‘Stuck on stupid’

There’s a point in Los Angeles’ gang violence crisis at which diagnosis and prescription become simply another symptom of the disease. At issue is not just the devastation suffered by innocent residents shot in turf wars, or young people enticed or threatened by or victimized by gangs. The question is whether the city has a government capable of doing anything about its most serious problems. There is plenty of troubling evidence that it does not.

The current squabble between City Councilman Tony Cardenas and City Controller Laura Chick over how to improve the city’s anti-gang programs follows a long-running -- and enervating -- City Hall pattern. Nearly a decade ago, a City Council committee ground to a halt over LA Bridges, the city’s primary gang prevention program. Council members deadlocked not over the program itself but how to evaluate it, then how to evaluate the would-be evaluators. Chick’s predecessor, Rick Tuttle, concluded that the program was fatally flawed and should be scrapped. But the council, many of whose members received campaign contributions from LA Bridges contractors, protected the ineffective status quo. LA Bridges is still with us.

In the words of Connie Rice -- who presented a report on the city’s gang problem more than a year ago -- Los Angeles remains “stuck on stupid.” But when lives are being lost, “stupid” is putting it nicely.

Chick is correct to criticize City Hall’s haphazard management and careless oversight of gang programs, but there is nothing in her recent report that the controller didn’t already know from years of auditing city functions and, before that, overseeing the City Council’s public safety efforts. Contracting, patronage and politics take precedence over service.

Cardenas may have been right to spend some time parsing city programs, to understand just how they work before arriving at an organizational solution. But his promised several months of hearings have gone on for more than a year, and he is seeking even more time. Now he has slated, for Friday, a hearing on Chick’s report. That hearing will be a crossroads for the city.

One path is an endless loop -- the same circle the city has been following since the early 1990s. That path promises delay, redefinitions of the problem and refinements of the academic methods used to study it. Almost certainly, it leads as well to a continued loss of lives.

The other path is harder. It leads to a complete upending of City Hall so that an agency -- like the perpetually struggling Community Development Department -- is no longer the basic unit of government service. City programs must be more nimble, more flexible, undergo more probing evaluation and be sunsetted when their usefulness is at an end.

Voters elect a mayor to lead the city, and it is the mayor who must take responsibility for the city’s anti-gang programs. There are risks in such a move -- the mayor’s office is more political and at least as subject to patronage concerns as the council. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa already has the power to wrest control of city departments and make them function better; his record so far is mixed. And he did himself no credit last year when he tried to re- characterize existing city programs for youth as part of his anti-gang effort.

But Villaraigosa got the city on the right track in his appointment of gang “czar” Jeff Carr. He is working with Rice, Chick, Cardenas and a host of experts, not just to craft another report but to evaluate prevention programs, train intervention workers to prevent violent flare-ups and coordinate those efforts with police. Some in the City Council fret over whether Chick would have the power to audit programs in the mayor’s office. The concern is misplaced. Chick has the power and the pulpit to force Villaraigosa into opening his office to scrutiny.