‘I Dream They Are Going to...

Lucinda Green seems like a made-to-order little girl. A bubbly 8-year-old, she wears her hair in sprouts of brightly ribboned braids and sports a pink sweat shirt emblazoned with a wide-eyed pussycat.

As a third-grader at 97th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles, she likes to jump rope and read stories about a high-flying squirrel and a little boy who discovers the world hand-in-hand with his grandfather.

But when she is asked about gang violence, the illusion of childhood innocence bursts as abruptly as a spray of bullets. Her small legs paddle the air from the height of an adult-sized chair and her braids bob chaotically as she recounts, incident after incident, the terrors that are common to her life.

“I’m afraid that someone will snatch me,” she says. “So when I hear something I run as fast as I can. Like today (walking to school) I heard something and I dropped my book, and when I got to the corner I looked around and I see nobody. So I ran back and got my book.

“Then there was a car coming, so I ran and hid behind that other car. The car went by. It was a gang-banger. He had a red rag on his window, so I thought he was going to shoot.”

With a gulp of air, she races on: “Friday something strange happened. Me and my brothers, we were going to the store and this man said do we want to smoke. He had his pants all sagging down and a hair band on his head. Me and my brothers we ran. I almost fell. I was real scared.”

But it was the gunfire on New Year’s Eve that frightened her the most: “I was so scared. It sounded like somebody was at our door. It was going boruge! boruge! boruge! I went in my grandfather’s room and I asked him can I sleep in his room.

“Gunshots were just popping off. I didn’t even get no sleep that night. I just stayed in the house the next day. I thought it was still going to be some shooting.”

For psychologists, social workers and educators, Lucinda’s stories compose a familiar litany of a young child’s experiences on Los Angeles’ inner-city streets. Fueled by traffic in crack cocaine, gang violence has transformed routinely unsafe neighborhoods into urban war zones. In South-Central and East Los Angeles, where 134,100 children attend public elementary schools, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reported more than 4,000 gang-related crimes and 156 homicides during 1989.

For many children in these violence-riddled neighborhoods, outings to parks, playgrounds, libraries and movies are risky and rare, and even walking to school can be dangerous. They learn to hit the ground at the sound of gunfire and which gangs wear which colors. Firearms and knives, rendered with uncanny accuracy, turn up in their classroom drawings, and during their elementary-school years many children witness bloodshed.

A patchwork of school, community and law-enforcement programs teach children defense strategies against gangs and drugs and help them develop self-esteem, but officials say current funding and personnel do not come close to addressing the problem. They also point out that responsibility for the youngsters’ safety ultimately lies with their parents--a task families are not always able to fulfill.

Allowed to slip through the system’s cracks, many inner-city children are left largely to learn survival skills on their own. With insufficient protection and guidance, a generation of inner-city youngsters are growing into adolescents who are street-wise, hardened and, in some cases, may be psychologically disabled.

“It’s like living in Vietnam in the ‘60s,” psychologist Sandra Cox says of their environment. A staff member of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s School Mental Health Center clinic in South-Central Los Angeles, she adds, “The children realize this is a battle zone.”

At 102nd Street School, the nurse, Gladys Cormier, tells of children who sleep fully dressed on bare floors because they are afraid to go upstairs to bed. In shooting sprees, the children know, bullets are fired into the air, making their bedrooms places of danger.

“It’s like they’re not little kids anymore,” she says. “I cry every day for them.”

At the Westminster Neighborhood Assn., a community center in Watts that operates the Creative Child Project to help troubled children after school, 10-year-old Luis Hernandez next takes the seat to talk about his daily life. Luis (whose name, like those of the other children, has been changed to protect his privacy) is a quiet fifth-grader at 102nd Street School who sucks his thumb and answers questions with a “yeah” or “unh-uh.”

Asked about the violence that troubles him, however, he becomes talkative and animated. While standing in front of his house early one evening, waiting for his mother to open the door, he watched gang members drive up, jump out of their car, attack and shoot an elderly man.

On a Saturday, as Luis was leaving his home to play football, a group of young men jumped another group in front of his house, robbed them and ran away through the neighbors’ yards.

