PREVENTION PROGRAM AIMS TO MAKE KIDS STREET SMART

U.S. Attorney's Office Delivers Hard Sell to Churches,
Schools

The roll call kicks off with the bass drum of a funeral
dirge.

Slowly, methodically, the names of each young person slain last year
creeps across the projection screen. People shift in their seats,
swallow lumps in their throats.

Federal prosecutors Richard Rose and Abram McGull II want it that
way.

"We are trying to get into one young mind at a time," Rose
said.

Their venture, "Street Smarts NOLA" is a progressive new crime
prevention program aimed at city teenagers. The program prompts
students to think, to react, to question.

Rose and colleagues in U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office unveiled the
80-minute program Friday afternoon to local educators, clergy and
community activists.

With Rose putting on the hard sell, prosecutors asked schools,
churches and community groups to open their doors and sign up for the
program.

"We have to focus on prevention," Letten said in his opening remarks.
"We have to reach our youth."

More than 270 people under the age of 30 have been killed in New
Orleans since the beginning of 2006.

To underscore the gravity of the crime problem, the Street Smart
speakers keep the speech blunt.

"You got kids right now in New Orleans bagging rock so they can feed
their family," Rose said. "They ain't even adults."

Rose -- a slick-talking, street-savvy prosecutor with a pocket square
- -- paced the room, tearing down the gangster idols and hip-hop relics
who glorify guns and drugs. He analyzes the lyrics of hip-hop artist
Jay-Z, who raps in one song, "y'all respect the one who got shot / I
respect the shooter."

Rose talks of soldiers in the slums and how kids who sling crack
"think they are all going to get paid."

"I tell them they are heading for the roll call," he
said.

The program shows crime scene photos and footage of local
shootouts.

In a city with one of the country's highest murder rates, Rose likens
the youth crime problem to "teenage suicide."

The community group members watched wide-eyed.

"The students want to internalize these wild lifestyles," Philip
Smith, principal of McDonogh 35 High School, said after the seminar.
"They want to emulate and copy."

Smith said his school will be using the Street Smarts program in the
future. "Some of these youngsters, especially the most disconnected
ones, need to get these messages."

Other school administrators and clergy lined up after the program to
voice their praise and fill out sign-up sheets.

Earlier this year, Rose acted on an offer to take part in a federal
task force of prosecutors and agents temporarily tasked with aiding
the New Orleans criminal justice system.

As an anti-gang coordinator for the Rhode Island U.S. attorney's
office, he created Street Smarts several years ago and schooled more
than 5,000 Rhode Island students on the dangers of inner-city life and
crime.

Meanwhile, he made his mark as a member of the prosecution team that
convicted longtime Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, a gregarious
politician who ruled the local fiefdom with an Edwin Edwards-like flair.

Rose is slated to return to the Rhode Island federal prosecutor's
office in February. By then, the program should be in full swing, with
McGull leading the seminar.

McGull, a federal prosecutor in New Orleans for eight years, grew up
in the Lower 9th Ward, graduated from McDonogh 35 High School and
became the mayor of Pleasant Valley, Mo. He earned a law degree and
now works in the Violent Crime Unit in Letten's office.

McGull said Rose and other peers pushed him to lead the program. They
likened it to a ministry. And each day a colleague would tack up the
murder count to a board in the office.

"Every yellow sticky was another human being," he said. "Another human
life being snuffed out."