Building a safe community: focus on prevention techniques that work

Several dozen social workers, law enforcement professionals and prevention specialists attended a conference in Riverhead Friday that featured an array of speakers and workshops focused on shifting the emphasis on crime fighting to crime prevention.
Marion Blumenthal Lazan is a Holocaust survivor, author and lecturer who lives in Hewlett. She was the event’s first keynote speaker, sharing her family’s story of flight, imprisonment and liberation during the Holocaust. She set the tone for the conference, imploring the value of tolerance and the importance of not stereotyping people or blind adherence to a leader.
“It’s the lessons learned from that dark period of our history that’s so important for all to remember,” Lazan said.
Her presentation was followed by eight separate workshops scattered around the Hyatt Place Hotel. Topics included gangs, mental illness, bullying and community crime prevention initiatives.
One workshop featured a rousing presentation by Risco Mention-Lewis, Suffolk County’s Deputy Police Commissioner. Mention-Lewis outlined a department initiative called Council of Thought and Action (COTA), which operates like an offender support group. The idea is to interact directly with offenders, who show up voluntarily, and change communities from within, starting with them.
“COTA is a movement, not a program,” Mention-Lewis said.
She explained the outside-the-box approaches she uses to speak to people caught in cycles of crime, violence and the criminal justice system. Most are self-made entrepreneurs, she said, so she presents the concepts of responsible living in the language of business.
“You are a corporation. What is your corporate plan?” she said.
By using an approach that focuses on encouraging people toward specific behaviors rather than away from them, Mention-Lewis said she is able to make her message relevant and attractive. Members of COTA use the groups where they meet to be candid, hear ideas and express themselves. For some, it’s the only time they do, or have ever been able to.
Mention-Lewis said she teaches the “impostor concept” – the idea that negative thoughts about the self are a sort of tape playing in the mind, constantly reinforcing beliefs imbued during childhood or through some abusive relationship. Members learn to identify who their impostors are and how to turn off the thinking that makes them believe that person’s past words. Mention-Lewis said once the negative thinking has been isolated, a person can learn to define what they want their character to be, and then be it.
“It’s about reconnecting offenders with the community rather than taking them away from the community,” said Mention-Lewis.
That reconnection can give meaning and direction to people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, she said, and COTA members become a street-savvy intervention team. It’s an innovative approach Mention-Lewis said is a product of her work on the front lines of the justice system.
“I am not a therapist. I’m not a counselor. I’m a prosecutor. I am a trained prosecutor. Everything I’m doing is from my experience in the streets and my experience of being a mother,” she said.
Maureen Porter is a program manager at Maryhaven Center of Hope in Riverhead. She works with the kinds of people Mention-Lewis spoke about, and Porter said that what the deputy commissioner described is precisely what is needed.
“I asked her, ‘When are you coming to the East End? When are you coming to Riverhead?’ She said, ‘As soon as I get three of the leadership roles,'” Porter said, adding that she plans to follow up with Mention-Lewis on bringing the initiative to the area.
The event wrapped up with the day’s second keynote speaker, Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. Gross spoke of his work with some of the most troubled and violent neighborhoods in New England and cities in other regions. He described highly successful campaigns centered around prevention instead of punitive solutions, treating offenders and at-risk populations preemptively with a long-term approach. Gross talked about inviting gang leaders in for meetings where he and law enforcement tried to talk to them before the fact, looking for any common ground. He said change comes slowly and needs to be understood as happening that way in order for it to happen.
“It takes, on average, six attempts to get clean from drugs … surprisingly, also, six attempts to get out of a domestic violence relationship. Why wouldn’t it take six attempts, on average, to get out of a gang lifestyle? ‘Well this is the only friends I got, why not?’ But oh, you work with a gang member who comes to your program and he relapses – it’s a domestic or he smoked weed or was driving without a license – ‘You see? He’s not serious about change!’ Right? Don’t we say that all the time, judgmentally?” Gross said. “It takes a long time to be someone else, but they want to.”
Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter and Chief of Police David Hegermiller were at the conference.
“We’d be naive to say there’s not gang activity in the town, but between things like CAP and the Council for Unity and other organizations, I think we’re doing a pretty good job,” Walter said. “If there’s things that we’re not doing, I’m not sure. There probably are things we’re not doing, and when you come to a seminar like this you start to think, well, maybe there’s something more we could do.”
Hegermiller said Riverhead has a lot of the kind of cooperation presenters said was needed for law enforcement and crime prevention to be effective.
“We have all the pieces in place where there is a lot of communication,” he said.
Hegermiller said funding for prevention is an area for improvement.
“Getting the money up front is a big piece and that doesn’t always happen,” he said.
The conference was organized by the East End Prevention and Awareness Committee.

RiverheadLOCAL photo by Micah Danney.