The Star-Ledger
Monday, January 25,1999

Counseling kids who've witnessed violence
By William Kleinknecht

      It's a scene repeated all too often in Newark's toughest neighborhoods: police responding to the scene of a murder or assault find a child cowering in the corner, a relative lying bloodied on a floor nearby.  
      Routinely, the officers would contact the detective unit, or the medical examiner's office. Soon, they might also be paging the child psychologist.
      Under a new program set to begin later this year, specially trained police will arrive at crime scenes in Newark right behind regular officers and see to it that psychologists are immediately summoned to treat frightened young witnesses.
      "The one thing we know about these situations is that the quicker the children are seen, the better the outcome," said Tara Donnelly, a therapist who formerly treated traumatized children at University Hospital. "Kids in Newark are exposed to tremendous violence on a daily basis and many never see anybody."
      The program, known as Child Development-Community Policing, will start as a pilot project in neighborhoods served by the West District police station - perhaps as early as June - and could be expanded eventually to include the entire city.
      It is to be a joint effort of the Newark police, Newark Renaissance House, the Gateway Maternal and Child Health Consortium and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The university will have a team of psychologists ready to respond to crime scenes, if necessary.
      The effort - modeled on a highly successgul program in New Haven, Conn. - rests on the premise that many of society's most violent predators had themselves been exposed to brutality at an early age.

      Gerald Costa, a developmental psychologist at Rennaissance House who is helping plan the program, said many children exposed to such violence develop a feeling of hopelessness and insecurity. Some react by becomeing withdrawn and insecure, while others lose their ability to empathize with victims of violence and turn toward brutal behavior themselves, he said.
      "Many of these children becine violent as a way of feeling stronger and compensating for this feeling of weakness and hopelessness," he said. "But with proper treatment, a victim can be prevented from undergoing those kinds of psychological changes."
      The first step, Costa said, will be two surveys of West Distrivt cases to see how many involve children who witnessed or were victims of violence, to determine how many police and clinicians need to be trained to handle the caseload. The more detailed of the two surveys will take the entire month of February. Next come applications for funding, which is being handled largely by the Gateway Consortium. Marijane Lundt, the consortium's executive director, said federal funding and corporate donations should be relatively easy to obtain because of New Haven's success, which has led to identical programs in at least eight other cities, including Buffalo and Baltimore.
      She said the New Haven model also has strong backing from the White House and from the federal office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which held a meeting in Washington last fall with a Newark delegation to discuss the project.
      Costa, and adjunct professor at Yale University who has worked with the project in New Haven, estimated that the project would cost somewhere between $200,000 to $500,000 annually.

      Steven Marans, a Yale professor of child psychoanalysis who has headed the New Haven program since it began in 1992, said police credit the effort with a sharp decrease in juvenile crime over the last several years. An annual survey of students in New Haven schools has shown that students have grown to feel safer and have developed a better perception of their community over the same period, he said.
      The program has also forged a real partnership between police officers and clinicians, Marans said. They're now also collaborating in other efforts, such as a program that treats juveniles involved in serious crime.
       "When we started this work, the police and clinicians didn't know each other," he said. "We didn't know about each other's work and our perceptions were riddled with stereotypes more than a real understanding of each other's capabilities."
       Costa has been working to bring New Haven's model to Newark since 1993. He applied to the Prudential Foundation for a $200,000 grant and ended up working with Lundt, then working with the foundation. Together with Michael B. Greene, executive director of the Violence Institute at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, they reached an agreement with former Newark Police Director William Celester and began putting the pilot program in place.
      Five police officers were trained as "police fellows" and put together with five clinicians at UMDNJ's behavioral health care unit, who were prepared to be on call for the program.
       Had everything moved ahead as planned, Newark would have been the first city in the country to adopt the New Haven model. But the effort was derailed after Celester was indicted on corruption charges in June 1996 and removed from office. The planners have since been working to bring the new leadership of the department on board.
       Greene said Police Chief Thomas O'Reilly was sold on the project after taking part in the Washington meeting last fall and talking with police officials from other cities that have adopted the model.
       "The chief got really enthusiastic after that meeting," he said. "Sometimes cops talking to cops is more effective than psychiatrists or justice people talking to cops."