L.A. urged to alter gang tactics

Paramedics and firefighters have been shot at and threatened when responding to calls for medical help involving the city’s gang violence, the head of the Los Angeles Fire Department said Wednesday.

Interim Fire Chief Douglas Barry told a City Council panel at a packed public hearing on gangs that his crews have responded to 7,500 “shots fired” calls in the last three years, often arriving before police.

“We are first responders. Many times the perpetrators are still on the scene, so not only is the public in harm’s way but so are our firefighters as well,” Barry told the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development.

Barry was among more than a dozen L.A. city and county officials, and about 40 members of the public who testified at City Hall on Wednesday about the need to revamp gang prevention and suppression programs.

Some, including Councilman Ed Reyes, voiced frustration, saying that similar hearings have been held many times in the last two decades, yet the city has continued to fall short in its efforts to reduce gang violence.

Councilman Tony Cardenas, the committee chairman, said there were 2,200 gang-related homicides in the last six years in the city, adding that police have reported that gang violence increased 14% last year.

Cardenas likened the situation to the natural disasters that devastated the nation’s Gulf Coast more than a year ago.

“Gang violence has become Los Angeles’ urban Katrina,” Cardenas said during the three-hour hearing. “If we don’t find relief fast and create effective solutions, then we will lose more lives in this disaster.”

The panel convened the hearing to get responses to a study that concludes that the city’s scattered anti-gang efforts have failed because they lack coordination, focus and accountability.

The study by the Advancement Project recommended that a gang “czar” be appointed and that a Department of Neighborhood Safety be created, to overhaul the 23 anti-gang programs that cost the city $82 million annually.

The study also recommended that a Marshall Plan-style initiative be undertaken to bring jobs and economic development to gang-plagued neighborhoods.

“With over 700 gangs in the city, Los Angeles is the gang capital of the world,” Connie Rice, director of the organization that conducted the study, said at the hearing. “We need accountability and a neighborhood stabilization plan.”

Police Chief William J. Bratton endorsed the study’s general finding that more coordination and more resources were needed for gang suppression, intervention and prevention.

“If you just continue what you’ve been doing you will just be throwing your money away,” Bratton said.

But City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo took issue with the study’s call for a new department, saying that he had “serious concerns about the wisdom of the report’s call for a massive, expensive mega-agency.”

Speaker after speaker from the public upbraided city officials for failing to stem gang violence.

“You guys have no clue,” said Vicky Lindsey, whose son, 19, was shot and killed in 1995.

“After this is over, you guys go home,” Lindsey said. “We live with this every single second of our lives, and it hurts. So whatever plan you have, just put it in motion.”

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com