Activists call on gov. to revise gang plan
A group of black community activists, including a former Eight-Tray Crips gang member, called Sunday for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to add more preventive approaches to his proposed strategy to fight gang crime.
At a news conference held at a South Los Angeles street corner where a youth was recently gunned down, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, and former Crips member Melvin Farmer said Schwarzenegger’s plan was “doomed to failure.”
In a letter to the governor, they said the plan was “long on supervision and short on funding and new initiatives for intervention and prevention programs.”
The governor’s $48-million proposal, which was unveiled Friday, would track gang parolees by monitoring them with electronic ankle devices similar to those already used to track convicted sex offenders.
Hutchinson and Farmer, however, sided with some state Democratic lawmakers who believe that the plan is light on job training and other social programs.
“Your proposal,” their letter said, “will not stop gang killings in Los Angeles because it does not address the root causes of gang violence: poverty, neglect, unemployment, lack of skills, training and education improvement, and neighborhood and recreating facilities and services.”
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