Group Pins Hopes on New Name

Rebuffed by donors and deprived of city funds, organizers of Loved Ones of Homicide Victims made a reluctant change: They dropped “homicide” from the organization’s name.

Homicide “is not a cause that people want to align themselves with,” explained the Rev. Ferroll Robins, the South Los Angeles agency’s director. “It is something no one wants to think about.”

Homicide rates in the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau, which stretches from Watts to Crenshaw, are roughly six times the national average. Nearly half of all homicides in California occur in Los Angeles County.

The fact that a nonprofit agency specializing in treating the psychological aftermath of those killings lacks funds “really angers me,” said Deputy Chief Earl Paysinger of the South Bureau.

Paysinger called the agency “unique in terms of grass-roots organizations.” If it were to close, “it would not be a void. It would be an abyss.”

State and local government budget problems are putting the squeeze on many nonprofit agencies. But advocates for Loved Ones say its problems go beyond tight budgets. They say Los Angeles’ murder problem is losing out to other political priorities and more popular causes.

“Homicide is not fashionable. It is not the popular cause, the cause du jour,” said Inglewood Police Chief Ronald Banks, chairman of Loved Ones’ board.

For nearly two decades, Loved Ones has provided counseling and support to about 200 people a year who are grief-stricken after a homicide -- mostly street murders, many of them gang-related. It serves the city’s most violent neighborhoods, and city and county prosecutors use it regularly.

“It’s the first place I send my victims,” said Loretta Denman, victim services representative for Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley.

But Loved Ones now gets no city funding and receives only three private grants. It depends mostly on a modest grant awarded by state officials out of the annual $40-million federal Victims of Crime Act fund. The grant program ends this year and might not be renewed.

As it is, the grant money is distributed in equal portions around the state, and Loved Ones gets no more than agencies in such counties as Napa and Shasta, which serve communities with far less violent crime.

Loved Ones’ operational budget has since shrunk from about $180,000 a year to about $125,000. The agency also receives about $46,000 in partial government reimbursement for psychologists’ fees.

The city gave the group $67,000 last year. But Loved Ones no longer measures up to other needy agencies, said Manet Milner, director of human services for Los Angeles. Milner said applicants are evaluated in part on how well they fit the mission of the grants, which are weighted toward areas of higher poverty and target the need for economic and social development and housing.

Loved Ones was ranked high enough in past years to qualify for a grant. But in the most recent cycle, the bar was higher, and the agency didn’t meet the new cut-off point, Milner said.

For Milner, the decision to end funding was personally difficult. Her son was murdered in 1990 at the age of 22.

“I’ve been through it,” she said. “It never ends.”

Most of the $40 million in federal funding for victims programs in California is restricted to two uses: salaries for victim representatives -- who are assigned statewide in proportion to crime numbers -- and services for victims of domestic violence, child abuse or sex abuse.

What’s left for other organizations such as Loved Ones is less than $1 million. The state Office of Emergency Services divides that funding equally among eight organizations, which include agencies in Orange, Napa and Shasta counties and two in Los Angeles County. One of those in L.A. County is a gay and lesbian service group. The other is Loved Ones.

Ann Mizoguchi, chief of the victims services branch in Emergency Services, said the distribution takes into account the greater number of other victims’ representatives in Los Angeles County.

It also serves to ensure that rural areas are not overlooked, protecting funding for such programs as the Family Service Agency of Shasta County, said Melissa Harris, the agency’s executive director. She acknowledged that her county’s crime rates are much lower than Los Angeles’.

“If they just looked at numbers, no money would ever come to a county like this,” Harris said.

That approach outrages some victim advocates in Los Angeles.

“Who lives in Shasta County? Penguins? How many drive-by shootings do they have?” asked Norma Hawkins, a Lynwood activist and former Loved Ones client who has lost two sons in drive-by shootings.

Hawkins contends that society’s failure to give priority to homicide over other crimes hampers fundraising to battle street violence in South L.A.

Some critics question the types of crimes included in the federal funding scheme. Los Angeles-style violence -- chiefly street fights and gang warfare -- is far more lethal than domestic violence, sex crimes or child abuse.

Such crimes account for many nonfatal assaults. But among murders, domestic violence accounted for only 6% in Los Angeles in 2003. A recent state study concluded that, over two decades, just 5% of California murders were related to domestic violence. Only 1% were related to rape.

Faced with the possibility of further cuts, Loved Ones has tried another route: private fundraising.

But here, too, it has met difficulties. Most of its applications for private funding have been rejected. Frustrated, Robins, who is also an LAPD chaplain, took the advice she had quietly been given in the past by expert fundraisers, removing “homicide” from the name last year. She thought it would give Loved Ones a fighting chance next to mainstream causes, such as child abuse.

Homicide “made people very uncomfortable,” she said. “We would leave a message, and the person at the other end of the phone would get real quiet.”

But to some longtime supporters, the move was a sad commentary.

“Everybody wants it nice, warm and fuzzy. And if it’s not, they don’t want to deal with it,” said South L.A. activist Charlotte Austin-Jordan, a former client of Loved Ones who has lost a daughter and a son to homi- cide.

To help close the funding gap, City Councilman Martin Ludlow said he would seek new funding for the agency, which is in his district. “This is clearly a tragedy -- that an agency slipped through the cracks,” he said.

In its search for private funding, Loved Ones has not struck out completely. Kaiser Permanente has provided $5,000 and Northrop Grumman $10,000. A spokesman for Northrop said Loved Ones matched the company’s goal of supporting very small, grass-roots, urban Los Angeles groups.

But the last resort -- individual donors -- has been disappointing. To date, the largest such donor has been Christopher Darden, a prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson case now in private practice. Darden, a former Loved Ones board member, gave $10,000 to the group years ago.

Darden attributes Loved Ones’ problems in netting other donors to squeamishness. Murder “is a very morbid topic. It has a way of making people uncomfortable,” he said.

High-profile cases that highlight domestic violence such as Nicole Simpson’s murder mobilize the public, he said. “But if it’s gang-related, nobody cares about it. Nobody cares.”

Loved Ones “is such a necessary program,” he said. “It is depressing to think the community won’t support it.”