YFC Worker Claims Police Harass Street Youth

You’re a police officer on patrol in a dangerous neighborhood. You come across a young gang member smugly wearing his group’s colors. You tell him to change his clothes. When he doesn’t, you help him with liberal use of nightstick and fists.

That is not an unlikely scene for a made-for-TV movie, but according to Gordon McLean, director of the juvenile justice ministry of the Metro Chicago Youth for Christ (YFC), it is a scene repeated in real life with Chicago’s inner-city kids, many of whom carry YFC-issued cards identifying them as “Retired Gang Members.”

McLean founded YFC’s juvenile justice ministry program in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1950 and is a member of the International Juvenile Officers Association. He is the recipient of the outstanding service award from the California Probation, Parole, and Correctional Association, and has served as executive director of YFC in Tacoma, Washington, and San Jose, California. But what he has seen since coming to Chicago in 1982 has startled him.

“We have seen an ongoing pattern of harassment of our YFC [participants]. They have the proper ID but are repeatedly stopped and interrogated by officers who seem to resent our contact with gang-related youth on the streets.”

Of greater concern to McLean is what he sees happening to the youths themselves. A case in point, said McLean, is the harassment that Joel Mayoral, 17, has endured from police despite his efforts to go straight on the streets.

Mayoral, a Latin King gang member, faces a charge in juvenile court of aggravated assault, and at press time was being held on charges of shooting another member of his gang—an act he claims was self-defense. However, Mayoral has been active in YFC programs and was instrumental in opening up his gang to YFC staff, said McLean. In mid-October, he was the first youth ever to participate in the International Juvenile Officers Association’s national training conference.

Recently, police picked up Mayoral as he was leaving a restaurant with his girlfriend. The officer told Mayoral to turn his shirt, which bore the Los Angeles Kings hockey team emblem (used by the gang as an insignia), inside out. Mayoral complied, but refused the officer’s ensuing order to turn his pants inside out. Mayoral claims he was beaten by an officer while his partner watched. The police district duty sergeant later declined to press any charges against Mayoral and ordered him released. He was taken to an area hospital and treated for numerous cuts and bruises.

Raul Ochoa is another street youth now active in YFC ministries. Recently, a staff member gave him a Bible. “A police officer stopped Ochoa on the street, ripped the Bible apart, and threw it away, calling the youth ‘a gang-banger who doesn’t need anything like this,’ ” McLean said.

Mayoral, with McLean’s help, filed a complaint over the incident with the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards (OPS), which investigates claims of excessive force by police officers. But McLean calls the group a “toothless tiger.” He says most complaints are either ignored, explained away, or lack substantial evidence because most officers adhere to a strict code of silence that makes it hard to develop cases of brutality.

Police statistics show OPS heard 2,319 complaints last year of excessive force among its 12,500 officers, up from 2,242 in 1988. Edith Siler, an OPS administrator, declined to say how many cases were sustained.

Chicago Police Department director of news affairs, Tina Vicini, could not be reached for comment on the incidents.

To complicate matters, McLean says he has trouble finding attorneys to take his youths’ cases. Many Christian attorneys do not see criminal defense as their calling or simply do not feel comfortable doing it, he says, and most local Christian attorney groups prefer dealing with civil matters such as rent disputes and landlord problems.

The result—lack of representation—sometimes produces tragic consequences, such as forced confessions, which McLean says are “daily police practices” on the streets.

With the exception of Cabrini Green Legal Service, a church-based agency that McLean praises, he says few groups aid the youths. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, says McLean, is less interested in individual cases than broader political causes.

Attorney Jeffrey H. Haas of the People’s Law Clinic is filing a civil suit on Mayoral’s behalf. He says Mayoral is one of about 100 such cases he has represented related to police abuse.

McLean also feels the public is kept poorly informed of such cases by the media. “If a youth in the suburbs were shot and killed, it would be headline news.” In a period of one week in December, McLean attended the funerals of four street youths.

The veteran youth worker worries about the examples some police offer street youths. “Curb-side justice, with the cop as instant prosecutor and judge, and law at the end of a nightstick, is tearing down respect for the law where it is needed most, among inner-city youth.”

Said McLean: “A society that allows for destruction of rights in the name of security will end up with neither.”

By Joe Maxwell.

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