Twenty years ago, most of us in law enforcement thought we could protect public safety simply by being "tough on crime" and catching and locking up criminals. Today we understand that we can't arrest our way to a safer society; we must be "smart on crime."
Prevention must be part of a smart and balanced crime-fighting strategy and that starts with giving kids opportunities to lead healthy and productive lives. Bright futures require an education, and getting troubled kids to stay in school is one of the most important challenges we face.
Countywide, one in four high school students drops out, which is well above the state average. Kids who are not in school are more likely to be on the streets, engaging in criminal behavior such as thefts, assaults, arson, graffiti and worse.
In law enforcement, we've seen this time and time again: If kids don't have a healthy system to belong to, like a supportive family or school, they will turn elsewhere -- oftentimes to gangs -- to fill that role, and that costs the community enormously.
This past week, a new research study put a dollar figure on the immediate cost to California from dropouts. The study by the California Dropout Research Project found that each year's dropouts cost the state over $1 billion in juvenile crime expenses alone, and much more in adult crime and prison costs down the road.
While there are differences of opinion over what to do with our prison population in the short term, pushing for more kids to graduate high school is a long-term solution we can all agree on. By utilizing early interventions to keep kids on track in school, there will be fewer criminals we need to put behind bars.
Waiting until kids drop out to ask "what went wrong?" is too little, too late. With dropouts and crime, we need to do more than just count the casualties.
Over the course of my career, law enforcement has become very data-driven. We use current statistics to identify trends and map out hot spots to determine who's committing crime and where. Once that's determined, we can create a strategy to target our intervention and suppression efforts to address the problem.
The same can be done with high school dropouts. By collecting and analyzing student data, schools will be able to determine which students need help staying on track and the best ways to help them.
Even as the economy struggles, California can move forward in addressing dropouts. The Legislature recently passed SB 651 (Romero & Steinberg), which would require an annual report on dropouts that would identify students showing early warning signs for dropping out. It now sits on the governor's desk.
The report goes beyond just collecting numbers of dropouts, which is what we have now. It would go further and look at what drives those numbers. It would act as a mechanism to focus on truancy, grade repetition and students who frequently change schools, in order to target interventions for kids who need them most.
This is a modest but important step we can take now to start getting in front of the dropout problem, instead of continuing to let kids fall behind and having us all pay the price.
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