THINGS HAVE NOT gotten any better in East Cambridge since Larry Largey was allegedly beaten to death by two Cambridge policemen. Over 500 windows were broken in Roosevelt Towers last month alone. Rubbish and beer cans, many of them drained by the kids, litter the hallways. Shut out of the Langley Teen Center by the Recreation Department, kids hang out under the protected benches or in the shadows of the same doorways they have frequented for the last three years.

There have been no major improvements in the lives of kids here or anywhere else in the city. Kids are still stealing cars; kids are still popping pills or shooting heroin. The possibility of running into the type of hotshot that killed Kevin Harris, a black kid from the Riverside section of Cambridge, is still very high.

But the city has an answer to the needs of kids like Larry Largey and Kevin Harris, and those kids you see hanging out on your streetcorners. It is the two-and-a-half-year-old Youth Resources Bureau, the only social service agency in town specifically mandated to deal with "juvenile delinquency." The day Kevin died of an OD there were no formal programs for Riverside. But plans were afoot--for a program that would teach black girls their self-identity, through a cosmetics course.

"The Bureau had pledged to do something about the drug problem in Riverside," Joe Ferolito, a former staff member said recently, discussing Kevin Harris' death. "When a couple of us complained that a cosmetics program would in no way help, that a kid had died, the administrators just shrugged it off."

The history of the Cambridge YRB is shot through with similar instances of neglect, inaction, and total incomprehension of the needs of its constituency. Designed primarily as a power broker for Cambridge youth, the Bureau has consistently refused even to speak out as an agency on the most visible community issue ever to face its clientele: the death of Larry Largey.

Internally, the Bureau is torn by conflict between its staff of streetworkers (the people who deal directly with the kids) and an administration that is undermining their programs and proposals. Many see the Bureau as either a waste of time, or an outright detriment to kids. Staff turnover has been high, and tangible accomplishments by the Bureau are almost impossible to find.

AN OUTGROWTH of the 1967 Safe Streets Act, the YRB receives 75 per cent of its quarter-million dollar core budget from the Governor's Committee on Law Enforcement (GCLE); most of the rest comes from the city of Cambridge. The Bureau is supposed to emphasize changing the systems that control the city's youth rather than merely to approach each kid as an individual problem.

But an unreleased evaluation conducted by the GCLE funding committee during the time of the Largey incident said that "the bureau has done its best work in its lower priority areas" of individual contact. The report concluded that the Bureau's structure had effectively "insulated the administration both from other staff and the client population." And it termed the core Bureau's four-level decision-making process "needlessly complex" for a staff of 13.

The evaluators also said that the Bureau's two satellite projects, the East Cambridge Job Bank and the Jefferson Park Delinquency Prevention Project, were failing to fulfill the general mandate, but were functioning well on the level of individual contact.

To put it plainly, the streetworkers seem to be doing their jobs, but the administration remains inadequate and out of touch. And most of the blame seems to fall on the Bureau's director, Kerry Saravelas.

Saravelas is a tall, heavy-set, 36-year-old man who runs the Cambridge YRB from behind a large plate glass window on Mass Ave. The son of Greek immigrant parents, Saravelas grew up in West Roxbury and studied in Greek Orthodox seminaries for six years before "running away" to Chicago at the age of 26 to get a degree in psychiatric social work. He has a penchant for phrasing things in "ethical" terms, and, according to a number of present and former staff members, a tendency to look for the causes of kids' problems inside their own heads rather than out on the street and in the institutions where the causes usually are.

Saravelas came to Cambridge from a job as the director of a Young Men's Jewish Council Youth Center in Chicago. He was appointed by City Manager Corcoran after being selected by a board of directors that included politically connected Judge Lawrence Feloney, a. clergyman, and representatives of the schools, the police, the probation department, and the Shady Hill crowd. After Saravelas was hired, the board reverted to a simple advisory role, and Saravelas found himself a comfortable house on the North Shore.

Kids I spoke with who were connected with YRB were almost all vehemently critical both of Saravelas and his Bureau, though some liked individual staff members. "Raymond [a pseudonym for a former streetworker] introduced me to the Bureau, but the Bureau hasn't done shit," said one Dana Street kid. "The only thing that was done for me that was considered part of the Bureau was that Raymond got me a job at a gas station. And that was on his own time--he went down at night."

"One of their big problems is that they got too many bosses," said a 17-year-old from North Cambridge. "They don't have enough people out on the street getting to know the kids. The only time I saw a lot of them out on the street was when the shit was going down in East Cambridge (during the Largey incident). And then they were all just running around. They didn't know what to do. They really wanted in on that. Maybe the word came down from City Hall to get the kids off the street."

LARRY LARGEY HIMSELF had been on the YRB's caseload. But although the Bureau referred him to an alcoholism program at the hospital, no one seems to have ever worked with him directly. During the riots following his death, certain Bureau administrators were patrolling the streets with expensive new walkie-talkies. Part of the strategy was to get kids to wear armbands identifying the neighborhoods from which they came, supposedly for the protection of those who were connected with the Bureau. Saravelas, meanwhile, was riding around in a car with Police Chief Reagan. Although the staff members wanted to take a stand, Saravelas said that by so doing the Bureau would only alienate the police department. So the CYRB said nothing, refused even to call for an investigation of Larry's death. Said one North Cambridge youth, "They work for the city. They do whatever the city says. They were on the city's side."