Change in Focus Renews Anti-Gang Group

A month ago, Steve Valdivia, director of Community Youth Gang Services, Los Angeles’ largest civilian gang prevention program, had his head handed to him by several members of the Los Angeles City Council. They chewed him out in public over an alleged $600,000 budget overrun and then ordered an independent review of the program’s effectiveness.

The flap could not have come at a worse time. It rekindled memories that the organization has been struggling to escape--only recently with any success--since its creation in 1981.

During the last two years, Valdivia has managed to win a significant amount of respectability for Community Youth Gang Services, which has long been the target of skepticism and criticism. He has done it by dramatically broadening the program’s objectives and downplaying its original purpose: hitting the streets to cool down potentially deadly squabbles between members of rival gangs.

No longer is the group a collection of street workers, many of them ex-gang members, who cruise dangerous neighborhoods, attempting to establish empathic relationships with young outlaws.

Now the 75-member staff consists largely of better-educated employees who spend their time in less perilous surroundings, teaching Say-No-to-Gang classes in elementary schools, organizing community demonstrations outside rock houses and circulating flyers encouraging inner-city residents to “reclaim” their parks.

The byword at the agency used to be “intervention”--stepping into gang disputes that might spill into violence in a few hours. Today it is “prevention”--community programs that might pay off in a few years, or perhaps a decade.

Two years ago the group’s crisis-intervention workers cruised the streets until 11 p.m. These days they are off the streets within an hour after nightfall. Life is simply too dangerous and too unpredictable.

“Frankly, I just don’t want them out there,” Valdivia said.

The intent of restructuring the program is to treat gangs as “a disease--the only disease that hasn’t been dealt with on a preventive basis,” he said.

Because of this shift--and despite the fact that gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County have increased 113% in the last four years--Community Youth Gang Services today enjoys a level of popularity and bureaucratic support that it was never able to achieve as long as it was committed primarily to working directly with gang members.

As a program committed to intervention, it was plagued by suggestions from law enforcement spokesmen and many politicians that it was too sympathetic to the unsavory young men it sought to counsel.

As a result, for many years, its funding from the county Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council was stuck at about $2 million a year, causing staffing to gradually drop nearly 40%.

Rises to $3 Million

However, in the budget year that began this month, the joint city-county contribution to Community Youth Gang Services will rise 50%, to $3 million, specifically to help it expand its nonintervention programs.

Nationally, the organization continues to enjoy the image of an influential street-level agency. Dozens of reporters have come to Los Angeles in the last year to profile the region as the nation’s gang-murder capital, and virtually all of them--desperate for a way to talk to gang members--have made Community Youth Gang Services’ East Los Angeles headquarters their first stop. The group’s own brochure boasts: “We have the one thing it takes to make an impression on gangs--their respect.”

However, interviews with dozens of gang members by The Times last year indicated little respect--and in many cases outright contempt--for the agency. Gang members routinely claim that Community Youth Gang Services workers feed information about rival gangs to police, an allegation the group denies.

Community Youth Gang Services has never had a strong presence in the black neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, where the worst spasms of gang violence occur, according to law enforcement specialists and nonprofit groups that work with young people.

Part of the problem is that the agency--which has never had a black administrator and was created at a time when violence by Latino gangs drew more publicity than black gangs--has long been criticized by black nonprofit groups as being more sensitive to Latino neighborhoods than black ones.

Markedly Distrustful

But another part of the problem is beyond the organization’s control. Today’s black gangs are markedly more distrustful of any outside presence--civil or police--than their Latino counterparts. The introduction of rock cocaine into Los Angeles in the last five years and the involvement of many black gang members in sales created a chain reaction in which more money became available for more dangerous weapons and the destructive social influence of crack created a more unstable society.

While Community Youth Gang Services recently threw most of its manpower into South Los Angeles, only 16 of the 48 staff members assigned there do gang intervention work. The rest work in schools, parks, job development and community organizing.

The pull away from the streets reflects a consensus that has been building throughout the decade among gang-prevention specialists: New generations of gang members are so hardened and so resistant to counseling that they are, in many cases, beyond the influence of traditional street workers. With funds limited at all levels of government, this thinking goes, it makes more sense to spend money educating younger children and their parents about the evils of gangs.

