Catholic Churches Pledge Increased Push to Fight Gangs

LONG BEACH — In an expanding community effort to slow youth-gang crime, priests at four inner-city Roman Catholic churches pledged Tuesday to make the welfare of wayward youngsters a top parish priority.

Swamped by day-to-day responsibilities and unsure of what to do to recapture youngsters lost to gangs, local parishes have often done too little to combat gang membership now estimated at 2,725 in Long Beach, priests said this week.

One parish simply stopped holding youth dances because it feared gang violence, said Los Angeles Southern Region Bishop Carl Fisher, a former inner-city priest who moved to Lakewood from the Baltimore ghetto 3 1/2 months ago.

‘Do Positive Things’

“Good people have not been doing very much, and it’s time for us to go in and do the positive things that are beneficial to our young people,” Fisher said after a meeting at St. Anthony Church with priests from the four Long Beach parishes most affected by gangs.

During that meeting, the bishop said, the priests agreed to open their doors to new youth activities, set up anti-gang committees and work both among themselves and with others in the community as a broad network to fight gangs is formed in coming months.

While the greatest commitment will come from the poorer inner-city parishes--St Anthony, St. Lucy, St. Matthew and Holy Innocents--the financial costs of expanded youth programs will be shared by the area’s richer churches, Fisher said.

“If, for example, the youth group at St. Lucy needs to take a trip, buy T-shirts, put on a dance or start a tutorial program . . . then I’ll go door to door and beg for some of the resources. And I’m sure the parishes won’t turn down their bishop,” said Fisher, whose region includes 46 cities in the South Bay, Long Beach and Southeast areas.

The priests’ commitment comes during a week of meetings aimed at ensuring that the city’s most recent anti-gang effort does not end when a report is given to the City Council in three weeks.

‘We Want Some Action’

“We want some action to follow,” said Jerome Torres, city liaison to a gangs and drugs task force due to complete nine months of work by adopting recommendations on July 29. “The community must buy into this.”

What Torres and his colleagues have in mind is creation of a single independent agency through which youngsters identified by police, schools, churches and the courts as potential hard-core gang members can be routed to agencies and private businesses that provide jobs, education and other assistance.

The central agency would track the progress of a youngster, give parents a place to call for help and let “at risk” youths know that they must be accountable for their actions.

“And they’ll know there are alternatives to hanging out on a street corner,” Torres said.

The task force is modeling its recommendations after a seven-year-old private San Fernando Valley project that now helps about 3,000 troubled youngsters a year and whose structure is being adopted by cities and counties throughout the state.

Success Story

The initial 60 cooperating agencies and businesses has increased to about 1,500, a spokeswoman for the Van Nuys-based Juvenile Justice Connection Project said.

Also being studied is a more narrowly focused East Los Angeles anti-gang program that police agencies say has helped cut killings in that Latino neighborhood from 24 in 1978 to four last year--even as gang murders citywide were increasing.

Police say the Catholic church in that area played a key role in coordinating the efforts of families, schools and the criminal justice system.

Indeed, Torres said that perhaps the most significant commitment by Fisher Tuesday was to bring Brother Modesto Leon, a primary architect of the East Los Angeles program, to Long Beach to help build a similar structure here.

“Churches are a place to begin,” Leon said in an interview. “Even though these kids are not attending, they all belong to a church. The roots are there.

‘Everybody Knows Everybody’

“Some churches use neighborhood watches,” he added. “I get calls all the time, ‘They say this kid is doing this and this kid is doing that.’ Everybody knows everybody. And that’s the way it used to be in the old days before we put bars on our windows and let our neighbors take care of themselves.”

The San Fernando Valley and East Los Angeles projects also have shown that federal, state and local grants are more readily available to agencies that work together rather than competing to provide similar services, Torres said.

To that end, Torres--who says he is a former gang member--pressed the task force’s agenda this week. On Tuesday, he secured a commitment of cooperation from the county-wide director of the United Way’s anti-gang programs, attended the priests’ meeting and met with two minority-community representatives who talked about how their organizations might fit into a larger service network.

On Wednesday, Torres met with Karma Leeds, the only probation officer in Long Beach who specializes in hard-core gang members. And today, task force members have scheduled a meeting with local United Way agencies and representatives of the school district and the city Department of Parks and Recreation.

A meeting with the top administrative judges in the Long Beach superior and municipal courts is being scheduled for later this month, Torres said.

Heightened Awareness

This push for a coordinated attack on gang crime is part of what a number of local officials say is a heightened awareness during the last two years that Long Beach has a gang problem.

“For a long time the response was, ‘We don’t have gangs here,’ but recently the attitude has been great,” said Leeds, who has worked here for six years.

This spring the Long Beach Unified School District won a $175,000 state grant to teach elementary school children to stay away from gangs and the Police Department received a $199,000 state grant to expand its three-person anti-gang unit.

Police officers and community leaders say gang activity in Long Beach has increased substantially during the last several years as gangs have become more involved in drug sales.

Gang-related homicides accounted for one-fourth of all city murders in 1985 and 1986. Gang homicides jumped from four in 1984 to 16 in 1985 and 15 last year.

22 Active Gangs

Police say Long Beach has 22 active gangs with some 2,725 members who live mostly in central, western and northern Long Beach. About 53% of the gang members are Latino, 32% are black, 11% Asian and 4% white, according to the task force.

Scores of gang members are arrested each year for strong-arm robberies, assaults and burglaries. However, police officers say that serious offenses are committed by only about 5% of all gang members.

The task force wants to concentrate on the majority of gang members who are not hardened criminals, said Long Beach Municipal Judge Elvira Austin.

Austin, a task force member, is spearheading the effort to gain cooperation of local courts. The task force wants the courts to sentence youthful first- and second-time criminal offenders to work and tutorial programs, Austin said.

Now, the youths--who are most often prosecuted for possession of drugs--are frequently sentenced to six to 12 hours of classes about the danger of drugs.

‘No One Cares’

“Those youngsters do not get any help to get a job or learn anything,” Austin said. “No one cares that this kid is a dropout and has no job skills and does not know how to go for a job interview. These youngsters are given no reason not to do it again.”

Austin and two local juvenile court judges have referred some first-time offenders to a jobs, tutorial and counseling program at the the anti-poverty Long Beach Community Services Corp. But that program is far too small to meet the need, Austin said.

By the time the task force’s report goes to the City Council next month, it hopes to have a roster of participating organizations and businesses that numbers in the hundreds, Torres said.

Council members--particularly Ray Grabinski--have said that youth crime is a priority that deserves the council’s strongest support.

Councilman Evan Anderson Braude, who as co-chairman of the county bar association’s Juvenile Justice Committee, has tracked the the San Fernando Valley project, said a model of it “seems like the perfect vehicle” for attacking youth crime here.

Already, the task force has its successes. Father Al Scott of St. Anthony Church said local priests for the most part have been aware of gang problems but so busy with other demands that they did not respond.

“You don’t see gang kids on your church steps in the morning. They’re the invisible people,” Scott said. “But this task force is giving us important tools and stirring us to do something.”