Winning Against Gangs

Among the many statistics compiled at the end of 1986, we noted with encouragement a small but significant number suggesting that the violence caused by youth gangs in Los Angeles can eventually be brought under control.

Spokesmen for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department report that in 1986 gang killings reached a 10-year low in unincorporated East Los Angeles, the heavily Latino community three miles east of downtown that is patrolled by sheriff’s deputies. Only four homicides in the area were found to be gang-related in 1986--a dramatic decrease from a high of 24 in 1978. Department officials attribute the improvement to anti-gang programs run by local community groups, a coordinated campaign by law-enforcement agencies to monitor gang activity, and the innovative efforts of the Community Youth Gang Services Project, a county program created five years ago specifically to reduce gang violence.

Youth Gang Services was controversial when it was launched. The gang workers it employs are often former gang members themselves. Trained in crisis-intervention techniques, they patrol their old turf and try to stop violence before it breaks out. This approach was criticized in late 1981 by many who doubted that it could work, even though a similar program had helped reduce gang violence in Philadelphia a few years earlier. Back then, everyone agreed that the toughest test for Youth Gang Services workers would be the barrios of East Los Angeles, where about 70 gangs operate--many of them so entrenched that they date back to the 1940s.

The drop in gang killings in East Los Angeles is evidence that Youth Gang Services’ approach can work, given enough time. It is also a good argument for continuing, and expanding, similar efforts that are under way in other parts of town where new gangs are growing even as the gang problem in East Los Angeles is being calmed. Among the problems that these new gangs have created is an upsurge in violence within the City of Los Angeles, where police recorded 180 gang-related homicides last year.

An area of special concern to gang specialists is South-Central Los Angeles, where several gangs that have emerged in recent years are now warring over the control of cocaine and other illegal drugs. Given the profits generated by the illicit drug trade, the new gangs could pose as formidable a challenge for Youth Gang Services and other agencies as the gangs of East Los Angeles did. But the fact that things improved in East Los Angeles is reason to think that they can improve elsewhere --with enough patience and community support.