Mayoral candidate Steve Rideout has the criminal justice experience to help our police department accomplish its goals in Cambridge. For example, many of us are concerned about the recent gun violence in Cambridge for which some juveniles have been charged. Rideout’s professional experience as a juvenile and family court judge for 15 years in Alexandria, Virginia, a city of 150,000 people, would truly be an asset to our city.
During his time on the bench, Rideout worked with his fellow judges and local agencies to develop programs for the community. He worked with the school system, court intake and probation, social services, mental health, and substance abuse services to develop prevention and early intervention programs to help prevent court involvement by teens and families.
Rideout describes their work this way: “We were a model court for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) that improved permanency outcomes for children in foster care. We started one of the first Family Drug Treatment Courts in the Country. We were able to convince the school system to bring more truancy cases to our court service unit for collaborative solutions and diversion from court or to see court action that brought resources to the children and families that helped address their challenges that included mental health and substance abuse issues. We were able to reduce the incarceration of youth – pre and post-trial – while keeping the community safe, holding the youth accountable, and providing services. Our community began the Alexandria Tutoring Consortium 25 years ago. It is a faith based reading and mentoring program that has now served over 3,500 young children who had had limited reading opportunities prior to attending school.”
These efforts resulted in a 50% reduction in juvenile delinquency! In other words, Rideout knows the importance of agency collaboration and having the community become involved to tackle these problems.
After Rideout moved here in 2010 with his wife, Bobbie, he developed and participated in many projects to benefit our community. For example, he is a founding board member of Moving Dorchester Forward (MDF). His workstream has focused on parent and community engagement as well as court involved or court diverted children. MDF has been able to obtain some small funding for two programs to help youth. One is the Coalition 4 Court Kids to support those children that have faced court involvement or gone to court and are turning their lives around. The other is a summer photography program to help youth not doing well in school learn how to express themselves through photography and mentorship by volunteers trained on how to reach these youth.
Rideout has also been working on reducing truancy, raising reading achievement, and more. To find out more about what Steve Rideout can do as mayor, type his name in the search box on the Cambridge Spy website.
Steve Rideout has the professional experience and volunteer spirit to lead Cambridge to a better tomorrow. He would make an excellent mayor!
Eugene Lauer says
Steve would make an excellent Mayor. All or what Susan says is fact. But in addition to that Steve believes we need to fund police at it’s authorized complement and add non-sworn personnel to assist officers in certain calls and community involvement where appropriate. Steve believes as this article points out that there must be multipile vehicles in the community for addressing youth and juvenile problems but this will not come at the expense of funding police. His platform also commits to finding incentives to attract and retain our police officers in Cambridge.