As San Francisco becomes the first major city whose youth population mirrors the diversity of the globe, its official attitudes and policies toward youth remain mired in the past. The city’s youth—43% Asian, 25% Latino, 20% white, 11% black—demonstrate that California’s and the nation’s transition from a white-dominated to a multicultural society brings greater opportunities and safer communities.

Unfortunately, an unholy alliance of law enforcement, interest groups, entrenched programs, politicians, media reporters, irresponsible columnists, and “experts,” all of whose agendas require convincing the public and policy makers that youth are always “bad and getting worse” are creating a completely distorted image. The public discussion of young people depicts San Francisco’s present and future as a frightening dystopia of murderous gangs, middle-school heroin users, random hookups, marauding girls, prostituting preteens, suicidal preppies and “kids shot every day.” It isn’t just the Bushite Right foisting these anachronistic panics, but the most enlightened of liberals—the very ones who should be heralding the massive declines in social ills among San Francisco’s diversifying youth population as a shining model for the Western world’s multicultural future.

Because of improved behaviors among its young, San Francisco is a much safer, healthier city than it was a generation ago. If you retreat 30 to 40 years to the late 1960s and early 1970s era now worshiped as an idyllic era of neighborhood peace and countercultural love, you find in reality a dangerous city to be young. In the first five years of the 1970s, San Francisco’s 98,000 teenage residents (nonresidents are excluded) suffered 273 violent deaths, including 100 murders and suicides and 91 deaths from drugs or guns. Nearly 50,000 youths under age 18 were arrested for criminal offenses—including 50 for murder, 125 for rape, 4,000 for robbery and assault, and 10,000 for felony burglary and theft.

In contrast, in the first five years of the new century, San Francisco’s 60,000 teens suffered 76 violent deaths, including 44 suicides and homicides and 39 deaths from drugs or guns, and 11,500 criminal arrests—including 15 for murder, 12 for rape, 2,400 for robbery and assault, and 1,500 for burglary and theft. Work out the per-capita rates, and you’ll see that over the last 30 years, serious youth problems all declined, with truly mammoth drops in homicide, suicide, rape, drug overdose, violence, and crime. Gentrification is not the reason; as older age groups became richer, the percent of youth living in poverty stayed static: 17% in 1970, 16% in 2002.

Girls, in particular, show dramatic improvements over the last generation:  criminal arrest rates down 50%, violent deaths down 65%, homicides and suicides down 90%. In 2005, 2.2% of the girls ages 10-17 in the city were arrested for criminal offenses—compared to 5.3% in 1965 and 10.2% in 1970. In 2005, girls accounted for a whopping 2% of San Francisco’s violent crime, 1% of its drug crimes, and none of its murders, suicides, gun deaths, or drug deaths—fewer than for senior citizens.

But various groups have designated girls an “underserved” population—which means they’re targeted for bad publicity aimed at securing more funding for those who claim to serve them. A wave of media scares assert burgeoning “girl gangs” and “girl trouble” (the latter the title of an inaccurate 1990s film on girls’ supposedly rising crime and violence still endlessly recycled on TV and in community forums). Similarly, “Benchmarks for the Future: A Report on Girls in San Francisco,” issued in 2003 by the Department on the Status of Women, incorporated rampant myths made all the more disturbing by its juxtaposition of the rising racial diversity of girls and rising crime and other problems.

I had direct experience with that report and the process by which interest groups, substituting self-serving propaganda for reality, prevent modernization of San Francisco’s policies and services. I was asked to submit background information to the DOSW and supplied many of the optimistic trends on girls summarized above, along with strong concerns that too many girls were being incarcerated for trivial offenses. To my shock, every positive trend I submitted wound up being summarily excised from the final report. Instead, the authors inserted irrelevant quotes from national interests to concoct standard “youth at risk” panics over girls’ supposedly rising crime, drug abuse, depression, suicide, and other crises. It was particularly disturbing that a city agency specifically charged with ensuring the well-being of girls and women would issue such an inflammatory, anti-girl report at a time when girls were being pilloried in the media.

Similarly, my reports beginning in 2003 detailing the disturbing over-arrest of black girls and women in San Francisco, especially for drug offenses, met with outraged responses and promises for action by the DOSW, Human Rights Commission, Board of Supervisors and local media. But in three years, none of these agencies or media outlets did anything tangible. Then, in December 2006, a series in the San Francisco Chronicle revealed the problem of excessive African American arrest rates. Why did this issue suddenly become ripe for discussion? Because various interests had identified a handy scapegoat: “black youth,” blamed for “shooting each other,” “selling drugs” and requiring strong policing. In reality, the police department’s own figures showed black youth had virtually nothing to do with high black arrest rates, particularly for the most racially-disparate drug arrests, which are now heavily concentrated in middle-aged groups.

These disgraceful, pathetically easy manipulations of public opinion against the young—whether black, female or youth in general—are not excused by the noble motivation of securing better services. As long as San Francisco powers can indulge the easy route of scapegoating young people for every crisis, no real progress will be made toward redressing the city’s perilous divisions. It is time for advocates to declare that young people deserve resources and services because they’re valued members of society, not because they’re savages about to kill us all.

In fact, San Francisco youth trends suggest emerging dynamics we don’t begin to understand. Since 1970, the city’s teen suicide rate fell from 50% above the national average to 50% below; its teen drug death rate, from a staggering 6 times the national average to 30% below; its birth rate by teens dropping 50% faster than the national average. Today—in a city whose adults suffer higher risks—San Francisco teenagers, especially its girls, have among the lowest levels of suicide and drug abuse mortality of any population in the Western world. Why? These and numerous other youth improvements beg for attention.

While young people live in the evolving, future-oriented world of 2007 and beyond, the officials and established interests who govern them remain mired in backwards, pre-1970s mindsets that see crime, drugs, violence, and other ills simply as “youth crises.” The decline in problems among the young have offset massive increases in drug abuse and crime among rising thousands of middle-aged San Franciscans that are now filling jails and prisons—yet another crucial trend authorities, trapped in glacial response to changing trends, do not yet acknowledge.
 
Some initial steps to shaking up and modernizing the discussion include debates over (a) reducing San Francisco’s voting and office-holding age to 15, and (b) classifying anti-youth invective the same as hate speech vilifying racial and other groups. Every group in town endorses some cliché about “empowering youth;” let us now get serious about it.