Three days before the Littleton, Colo., school slayings shocked the nation last week, hundreds of residents in San Francisco Chinatown gathered to discuss what many see as an ominous trend toward violence in their neighborhood—a threat that became real last June when six teenagers were gunned down in Chinatown Playground.

Unlike 14 teens in Colorado, the six San Francisco victims survived. Yet the calamity inflicted on them and their neighborhood continues to be remembered by those who live in the area, many of whom spoke out at the youth-violence forum sponsored by Supervisor Leland Yee and the Chinatown Youth Center.

A youth who called himself Tony said he and other young Asian Americans feel ignored by the city. “They’re not really paying attention to the Asian community or the Chinese community,” he said. “It seems like they don’t give out funding or money to counseling agencies to help out youths.”

Yee largely agreed, saying, “Clearly we need to provide more bilingual services for a lot of these young individuals.” Ironically, that need became especially apparent in the hours after the Chinatown shooting, when hospital workers, police and family members converged on the one person at San Francisco General who spoke Cantonese and English—an AsianWeek reporter. (The hospital’s translators had gone home hours beforehand.)

Two suspects, both under 18, have been in custody since last summer, awaiting trial. In one sense—being alive—they are more fortunate than the presumed Colorado shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who apparently committed suicide after killing a teacher and 12 students. All but one were white.

“This can happen anywhere,” said San Francisco Superintendent Bill Rojas at a news conference the day after the slayings. “The best process is one of prevention and early intervention. We want to reinforce to the community that’s the strategy we’ve taken.”

No weapons-related assaults have been reported in San Francisco public schools since 1992, though five students were expelled last year for bringing guns to school.

Like S.F. Mayor Willie Brown, Rojas emphasized the importance of communication, saying that he believed that counseling might have averted the bloodbath. “Those kids were crying out with mental health needs,” he said.

“How come kids can walk around in trenchcoats?”asked the superintendent, who said “you can’t find a school like that” in his district. Dress codes, he said, prohibit students from wearing such gear to school, as the two gunmen did.

Police Chief Fred Lau said he will let the “district take the lead on this issue. We don’t want to overreact and turn the schools into something other than what they are—institutions of learning.”

At Monday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Leland Yee announced that he was creating a task force to deal with mental health issues in the city’s schools.

“Research has shown that youths that act out in high school started to exhibit signs of troubled behavior during their elementary- and middle-school years,” said Yee, a child psychologist by training. “So we need to begin to provide services to the city’s youth at younger ages, not when they reach high-school age.”

Yee said his panel, which is independent of the board, would endeavor to draw up a blueprint for providing psychological services available to students in elementary through high schools. He hopes to bring together experts from the city’s health department, the school district, the University of California at San Francisco, and the Center of Juvenile and Youth Justice.

Despite all the alarm over youth crime, though, a teenager in San Francisco is much more likely to be a student than an arrestee, though plenty are both. In 1997, about 30,000 teens were students at middle and high schools in San Francisco. That same year, police arrested 5,222 minors, mostly teenagers, in the city. Of them, 3,249 went to Juvenile Hall, but 58 percent were released within three days, according to the Juvenile Probation Department’s 1997 report.

However, some 12 percent were held at the Youth Guidance Center for more than 30 days—among them teenagers who could not make bail, those whose probation officers recommended additional time behind bars, and those charged in connection with violent crimes.

The two Chinatown shooting suspects, for example, have been in custody for almost a year. Yet the delays in their trials have been largely the work of their attorneys, who want negotiated settlements rather than lengthy hearings that could land both teens in adult court, according to officials familiar with both cases.

Adult court is usually the worse deal for young defendants: Unlike in juvenile court, sentences may be decades long and proceedings are usually open to reporters. Juvenile court is more private, and judges there almost never sentence defendants to more than a few years. Plus, juvenile-court cases usually come to trial much faster than their adult counterparts: A “speedy trial” is about 60 days in adult court, but only about three weeks in juvenile court. Explained public defender Chris Gauger: “The judges don’t want the incident to be so far away that the child loses the connection why they are here.”

How can you tell if a kid will end up before either court? Though you never really can, the arrest figures in the draft 1997 Juvenile Probation Department report strongly suggest factors that may put some youths at much greater risk than others among them:

AGE
Of the 5,222 young suspects arrested in 1997, 3 of 4 were between 15 and 17. Many are skipping classes at the time of the arrest.

Gender
Boys outnumber girls 3 to 1 in the juvenile justice system.

Race
Asian Americans and whites each represented about 1 in 8 young arrestees in 1997. Latinos comprise more than 1 in 5, and African Americans about 1 in 2. The numbers of Asian Americans in the system, and to a lesser degree those of whites and Latinos, are disproportionately small compared to their presence in the city’s public schools. Some 680 youths of Asian descent were arrested in 1997, making up about 13 percent of the total. In comparison, about half of San Francisco’s 60,000-plus students are Asian American.

Prior Run-Ins
Almost 30 percent of the arrested juveniles had had seven to 12 prior contacts with police. More than 17 percent had up to 20 prior contacts. Most busts involve drugs and/or robbery, according to public defender Chris Gauger. Indeed, of the 128 juvenile detainees in custody on Dec. 31, more than 20 were being held in connection with drug-related offenses, and 24 were in for robbery, burglary and auto theft—versus three in for murder and four in each for assault with a deadly weapon and for attempted murder.

Neighborhood
More than 950 of the 5,222 juvenile arrests in 1997 came from one neighborhood—the Outer Mission. In contrast, the Marina had only 72. An additional 805 came from the Bayview, the only district in the city that did not show a decrease in juvenile arrests between 1993 and 1997.