Posted on: Thursday, February 19, 2004

EDITORIAL
Weed & Seed areas need adequate funds

It never fails that politicians, both here and in Washington, bluster endlessly about getting tough on crime in election years. Yet given a proven program that radically reduces crime at bargain-basement prices, they seem to be looking the wrong way.

We're talking about the Weed & Seed program, whose great success was detailed at length yesterday by Advertiser reporter Peter Boylan. In Kalihi, Palama and Chinatown, the first of three Hawai'i Weed & Seed areas, crime has dropped dramatically:

"In 1997, before the designation," writes Boylan, "3,498 major felonies were reported in the area," according to police statistics. "In 2002, that number fell to 1,167, and between January and August 2003, to 636 felonies."

The "weed" portion of the program involves "weeding" out gangs, drug dealers and repeat and violent offenders from high crime areas, partly with increased heat from federal law enforcement.

The "seed" portion, though perhaps not as dramatic, is every bit as important in the program's sustainability. In bureaucratic terms, it means crime prevention, intervention, treatment and neighborhood revitalization to the area. A concrete example is the Weed & Seed money that allows Bernard Lewis, head custodian at Kaiulani Elementary School, to run an after-school basketball program.

Now 'Ewa Beach and Waipahu have been added to the program, and the state has submitted applications for two more sites: Wai'anae and Pahoa — "largely," writes Boylan, "because of prevalent and brazen drug offenses."

But of all of these sites, only Waipahu is currently funded by the feds. At the federal level, it's actually success that is killing Hawai'i's Weed & Seed program. Hawai'i's three sites are among 351 nationwide, of which only 170 receive some form of federal money. The sites with the highest crime rates get the money; the Hawai'i sites are improving themselves out of contention.

Clearly nothing Congress and the Bush administration spend money on gets better results than Weed & Seed.

Locally, the Democratic Legislature and the Republican executive are arguing about how much to spend on drug programs. One of their first steps should be to fund Weed & Seed.