Carly Borden, Staff Writer and Shannon Nickinson, Editor

Breaking the ties of violence that bind young people today is not a 9-to-5 job.

It is an all-day, every day job. For all of us, says the Rev. Carl Reeves.

“When it’s your job, you do it until you’re fired,” said Reeves, the pastor of Greater Mount Lily Baptist Church. “When it’s your life, you do it until you die.”

That was the Rev. Carl Reeves' message to a crowd of 30 recently at the Woodland Heights Resource Center as part of a town hall meeting sponsored by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

The May 20 meeting is one of a series that DJJ is hosting throughout the state. The sessions began last year. There have been 42 meetings in 26 counties statewide, all with the aim of sparking the community conversation about how to keep young people on the straight and narrow path.

Denise Manassa with the Community Drug and Alcohol Council said this meeting was co-sponsored by the Escambia County Gang Reduction Task force and the Northwest Florida Prevention Coalition. It also included resources for parents and attendees from several community service groups who aim to prevent youth violence.

The panel included representatives from DJJ, the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, Pensacola Police Department and the Escambia County School District.

The county’s new civil citation program was among the hottest topics of conversation in the crowd. Other topics included clarification on school disciplinary procedures and drug prevention training for teachers.

The civil citation program went statewide in the 2011-2012 fiscal year. It was expanded to Escambia County in 2013.

The program gives young first-time offenders facing nonviolent misdemeanors the chance to enter a diversion program that includes counseling and community service. Those who successfully complete the program will have no arrest record.

Paul Wallis, chief probation officer for this district for the Department of Juvenile Justice, said that from May 2013 to June 4, Escambia law enforcement officials have written 252 civil citations. The citations are about evenly split between the Escambia Sheriff’s Office and the Pensacola Police Department.

Statewide, it is about 94-96 percent success rate and Wallis said the local program has been in that range as well. As officers and deputies become more familiar with the program, the number of citations written increases monthly, Wallis said.

One of the challenges with the program early on was community education. For example, to participate in the program the teen must admit his or her guilt, which understandably made parents anxious.

“There was resistance from parents to signing off on something that says, ‘I did this,’” Wallis said. “But the advantage to that is, if they really did it and they want to avoid an arrest history, the program does that. That was the whole point of establishing the program.”

At the Woodland Heights meeting, both panelists and audience members agreed that along with intervention programs like the civil citation, parental involvement -- or lack thereof -- is the key to turning the tide.

But, some audience members said, the lack of support could be due to lack of parental knowledge or resources as opposed to apathy.

And that is why, Reeves, said, solutions to these problems must come from the entire community.

“I am here because I am concerned,” he said. “We’re all going down to go down the drain together. We’re on the same ship.”

With Pensacola City Councilman Gerald Wingate the only acknowledged elected official in the crowd, Reeves said, “at some point, the people who lead in government need to be here.”

Wingate said he felt the civil citation program has helped and he hoped the community conversation would continue.

The next formal DJJ meeting has yet to be scheduled, but Manassa said the hope is that there will be another in the fall.

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