. Charles. You were sissy

and everything. Do you believe that? No sir, I don't want to go to St. Charles. You ever been there? No sir. And you don't want them to go there now? No sir. Okay thanks Joe. Good luck. This is Vince Burke, a youth officer who works out at the Central District here. How long have you been in the district, Vince? I've been in the first district and detective bureau now for six years, Mr. Angel. How long have you been in youth work? Eight years now in the juvenile unit or youth bureau as we call it now. How did you get into it? Well I was formerly with the working on stolen autos in a district on this outside and we had plenty of contact with young juveniles in taking cars and tampering with autos and it looked like a pretty perplexing thing with all these youths getting into trouble with automobiles. So I made applications through the deputy commissioner to the commissioner and asked that I'd

be considered for the position of juvenile officers that were called at the time. And I was called down with I think it was 350 other officers and we were sent to a school and after the schooling were given the competitive examination and I believe it was 90 of us accepted at that time. We had to submit our background from college credits and sociology and psychology also. Pretty tough to get into bureau. Yes sir. What's the big problem down here in the Louvre area? Well we have a primary problem here of runaways coming to Chicago. That's young fellows that want to see the big city. And we do have a few Chicagoans who want to leave here and travel elsewhere. And then of course we have the, we cover all the depots, we cover the shows and all the theaters. Different places in the Louvre where a youngster may, if he decides to ditch school they congregate. We also keep an eye on

truance. Do you have any philosophy that you build up over the years about how we can help ourselves with this problem? Well I think the problem is primarily of course the family situation. It's for the family group of course to do what they can for their youngsters. And if every parent would keep the proper supervision on youngsters I think they wouldn't have the opportunity to get into trouble. But of course we have the only currency everywhere. But when you have a strong family makeup where the boy or girl or child who has a desire for recognition like we all have, finds that he has a definite place in this family group and feels that he has a proper respect, affection and everything that goes with being a member of the family. When he has this many times he will not have to seek recognition out on the street in the formation of many of these gangs. The files of the youth bureau open on many things.

There is the section marked gangs for example. The card file is complete. Maybe you stop at the seas, cavaliers, carbs, clovers, camshafts, comets, clippers and so on. And there are 25 more letters to go. Not all gang groupings are bad. Some may even be good. But the one uniformly good grouping is not in the files. It is called the family. This is Jack Angel with Fred Schunerman and Don Fitch. Engineers for City in Sound.