Skepticism Greets New Gang Program

A new, $1-million federal program will fight gangs and drugs in the harbor area by creating “an integrated community system,” says Robert Polakow, the county employee who will oversee it.

A few Lakers tickets might help more, says gang worker John Northmore.

Tickets to sports events are one of the incentives that Northmore, a counselor with the Harbor City Teen Post, uses to keep the sometimes unruly members of the Harbor City Peewee Gang off the streets and out of trouble.

Northmore says he has seen plenty of youth programs come and go in the more than 20 years since he came to Harbor City during the heyday of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Crime, drugs and gangs have remained.

His skepticism is typical of local social workers’ responses to the Community Reclamation Project, designed to unite a wide range of community organizations to combat drug abuse and gangs in Wilmington, Harbor City, Lomita and Carson.

Funds for 18 Months

The project has enough money from the U.S. Justice and Human Services departments to operate in the four communities for 18 months. Newly appointed Director Natalie Salazar said she hopes to open an office in Wilmington for her 11-member staff sometime this month.

Northmore and other veterans of social service agencies said they will support the project but that the newcomers will have to earn respect in a community already served by half a dozen anti-gang programs and several anti-drug abuse projects.

“We will be happy to listen to them and see what they have to say,” said Howard Uller, director of Toberman Settlement House in San Pedro. “But my first reaction is that we have a lot of experience in really working with gangs. My hunch is that justice-system bureaucrats are not going to make much difference in the community gang scene.”

The five counselors at Toberman work with gang members in San Pedro and Harbor City.

“But everything is tempered with hope,” Uller said. “I hope something great happens. Our approach will be to help in any way that we can.”

Polakow, an administrator in the Los Angeles County Probation Department, said the Community Reclamation Project is based on university research findings that gang and drug programs are often hampered by lack of coordination between the schools, churches, law-enforcement offices, social agencies and other community groups that sponsor them.

Such lack of cooperation is not seen as a particular problem in the harbor area, Polakow said. The reason Lomita, Harbor City, Wilmington and Carson were chosen, he said, is that they have strong community identities and a mix of ethnic groups and are not already overrun with social programs.

Those characteristics make the area a good scientific model for studying how the program would work in other parts of the country, Polakow said.

Salazar said the Reclamation Project will be the first of its kind. Instead of working directly with gang members and drug abusers, it will try to help the four communities become better organized against drugs and gangs. Salazar said the project will get teachers, religious leaders, social workers and businessmen to plan together to fight those problems.

When the project concludes in mid-1990, Salazar said, it will leave behind a number of committees to work on the problems.

“I don’t know,” said Toberman’s Uller. “Should there be more people to work directly with gangs, or should there be more of these high-level ‘enablers’? We’ll have to see.”

Several local social workers pictured the new program as being run by out-of-town bureaucrats invading an area they do not know.

Salazar, 31, has worked in Sacramento for two years on the staff of the California Council on Criminal Justice, a 37-member committee that advises the governor and the Legislature on crime.

This week a local newspaper incorrectly reported that Salazar will make $90,000 a year. Actually, her salary will be $60,000 with no benefits, but that still raises eyebrows among social service workers.

“That’s an unheard-of salary in this field,” said the director of a drug abuse program, who requested anonymity. “You are looking at people who are making $25,000 or $30,000 a year who are running these (local) programs.”

A budget of $450,000 has been approved to hire and pay 11 other employees.

Agencies OKd Salary

Polakow said Salazar’s salary is warranted, given the size of her staff and the importance of the job. He said Salazar’s salary was approved not only by the county officials who drew up the proposal but by the two federal agencies that approved the grant.

Some social workers said they are suspicious that project officials will be concerned more about research than about results.

“It’s no longer important to have a good program,” Northmore said. “It’s important to report a good program. That seems to be the primary concern--writing a good report.”

But other social workers said their colleagues’ doubts might be motivated by jealousy or fear that the federal project will make their own programs expendable.

“In conversations that I have had, everybody is just saying that (Salazar) is going to come down and put you out of your job,” said Ernie Paculba, coordinator of the Harbor area’s Gang Alternative Program, a nonprofit agency. “Or they say, ‘Doesn’t it make you feel bad that she gets all this money?’ ”

No Hard Feelings

Paculba said such fears are unwarranted and that he has no hard feelings, even though Salazar was chosen over him and 25 other applicants for the directorship.

The project “makes me feel good,” Paculba said. “There are so many things that we can do. I just hope she has time to listen to some of my harebrained schemes.”

But others, said the anonymous drug program director, have not been so understanding.

“I honestly believe that it is some kind of professional fear,” he said. “ ‘Are they going to take funding away from us, or are we going to lose our jobs?’ People are very set in their ways. There is a real turf battle out here.”

Polakow said the federal project is not in competition with local groups and receives money from federal funds that could not have been distributed elsewhere in the community.

Salazar also sought to reassure Harbor area social workers.

“The project will not reinvent the wheel,” she said, “but reinforce the people who are already there and maybe don’t have the resources. I want to see that the local programs that are doing a good job get support.”