The Gangs

Babies are not born Bloods or Crips, but gang membership is becoming a sorry birthright in some desperately poor black sections of South-Central Los Angeles. The deadly bondings are guided by circumstance, neighborhood and dead-end futures. Government, starting with Mayor Tom Bradley and the Los Angeles City Council, must intervene, and not just with extra money for police sweeps and more cops.

Forty thousand teen-agers and young adults belong to gangs, according to police estimates, ranging in size from dozens to hundreds of members. Major rivals engage in a deadly cycle of revenge. Turf wars break out between separate gang sets that pledge allegiance to the same color. They kill each other. They also kill children on their way to school, mothers in their homes, fathers returning from work and anyone who gets in the way of a drive-by shooting.

The violence must be stopped; the question is how. The mayor can advance the debate at his gang- and drug-prevention conference on Monday. He can challenge the city’s best minds to determine how to discourage youngsters from joining gangs and to encourage members to get out. He can twist the arms of business leaders to provide thousands of jobs and substantial corporate underwritings for new programs. He can push religious leaders to make moral appeals, become peace-makers and open their buildings for adult literacy classes and the like. He can lead an urgent and sustained response.

Something has to work. Gang violence subsided dramatically in Philadelphia 15 years ago after police targeted gangs, prosecutors made convictions a priority, judges imposed harsher sentences, youth workers mediated on the street and courageous mothers confronted their youngsters at battle scenes.

Gang homicides have been cut by half in Chicago since 1985, when the late Mayor Harold Washington created the Chicago Intervention Network. Community workers built close relationships with gang leaders, worked with police to cool off tense areas, and used parents to patrol safety corridors to and from schools. The network also concentrates on alternative schooling, job training, counseling and recreation for gang members.

Similar law-enforcement strategies are in place in Los Angeles, where gangs are much larger, much better armed and more deeply entrenched in the drug trade. The Community Youth Gang Services also uses similar intervention strategies. But it takes strong leadership to persuade frightened mothers to stand up to youngsters armed with sophisticated weapons and to persuade teenagers who have no stake in the future to resist the thick gold chains and the hundred-dollar bills, the sense of family or the protection. They must know that there is some way out other than in a coffin.

For them the choice is to live or die. That is how the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it at the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts last week. He hugged giggling children and autographed their homework: “Push for Excellence! Keep Hope Alive!” He talked to mothers who want government to stop the crack and PCP from flooding their neighborhood. They want drug-treatment programs for sons, daughters, friends and neighbors. They want day care and after-school supervision so that they can go back to school, into training or to work. They need a way out, too.

Jackson met with gang members who mourned dead brothers and friends under the basketball nets in the gymnasium. They did not defend the violence or drug-dealing, but they complained about a dearth of jobs, of training, of recreation. They wanted more options. Jackson took their message to the mayor.

It is up to Bradley to make the city’s commitment to the social aspects of the gang crisis match the strengthened law-enforcement response. It is up to federal, state and county officials to respond in kind. Business leaders, community activists, parents--everyone who wants to live in peace in a vibrant city--must also contribute to alternatives that divert innocent children and reclaim troubled men. Gang affiliation must not become a bloody and crippling birthmark.