Youth crimes declining but punishments on the rise, advocates say

WASHINGTON - Youth violence is falling, but more children are paying the price of public fears driven by high-profile school shootings - harsher punishments for nonviolent or minor offenses - says a new report.

''We've got kids getting kicked out of school for saying 'bang-bang' to each other,'' said Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute, a youth advocacy think tank that co-authored report. ''It's no more fair to stereotype them all as school shooters than to stereotype all adults as Timothy McVeigh,'' who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The report - released a week before the first anniversary of the April 20 Columbine High School massacre - says the public isn't paying attention to overall youth-violence trends. Instead, shootings in Colorado, Arkansas, Oregon and most recently Michigan - where one first-grader shot and killed another youngster in class - have driven schools to install more metal detectors, conduct more locker searches and impose more suspensions and expulsions for threats, Schiraldi said.

''Even though these are awful tragedies, we can't set public policy based on these events,'' Schiraldi said in a recent interview.

The report by the Justice Policy Institute, based in Washington and San Francisco, and the nonprofit legal aid Children's Law Center in Covington, Ky., recommends more school counseling, balanced media coverage of school shootings and tougher gun control laws. The groups - which gleaned data from federal and state agencies and nonprofit research centers - are releasing the report publicly today.

The report's findings include:

- Seven in 10 Americans think a school shooting could happen in their communities, but a child has a 1 in 2 million chance of being killed in a U.S. school.

- Youth homicide arrests dropped 56 percent from 1993 to 1998, but two-thirds of 1,000 people polled by The Washington Post in November said they believed children were getting more violent.

- Citing Maryland as an example, suspensions for false alarms and bomb threats went up 44 percent from the 1997-98 school year to the 1998-99 year. Although it was not known whether the alarms and threats themselves increased, the group said the significant increase in suspensions alone reflected a crackdown on such infractions.

''Kids have to know there are consequences to illegal activity,'' said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the 285,000-member police union. ''The real issue is how can they (officials) be tough without creating the perceptions that they are oppressing these kids.''

Most of the punishments were for what the report called ''petty acts.'' For example:

- A 17-year-old junior was expelled from his suburban Chicago high school in 1998 after the paper clip he shot with a rubber band struck a cafeteria worker, drawing a small amount of blood. He was also charged with disorderly conduct.

- Two 10-year-old boys in Arlington, Va., were suspended for three days for putting soapy water in a teacher's drink. Felony charges filed against them were later dismissed.

The crack down hit minority children especially hard, the report said. In Phoenix, black students are suspended from school at 22 times the rate of white students; in Denver, San Francisco and Austin, they are suspended at least three times as often.

Some parents oppose zero-tolerance laws that require tough penalties for all children who carry weapons, start fights or make threats.

''I don't think anyone who is in a position of responsibility can be mindless,'' said Alan Heitner, a physician in Madeira, Ohio, whose son Dana, 18, was suspended for school-election signs in a restroom that joked about a bomb in the toilet.

Heitner said the two-week suspension didn't protect anyone and caused his son to miss exams at his suburban Cincinnati high school: ''From a safety standpoint, this is really absurd.''