“You have to do it (intervention), but it’s not a priority anymore,” said Schuyler Sprowles, a former aide to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner who recently became a Community Youth Gang Services consultant and is coordinating a drive to raise $1 million from private donors to finance more CYGS anti-gang classes in public schools. “It’s a matter of getting the most bang for your bucks.”

As his staff shrunk progressively over the years, Valdivia said, it became impossible for his group to claim it was having an impact on the gang problem.

New ‘Target Areas’

So in an effort to prove the program could make a dent, Valdivia last February put his most trusted crisis-intervention workers into four new “target areas,” consisting of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th and Southeast Divisions and the county Sheriff’s Department’s Lennox and Lynwood stations.

He cut back or eliminated many operations in other parts of the county and formed teams in each target area. Each team had a separate specialty: removing gang graffiti, community organizing, working at job referrals or teaching one-hour-a-day, 15-week anti-gang classes at local schools.

A number of intervention workers, members of what Valdivia calls “the old CYGS,” were fired.

The changes represent “a wiser deployment of staff on Steve’s part,” said Mike Duran, head of the county Probation Department’s gang unit. “He has been able to sift out a whole lot of staff that couldn’t do the job and has brought in new staff that is willing to work and make things happen.”

Valdivia was named director of Community Youth Gang Services in 1983, leaving an East Los Angeles community-services program to take the job. He benefited immediately from the fact that countywide gang deaths had already begun dropping, but by 1984 that pattern was reversed.

In other agencies that work with CYGS, Valdivia has a reputation for defensiveness, though few question his sincerity.

“The problem he’s had is that he has to keep changing his program to appease the politicians because they make decisions on how much to fund him every year,” said the director of another government-funded anti-gang program, speaking on the condition he not be identified. “He has to keep justifying his existence. The bad thing about preventive programs is that you can’t gauge prevention. That sort of program shouldn’t be held (political) hostage.”

In addition to the 50% increase in his 1989-90 budget, Valdivia four weeks ago persuaded the City Council to approve an extra $600,000 in interim funding, but only after receiving a tongue-lashing for what several council members characterized as an unauthorized expansion of services.

Confusing Confrontation

It was a confusing confrontation that illustrated the emotional politics of Los Angeles’ frustrating and foundering war against gang violence.

Valdivia sought the interim increase last March to restore services to areas that had been cut in the Southside buildup, such as the San Fernando Valley and East Los Angeles. The extra money also was to finance replacement of the program’s aging car fleet.

Valdivia asked his closest City Council ally, Councilman Richard Alatorre, to introduce a motion providing the additional financing. But when the council vote was delayed, Valdivia decided to take a calculated risk. Knowing he was going to receive a sizable increase in his regular budget, effective Oct. 1, he hired additional personnel during the spring, recognizing he would have to terminate about 18 of them temporarily if formal council approval of the interim funds was denied.

When the full council finally voted on the interim increase on June 16, there was outrage at what Valdivia had done, even though two high-ranking officials of the LAPD testified in support of extra money for CYGS. The council was particularly irked because it has been trying to exercise more control over bureaucrats deemed to be acting too independently.

To Councilman Joel Wachs, Valdivia had committed “probably as bad a management as I have ever heard of.” To a sympathetic City Council aide, he had done “the gutsiest thing anyone’s done in years.”

Community Youth Gang Services has long been on the hot seat because it is a bureaucratic rarity. Seldom have Los Angeles’ government agencies been willing to spend so much money on anything other than law enforcement to combat gangs. City and county officials have traditionally resisted calls for greater preventive spending. The theory that there is a correlation between rising gang crime and deep cuts made in social programs since passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 has not been a popular one among local politicians.

The program was created in desperation in 1981 by the supervisors after annual gang-related homicides in the county passed 350. The program was modeled after Philadelphia’s crisis-intervention program.

Personnel problems abounded. The first two directors were fired or quit within two years. Several staff members were arrested on robbery or drug charges.

Gang members accused CYGS workers of being little more than law enforcement snitches. Leaders of some South Los Angeles nonprofit organizations--often jealous that the group was receiving the lion’s share of local gang violence-prevention funds--belittled the program as an ineffective sham that had insufficient black representation.