Group Adds Crime to Its Enemies List : Communities: The East Valleys Organization has launched a campaign against drugs and gang activity.

The East Valleys Organization, best-known for its efforts to clean up the San Gabriel Valley’s contaminated ground water, has launched an ambitious anti-crime campaign aimed at cleaning up the area’s gang-infested streets.

At a rally Tuesday night at Sacred Heart Church in Pomona, nearly 400 people gathered to launch the “Turn the Tide” campaign. Police chiefs from Baldwin Park, Azusa and Pomona attended, as did Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner.

“We are sick and tired of gang violence, drugs and crime,” said Jesse Martinez, secretary of Carpenters Local 309, which the East Valleys group formally inducted at the rally. “But it will not change until we are determined to change it for ourselves.”

EVO, a predominantly Catholic group that claims to represent nearly 40,000 families, mostly Latino, will continue its campaign Friday night with a police-escorted march to a crack house in one of Pomona’s most crime-plagued neighborhoods.

“We are frustrated seeing the lives of our youths wasted by violence and drugs,” said the Rev. William Easterling of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, who, at the end of Tuesday’s rally, led a candlelight prayer service for the 49 people who have been murdered in Pomona in the last 13 months.

“Turn the Tide” is part of a larger grass-roots effort by EVO and an alphabet soup of sister organizations throughout the county, which for years have agitated to bring about progressive social change.

The other participants include the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), which has its roots in East Los Angeles; the South Central Organizing Committee (SCOC), based in the South-Central part of the city, and the Valley Organized in Community Efforts (VOICE), which covers the San Fernando Valley.

The four groups collectively represent nearly 90 churches and synagogues and about 250,000 families. They are all political descendants of the movement fathered by the late Saul Alinsky, the social reformer who got his start in the 1930s rallying Chicago’s Irish slums into a power bloc and who later wrote the manifesto, “Rules for Radicals.”

The groups’ efforts will wind up at the Los Angeles Coliseum on March 31, when thousands of protesters will march through the surrounding neighborhood, in a demonstration aimed at cleaning up the streets of South-Central Los Angeles.