There’s a problem in Mercer County when out-of-towners come to the Farrell-Sharon basketball game to sell drugs. That happened Tuesday.

Or when members of the rival Shenango Valley street gangs the Young Gunnaz and the Chedda Boyz get into a beef Dec. 28 at the tradition-rich Dresch-McCluskey basketball tournament that resulted in a handful of arrests in the last month.

Or when a 21-year-old mother gets gunned down in broad daylight and the person accused of shooting her is the brother of a man that was shot and killed in what a Mercer County judge called a “senseless death” three years ago.

“Society is much more violent-prone,” Mercer County Common Pleas Court President Judge Francis J. Fornelli said. “Drugs are so much more acceptable than they were a decade ago.”

“We’ve got gang activity,” he said. “There has been further deterioration of the family unit.”

That’s why Mercer County’s recent designation as a site for the Communities that Care Initiative is important, Fornelli said.

“The CTC initiative is critical at this time to bring a fresh approach at identification and prevention,” Fornelli said.

A nationwide program that in Pennsylvania is administered by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, the county’s CTC program was awarded a $36,825 grant to study the county’s problems and find answers that work, Mark Benedetto, the county’s juvenile probation chief and chairman of the local CTC initiative said.

They’re looking to hire a “mobilizer” to administer Pennsylvania Youth Services (PAYS) surveys to kids in grades 8, 10 and 12 in the county’s 12 school districts.

The information gathered in these surveys has proven to be helpful in assessing problems and identifying prevention programs that work, Benedetto said.

CTC is nothing new in Mercer County, Bennedetto said, noting there were successful programs in Sharon and Farrell in the 1990s along with a program in the Greenville Area School District earlier this decade.

But the recent designation brings a county-wide approach to identifying problems and building programs to address them, Benedetto said.

“CTC brings with it a lot of respect. It is a program that’s been proven (to work),” he said.

Surveys completed during the last two years identified three big problems facing kids in the county, Benedetto said:

• There’s a neighborhood attachment problem.