Bridging the GAPP : Gang Awareness and Prevention Program Sees Positive Results

Tired of rousting a frequently truant 13-year-old boy from his bed to get him to class at Maclay Junior High School in Pacoima, probation officer Rick Saenz finally gave the youth an ultimatum:

The next time the boy failed to show up for school, Saenz warned, he would drive him and his mother to school and embarrass the boy by having her sit beside him through all of his classes.

The boy slept in and Saenz kept his word, invoking the authority the mother signed over to get her son into an innovative county program aimed at keeping youths from joining gangs.

For the time being, the boy appears to have gotten the point, said Saenz, one of 30 probation officers assigned to the year-old Gang Awareness and Prevention Program.

The point was that Saenz and his colleagues in the $2-million program will go to great lengths to deter youths who have been in minor scrapes from getting into more serious trouble.

The probation officers spend their time in the youths’ schools, neighborhoods and homes. They act as social workers, counselors, teachers, parents, friends, authority figures, police officers and more, all at once.

“We’re not in there just counseling the kids about drugs and gangs,” said John Poplawski, who heads the East San Fernando Valley office of the program. “What we’re ending up doing is some basic parenting kinds of things. Kids need to go to a doctor. They need somebody to come over and get them up in the morning to go to school. A lot of it is just paying basic attention to these kids.”

Such involvement is possible because GAPP officers have caseloads of about 30 to 35 instead of the 100 to 150 cases commonly supervised by other juvenile probation officers. Experts say the program is valuable because early intervention--children in the program are usually between 10 and 14--raises the odds of keeping youths from lives of crime.

“It’s reasonable, practical and it makes an enormous amount of criminal justice sense,” said Michael Agopian, a professor of criminal justice at Cal State Long Beach.

“The best time to work with children who have problems is as soon as possible,” he said. “(Younger children) are not solidified in gangs, they’re not carrying weapons and not breaking into cars and houses.”

The teen-agers who probation officers usually work with are caught up with “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” Poplawski said. But those targeted by GAPP are “still playing with toys.”

The program’s emphasis on prevention is receiving statewide attention, Agopian said. The program now has offices in North Hollywood, Long Beach, the Centinela-Firestone area of South-Central Los Angeles and in the Rio Hondo Court Building in the San Gabriel Valley. An office in East Los Angeles focuses on Asian gangs throughout the county.

School and city officials in Compton, West Covina, Norwalk, Downey and the Antelope Valley have asked the county to expand the program into their areas.

There are no firm statistics on the success rate of the program. But Bert Davila, supervisor of the San Gabriel Valley office, estimated that 20% of the youths there are arrested while in the program, a “considerably lower” rate than those outside the program.

The probation officers found that youths begin identifying with gangs and getting involved with drugs early. Teachers at a Pacoima elementary school discovered a misbehaving fifth-grader was carrying $200.

Laura Pogoler, who also works in the program in Pacoima, said that a kindergarten student threatened to unleash Pacoima’s Project Boyz gang on his teacher when she disciplined him. And Saenz said that one mother told him that her 5-year-old son was already flashing gang hand signals and wanting to wear gang clothes.

Anna Alvarez, an administrator at the Van Nuys-Pierce Park Apartments, one of two housing projects where GAPP officers are active in the East San Fernando Valley, said parents see the program as a source of support.

“I have a lot of parents who are beginning to see the signs of their kids getting involved in drug and gang activity and they’re looking for help,” Alvarez said.

She cited the case of a 10-year-old boy arrested for car theft. The boy’s 13-year-old sister had run away from home and he was already working as a drug runner. The boy’s parents agreed to put him under the supervision of the probation officers and agreed to attend family counseling.

Now, Alvarez said, the youth plays football after school instead of hanging out. “The little boy is just completely different,” she said. “He has direction.”

Pogoler described the case of a brother and sister who played hooky from San Fernando Junior High School all last year. The Attendance Review Board at the school referred the pair to the program, and Pogoler got involved.

Pogoler signed them up for summer school, took them on field trips and involved them in a YWCA activity program in Van Nuys that teaches young people responsibility. She drove them from San Fernando to the YWCA each morning and picked them up each afternoon because they had no other means of transportation. “This program allows you the time to do that,” she said.

Now the brother and sister are attending school regularly and have brought their grades up. “We’ve invested a lot of time in them. They’re real positive kids,” she said.