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Q&A
Brooklyn DA outlines youth justice initiatives
6:44:04
ยท
3 min
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez provides an overview of Brooklyn's youth justice initiatives and programs aimed at addressing youth offenses and prevention.
- Brooklyn has a designated group of lawyers handling youth incidents
- Gonzalez highlights the Young Adult Court created in 2015, focusing on meeting social service needs
- He mentions partnerships with public defender organizations and community-based providers
- Gonzalez discusses Project Restore, aimed at helping young people avoid gang involvement
- He raises concerns about the crisis in youth detention centers, including age disparities and rising crime rates within the facilities
Eric Gonzalez
6:44:04
So in Brooklyn, I'll start, we have a designated group in my office to what DA Clark is trying to create in Bronx County.
6:44:13
Brooklyn has a designated group of lawyers who only handle incidents involving youth.
6:44:21
We had created in 2015 a young adult court that was before the youth part.
6:44:31
And so there's been a history of being able to deal with juveniles and young offenders in a different way.
6:44:39
I took a lot of pride, especially in the young adult court, most of these young people came through the justice system.
6:44:49
It was about meeting their social service needs, not holding them criminally accountable in terms of giving them convictions, but holding them accountable through the process of coming to court and services and working with the defenders.
6:45:03
I'm very lucky in the county.
6:45:05
Brooklyn has a lot of services.
6:45:07
I have very two great public defender organizations, Brooklyn Defender Services and Legal Aid, who will also coordinate with their clients to get services, and we were very successful.
6:45:18
In our youth part, that thinking, what cases we retain and what cases we sent to family court, we're also very lucky there because we have a good judge, a great judge, Judge Walker, who spends a lot of time thinking about that job as a family court judge, you know, making tough decisions, when we ask to keep cases in supreme whether or not the best interest of our community is served by sending that case to a family court.
6:45:51
But those things are happening.
6:45:53
There's a Bureau of Youth Investments, and we're doing a lot of the social service work and prevention and intervention work, and, of course, funding much of the money that my office takes from forfeiture.
6:46:08
We spend it directly on our youth, so that includes sports events and non sports events and things working with community based providers to give resources and opportunity to young people.
6:46:21
I do say, and I will go back, I ask that Project Restore be baseline funding.
6:46:28
You know, many of our young people are involved in gang activity.
6:46:34
Project Restore is just about trying to get some of these young kids away from the antisocial behavior that they may be forced into by gangs.
6:46:47
We've seen this, over and over, in the city where older gang members will often force younger gang members to carry their guns, to engage in activity because the Lord treats them differently.
6:47:03
And so we have to be mindful that when we wanna protect our young people that, you know, the resources of our city must be really directed to this point.
6:47:12
But we've we've all talked about this up here, and we're very concerned about many aspects of raise the age.
6:47:20
And the last thing that I will leave with is there's a crisis in our youth detention centers.
6:47:27
We have way too old of people being held in custody there, you know, 18, 19 years old, you know, with our youngest people, and the rising rates of crime in our detention centers against young people and against the staff there is alarming.
6:47:45
So trying to figure all that out, I think we did meet all five of us with a corp counsel to discuss how we can better coordinate with family court as well.