Charlottesville City Council heard a report yesterday evening from Psychology Prof. Dick Reppucci, Graduate Arts & Sciences student Todd Warner and Gretchen Ellis, director of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Commission on Children and Families, about the City's treatment of minorities, particularly those in the juvenile justice system.
Reppucci, Warner and some of Reppucci's students helped complete the report presented yesterday. The group's findings showed black youths in Charlottesville are over-represented in areas such as arrests. Black youths are arrested two to three times more often than non-minority youths, Ellis said.
Warner told Council the report found black youths do not have significantly higher risk factors which would lead to arrest, including no major differences in prior offenses.
The Charlottesville-Albemarle Criminal Justice Coalition, a group of local organizations interested in the problem of disproportionate minority contact with the criminal justice system, asked Council to appoint a task force to look into the issue, said Jeffrey Fogel, an attorney for the group.
"[T]here's been plenty of information to move on for years now," Fogel said, adding that "not much has been done to effect change."
The Coalition is comprised of the American Civil Liberties Union; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Legal Aid Justice Center; an organization of ex-offenders named the Believers and Achievers; the Public Housing Association of Residents; and Virginia Organizing.
Ellis said national data supported the recommendations of the report, which he said would allow the City to begin work without creating a separate committee. "We're not operating in the blind; we're not having to start from scratch," Ellis said during the Council meeting.
Ellis said some of the report's proposals, including mentoring programs, have already gone into effect.
Councilwoman Dede Smith said looking at the disproportionate impact of the juvenile justice system on minorities would be a good issue for a future City Human Rights Task Force to confront. A Council-appointed task force is currently studying the role a human rights commission could play in addressing discrimination in Charlottesville.
"The question is how much can the - really quite extensive - recommendations [of this report] be implemented in our current structure," Smith said. "I thought [the Human Rights Task Force] was much too limited [because] you've got very clearly illegal discrimination" in housing, as well as forms of legal discrimination in the City's juvenile justice system.
Councilman Dave Norris said he thought the issue needed its own task force. "It's a different type of a beast," he said.
Brandon Collins, a representative from the Charlottesville Public Housing Association of Residents, said his organization, which recently joined the Coalition, has been confronting this issue for at least a year.
"This stuff has been brought to you over and over again," Collins said. "This is where you do something about this ... we cannot have a pathway for kids who are as young as 10 years old to go into detention, incarceration. That's it for them."
Director of Human Services Mike Murphy said the City had applied for a $25,000 grant to research solutions for the disproportionate number of minorities affected by the juvenile justice system. Tiana Davis, the disproportionate minority contact policy director at the Center for Children's Law and Policy, said her organization expects to release the names of grant recipients later this week.
Davis said the Center for Children's Law and Policy wanted "to look at what youth are coming into the system, how they are coming into the system" and whether they are disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system.
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