Jim Stuit, Durham’s point man on gang reduction, has crunched a lot of numbers and finds reasons to think the city and county are on the right track.

But if he were grading the results, he said, he’d only award local government a B-minus.

“There’s a lot of room for improvement,” he said.

Stuit is gang reduction strategy manager at the Durham County Criminal Justice Resource Center. It’s a job created in 2011 to oversee a comprehensive anti-gang effort the city and county adopted in 2007.

Based on an approach endorsed by the U.S. Justice Department’s division on juvenile delinquency and its prevention, the strategy involves collaboration among law enforcement, schools, the judiciary, universities and community organizations.

Basic to the idea is compiling hard data to see what, if anything, the approach has accomplished.

Last week, Stuit issued a Community Indicator Report of statistics on youth gangs and factors that lead young people into them and into delinquency in general.

On the upside, overall crime is trending down in Durham, with juveniles accounting for a declining proportion of it. Violence committed by 10- to 17-year-olds is down, fewer kids are dropping out of school and the short-term suspension rate is down.

School numbers are key, Stuit said. Sixty-two percent of the youngsters involved with the courts in Durham County have “serious school behavioral problems” such as suspensions and unexcused absences, according to the report.

“That’s a place we’d really like to drill down on,” he said. “It’s just really key ... there’s such a correlation between not being in school and getting in trouble.”

But – “We still have more kids dropping out than you’d expect in a community our size.”

Numbers illustrate his points. According to the Durham Public Schools data Stuit used in the report, recent years have seen as many as 500 pupils drop out in the county. In 2009-10, there were 444; in 2010-11, the latest year cited, the total was down to 371. In the same two terms, short out-of-school suspensions fell from 6,492 to 5,213.

On the other hand, the percentage of Durham students at or above their grade levels was still well below the state average: 70.4 percent versus 82.4 percent in 2010-11. Out of North Carolina’s 115 school districts, Durham ranked 70th in the dropout rate.

Durham juveniles in the courts claim gang affiliation at a higher rate, 20 percent, than the statewide average, 6 percent. But, incident reports from 2009 indicate that only 4 percent of the offenses were gang-related; most appeared to be “crimes of opportunity.”

County Manager Mike Ruffin, who is co-chairman of the Gang Reduction Strategy Steering Committee along with City Manager Tom Bonfield, said he had not read the report yet, but had it on his weekend to-do list.

Bonfield said he had seen it, and found Stuit’s report encouraging.

“I think it is, particularly in the progress we have made in the last year in getting the right people around the table,” he said.

Getting people around the table, though, can involve problems of its own, the report indicates. Stuit quotes an assessment by the IBM Smart Cities grant program, which found that Durham County has as many as 400 service agencies working on problems that face young people – but there is little or no communication or cooperation between them.

Stuit quoted an IBM conclusion:

“The community’s orientation towards inclusiveness to the point of dysfunction and inaction have led to large committees, councils and task force meetings which frequently struggle to reach agreement. As a result, its ability to collaborate effectively and make timely decisions to drive results is hindered.”