THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING

YOUTH CRIME AN ISSUE WITHOUT T UNIT Author(s):    Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff Date: December 9, 2002 Page: B1 Section: Metro/Region For Binh Pham, an eighth-grader from Fields Corner, the thought of taking the Red Line to school is a fast track to bad memories. Day after day last year, for two months, the Vietnamese immigrant was chased, beaten, and robbed by up to a dozen teenagers who waited for him to step off the train and walk to the Gavin Middle School in South Boston. Pham's grades plummeted, he often skipped classes, and eventually he dropped out of a school where he had earned solid grades the year before. "It started to get serious," said Pham, 14. "I was too scared to complain. I just stopped going to school, period." Pham's story is not unique and the notion of the MBTA as a juvenile battleground rings true for many students, parents, and neighborhood groups. Some community activists, many of whom lobbied last year to disband an undercover MBTA police unit because of complaints of aggressive behavior and racial profiling, now believe that dissolving the unit has contributed to new violence because troublemaking students have less to fear. Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority statistics show that reports of after-school crime on the transit system rose 50 percent from fall 2000, when the plainclothes unit existed, to fall 2001, when it did not. In the fall of 2000, the MBTA received 60 reports of after-school violence and property crime, the agency said. In the fall of 2001, the total was 90. One high-ranking law enforcement source said the absence of the dozen plainclothes police has a direct impact on MBTA crime. "Absolutely, without question," said the source, who is familiar with the MBTA police. "The bad kids know the plainclothes officers aren't there. It's easy pickings: You can intimidate, you can rob, and you can stab." From this September through November, reports of after-school crime have dropped to 64. But activists in neighborhoods such as Fields Corner say that violence among students remains high and that MBTA data might not present an accurate picture of a problem that often goes unreported. To some, disbanding an admittedly flawed unit instead of refining its tactics was like throwing out the baby with the bath water. "I think there was an overreaction," said Larry Mayes, director of the alternative Log School in Dorchester. "You could have dealt with the problem without getting rid of an effective tool." The MBTA's interim police chief, William Fleming, dismissed the suggestion that after-school violence has increased because the plainclothes unit no longer exists. Instead, he cites the drop in this fall's statistics as an indication that his deployment of uniformed officers to daily "hot spots" has been an effective alternative. But Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, said that tactic can shift the problem elsewhere. To Folgert, the absence of undercover police on MBTA trains and trolleys is an invitation for trouble. "All hell has broken loose because there is no undercover police unit," said Folgert. If after-school crime has fallen, Folgert said, a new undercover unit would drive those statistics down further. Critics of the plainclothes unit, which had been making about half of the MBTA's arrests, said they do not want to reconstitute a force that allegedly routinely violated the civil rights of minority youths. Janice Lee, director of the Boston Youth Organizing Project, said students have no reason to believe that a new undercover unit would be more tactful in its work or less prone to racial profiling. "I'm definitely not in the camp where I'd say we need this," Lee said. Lisa Thurau-Gray, an attorney with the Suffolk University Juvenile Justice Center, is also opposed to re-creating the unit. She said the MBTA has not dramatically changed its public face or given students clear, simple guidelines about behavior on the MBTA. Fleming disputes that criticism, arguing that the MBTA is working more closely with the city, schools, and street workers to obtain warnings of potential confrontations and then prevent them. In addition, he said, the MBTA will meet a demand by Lee's group to install working call boxes and surveillance cameras in Red Line stations from Ashmont to JFK/UMass. But law enforcement officials concede that problems are inevitable when 20,000 teenagers use the system every weekday. Michael Hennessey of the Boston School Police said, "It's a dangerous place they have to tread after school. We've found hundreds of kids in schools with weapons and invariably they tell us they're not afraid in school, but they're afraid going to and from school." Count Pham among that number. After dropping out of school last year, he has returned to the eighth grade - with one major, stress-reducing change. His parents drive him to school. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company