TV REVIEW : Parents Battle for Their ‘Streets’

“Taking Back the Streets,” airing at 7:30 tonight on KCET Channel 28, is heavy with allusions to war, continually speaking of the battlefield, armies, recruiting soldiers.

This is not another PBS documentary on warfare, but the metaphors are nonetheless accurate, for the show’s focus is on a group called Concerned Parents, fighting the battle of their lives against gangs in their communities.

Founded in 1978 in response to the “cholo wars” on the Eastside of Los Angeles--there were 24 gang murders that year in the Monte Villa housing project where Concerned Parents began--the group linked mothers of children in different gangs for the first time. They formed an underground network--keeping tabs on their children, breaking up the rhythm of the gang kids’ life on the street. Ten years later, Monte Villa had zero gang-related deaths--no mean feat in Los Angeles’ worst year of gang warfare.

Writer-producer Martin Burns devotes most of “Taking Back the Streets” to a new group of concerned parents, who were given a small grant by the state to set up a program in South-Central Los Angeles. Particularly effective are a segment on the group meeting with--and counseling--gang members at a California Youth Authority facility and a segment that follows a young mother, Joyce Patrick, as she searches for her son, Tyrone, a teen-ager who ran away to live on the streets with his gang mates.

Part of the strength of Concerned Parents--and the documentary--is that it shows parents a way out, a way of fighting back.

“Once one mother gets herself strengthened, then she can help another mother,” says Eartha Vernon, a member of the South-Central group. “We’re gonna have to recruit . . . until we get enough mothers that we’re ready to walk the whole world if necessary.”