Chair responds to Ogbang on mentorship and council opportunities

What are we doing?

I'm in agreement with you.

I'm going to stop right there and chair.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, and thank you to this panel.

You are now dismissed.

And the next panel we will call will be Theodore Haywood and Prince Obang Jr.

You may begin.

Just come off of mute.

Hello, hello, counsel.

Thank you for allowing me to come up here and talk.

I'm currently a junior at NYU, and I came here to basically learn more about the criminal justice system in itself and learn more facts about it.

One alarming trend that really made me question a lot of things was how

Youth arrests have gone up 50%.

That is a little too alarming for my liking.

I feel like we need to invest more in our youth.

We need to invest more in our communities.

For me, for example, I grew up in the projects, the Morris housing projects in the Bronx, and I feel like the government is not doing enough to help the youth in general.

They're not providing resources.

They're not providing mentorship.

They're not allocating funds in the right way.

One way I'm trying to help my community is by joining community-based organizations.

One community-based organization I'm a part of is the BLOC, the Bronx Leadership Organizing Center.

I feel like mentorship is very important.

Right now, I have a mentor in the block, and he has helped me throughout my whole, through high school to now.

So I feel like mentorship is what we need to give to our youth.

It's really hard coming up here speaking because not a lot of youth are around me.

But I feel like if you...

give more mentorship to the youth, there'll be more people like me coming up here to speak and learning more about the criminal justice system.

And we need to provide more resources and more money to these programs so we can help our youth.

And it creates a snowball effect if you think about it.