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The Task Force. Such summary police treatment, on the orders of Commissioner Kennedy, disturbs nonpolice agencies concerned with juvenile delinquency, has touched off in New York a battle of philosophies whose outcome may have as lasting effects on the city as the war of the streets. Kennedy's use-force orders draw cries of protest from social scientists. They point to increasing arrest rates in the 14 heavily policed high-hazard slum areas, where social agencies thought they had made headway with a gentler approach toward juveniles. And they vehemently disapprove of Kennedy's decision on the proper function of the police department's Juvenile Aid Bureau.
The J.A.B. correlated records on some 31,000 troublemaking juveniles last year, marked out unruly youngsters to be taken to court as serious offenders or chronic mischief-makers (3,316), listed others who are to be let go with a police warning (24,766). J.A.B. officers followed up with visits to homes of errant youngsters to lecture their parents, determine whether the city's social agencies should be called in to help the family. Kennedy decided that the J.A.B. was dipping too deeply into social work that was not police duty. He put 100 of the J.A.B. men on the streets as a "Task Force" with the more immediate crime-preventive role of keeping an eye on troublesome gangs.
You Shall Not Appease. Kennedy's decisions have aroused protest, particularly from New York City's Youth Board, the municipal agency that allots some $4,500,000 a year of city and state funds for juvenile recreation and rehabilitation projects, also maintains a staff of 100 conscientious street workers who work in crime-ridden neighborhoods to counsel gangs and to reduce their violent activities. The Youth Board believes in allowing gangs to remain intact because they provide a juvenile sense of security and comradeship. The board distinguishes between "bopping" (attacking) gangs and defensive gangs that fight back only when attacked. Youth Board workers "mediate cools" (arrange truces) between gangs, get them to agree to avoid one another's proscribed "turf" (territory).
Policeman Kennedy, on the other hand, is against gangs, period. He makes no distinction between boppers and defensives. Two summers ago, after the Youth Board arranged a cool and helped allot turf to Lower East Side Puerto Ricans and Negroes who had shot up two youngsters in a rumble, the commissioner passed on a pointed order to his department: "You shall not enter into treaties, concordats, compacts or agreements of appeasement. You shall meet violence with sufficient force, legally applied, to bring violators to justice. Every man, woman and child has the right to use the streets of this city without fear and without consent of any illegally organized group."