The Robert C. Marshal Police Athletic League Center on Pennsylvania Avenue needs a makeover - the furniture is worn, the chairs mismatched, the floors grungy. A sign taped to the front door advertises a Spring Fling Dance, a fundraiser costing $7.
These are signs of age more than neglect, but also signs of a Police Department wanting out of the recreation business.
Not including salaries, cops spent just $161,050 to operate 18 PAL centers in fiscal 2009, a paltry amount compared with the program's heyday a decade ago when it was hailed as a national model and lauded by the White House for reviving the old boys' clubs in the city's most neglected neighborhoods.
In 2002, police spent $1.7 million on the PAL and still had $800,000 left over. The program started in 1995 under Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, who ran it as a nonprofit and relentlessly worked the phones, the political corridors and the party circuit seeking donations until he left in October 1999.
In May 2003, the nonprofit quietly folded with a $256,000 deficit. Lee A. Sheller, the nonprofit's lawyer at the time, told me that commissioners after Frazier simply lost interest in raising money and that funding shifted to the city.
On July 1, the police officer assigned to Marshal, Charles E. Lee, and 23 of his colleagues will walk out of 18 PAL centers and go back to fighting crime. Two centers are closing for good, two others are going to the school system and the rest, including Marshal, are being turned over to the Department of Recreation and Parks.
On paper, it's nothing more than a swap between city agencies required by a failing economy. But at the Marshal PAL on Wednesday, Tanisha Rodgers, 11, and her friend Shaun Douglas, 9, struggled to understand what was happening to their little comfortable world, of which Officer Charles E. Lee is such an integral part.
"It's closing?" Tanisha asked, fidgeting in a plastic chair in the office during a break from jumping rope in the gym. "He cares," Tanisha said of Lee. "Since he's a police officer, he can tell people what to do. He lets us know when we do something wrong." Added Shaun: "He doesn't let people fight in here because everyone has to be friends."
I visited the PAL center with Leticia Fitts, the academic director for the nonprofit Noble Enrichment for Children and Youth Inc., which partners with Marshal to help with programming. Fitts told me her group has been expanding services but might stop. She is reluctant to join Recreation and Parks, which she fears will be a mere caretaker.
