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• A decent time table.

Last year, around this time, the Public Safety Committee held a hearing to discuss ways the city could prevent summer violence. The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) talked about a whole circus of initiatives they were now starting. That caused Supervisor Sophie Maxwell to groan in frustration.

“Most parents who were trying to decide what to do with their kids in the summer have had to make decisions by now,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be starting these programs a lot earlier?”

Oops.

But this year the MOCJ has a special position of “Violence Prevention Planning Coordinator” charged specifically with working out a summer violence prevention plan, and started planning back in February.

That’s progress.

• A “plan” instead of a “book.”

I still keep a copy of last year’s “SF Safe Summer 2007” program description as a souvenir. It’s a bound volume, 145 pages long, that lists every city program that could possibly (in some way) be connected with preventing violence; this includes programs on how to help people raise their credit scores; engineering internships; volunteer street sweeping initiatives; and “Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach” to API victims of domestic violence (to flip through the book picking examples at random).

All these programs will work together, the MOCJ insisted, to curb summer violence!

“It wasn’t a plan so much as they were throwing a plate of spaghetti at a wall and hoping something stuck,” recalled Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs the Public Safety Committee.

Well, we saw how that turned out. To recap: record breaking homicides.

Now, there was one success last year: violence in summer schools was down significantly … almost entirely gone, in fact. But that was the result of a very specific and targeted program by the SF Unified School District with police assistance. It had nothing to do with engineering internships or Asian Pacific Islander legal outreach. It was a program with very defined goals and strategies … and it worked.

The good news is that this year, the MOCJ’s summer violence prevention plan is much closer to 10 pages … and there’s a clear connection (this is the “plan” part) between the activities they’re putting on and the reasons they expect summer violence to go down.

The plan can, in fact, be summarized in 4 parts (this is my summary, not MOCJ’s):

1) Build on the in-school success of last year’s program
2) Keep kids busy during the summers by promoting lots of youth sports and activities
3) Connect poor families in public housing to city services, and;
4) Focus on getting the people statistically most likely to be victims or perpetrators of homicide into intense special services for the entire summer duration

Wow, it … kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

That doesn’t mean it will work, mind you: but there’s a chance. It certainly isn’t absurd on its face, the way previous years’ efforts have been.

• Put resources where they can do the most good.

At this year’s Public Safety Committee hearing on summer violence prevention, there was another remarkable exchange – also involving Sophie Maxwell.

When Violence Prevention Coordinator Maya Dillard-Smith said that groups of volunteer kids were being trained to take a message about a peaceful summer (called “Alive & Free”) to other kids, Maxwell asked her whether these volunteers would be getting stipends.

No, said Dillard-Smith.

Why not? asked Maxwell. Many of these kids come from homes were a little extra money would be a big help. Why wouldn’t you help them out?

Because, Dillard-Smith said, we’ve got limited resources and we need to put them where they make the most sense programmatically.

Maxwell’s scorn was withering. “That’s easy for you to say because you have a job,” she responded. It only got worse from there.

But the answer was the right one: the MOCJ is trying to save lives and should spend their resources accordingly. This was the first evidence that they understand that.

So is this going to work?

It’s too early to tell, of course, but there are also troubling signs.

The summer “events” (besides sports) meant to keep kids occupied are only happening once a month … waaaaaaay too few to make a big impact. And a great deal of time, energy, and … yes … money … is being spent promoting a publicity campaign. Expect SF to be saturated with “Alive & Free” billboards, radio ads, and TV PSAs beginning in June (they’re consciously modeling it after the “Sarah Marshall” movie campaign, according to Dillard-Smith). There will be a website.

What there won’t be is any evidence, ever anywhere at all, that having strangers lecture kids about not hurting each other actually works. It doesn’t. No clinical trial has shown it, and if it did work we’d have had this problem licked by now because that’s what we’ve been doing since there were kids to lecture.

But perhaps most importantly, according to Mirkarimi, is the fact that the MOCJ has such a lousy record at pulling this stuff off.

“My sense of it over the last three years is that the (MOCJ’s) presentations seem to reflect the right ideas and strategies, but the continuity of these strategies has never worked well in practice.”

How do you keep a consistent and effective program to stop homicide, Mirkarimi wonders, when you’ve had 3 different heads of the police homicide bureau in three years? How does the MOCJ keep its priorities straight when you’ve had 4 MOCJ directors in the last three-and-a-half years? (Five directors if you count an interim).

It’s hard for even the best program to survive in an environment like that.

Dillard-Smith did not return repeated calls for comment (in fact, I’d go so far as to say she was ducking them). Neither did MOCJ Director Kevin Ryan. MOCJ seems bunkered down – whether that reflects focus or paranoia remains to be seen. But a lot of lives are depending on whether they get this right … finally.