“I just went back in. I went back to sleep.” But even sleep is not a certain escape from violence. “I dream they are trying to go after me and kill me,” Luis says.

According to Sharon Robinson, who has worked as a supervisor and an educational psychologist in the L.A. school district, young children cope with the presence of violence by taking one of two defensive routes: They emulate aggressive gang behavior or they retreat from it, often refusing to go out to play or go to school.

In both cases, the motivation is fear--fear of gangs, of their classmates, even of police.

“You see it if you ask them to do a drawing,” says Robinson. “They might do a drawing of a policeman putting a gun to a gang member’s head.”

In adolescence, perceptions of society become further confused. “Gang members are big shots, and the children want that identity,” says Robinson. But, she stresses, “many of them act like they belong to gangs because they think it’s cool and tough, when really they have none of this violent behavior in them.”

Dr. Quinton James, a child psychiatrist with the School Mental Health Center and with the Centinela Child Guidance Clinic, sees many signs of stress, ranging from anxiety-induced headaches and stomachaches to a change in goals and misperceptions of reality.

“They get to the point where they tend to distort the environment and say everything is fine when it’s not,” he says of his patients, who are as young as 5 years old. “But if the neighborhood is very unsafe, you’ve got to somehow rationalize to the point that you feel it’s safe to go out there.”

When James asks the youngsters what they imagine themselves doing when they are 18 years old, “They say, ‘I don’t think about it.’ They don’t give thought to their future.” With no sense of direction, he says, they are susceptible to psychiatric illnesses and poor adjustment to society, as well as to drug-addiction, alcoholism and a life of crime.

When Horatio Prichard was in the third grade, Westminster personnel say he was “a living terror,” a bellicose child who bullied his classmates. “I used to fight a lot,” the 10-year-old says. On the playground at Compton Avenue School in South-Central Los Angeles, he says, “It’s hard not to.

“They call your mother names. They say she uses the pipe. They just be waiting to start you fighting.” Encircled by watching classmates, Horatio declares, “You can’t get out.”

Through Westminster and programs in his school, he has learned to walk away from the rough playground crowd, but the real test comes out on the streets.

“They run home and get their big brothers,” he says of his classmates, explaining that to reach his house he must cut through a dangerous housing project. “That’s when they be trying to jump you.”

On Fridays when he does not go to Westminster after school, Horatio takes his 7-year-old brother in tow and confronts a nightmarishly long walkway in the project that for him is “like an alley. I don’t walk, I run,” he says. “I feel scared.”

To help the children who live in gang-infested areas, schools, police and community groups have developed programs that deal with self-esteem, child abuse, drugs and gangs.

Youngsters are in danger from gang recruiting as early as the third grade, says V.G. McGuinses, who heads a state-funded anti-gang project, SEY YES (Save Every Youngster/Youth Enterprise Society). Gangs need young children as hit men, he explains. They scrawl their names on building walls preceded by li for little, which usually indicates they are in elementary school.

McGuinses shows the children how to avoid gang overtures by projecting a neutral attitude. When a gang member accosts a child with “What’s up, cuz,” he warns, “You can’t say it’s none of your business. If you can’t control your temper you’ll have a short life.”

Children should not act tough. “If you get a kid out there who wants to be tough and bad, they’ll say, ‘Come on and join the gang, punk. Show us how bad you really are.’ ”

McGuinses’ most effective tactic to dissuade young children from joining gangs is to tell them their mothers and sisters could become victims of violence.

“Kids need to understand that gangs aren’t just some happy, big deal,” he says, emphasizing that it is essential to reach them in their elementary years. “When kids start getting older they don’t care about anything, especially if they’re on crack.”

Cox, who conducts weekly self-esteem counseling at 97th Street School, says girls as young as 9 complain about harassment by Anglo “johns,” who cruise South-Central streets looking for prostitutes.

She instructs the girls to walk in groups, never to get into a stranger’s car, and if they are molested, to run and tell an adult. She also imbues all of her students with a sense of their African-American history and culture. “We try to make sure they understand that they are not rootless, that they do not live in isolation. When we can tie them to their ancestors and relatives they are less likely to commit antisocial acts.”

Existing programs can only do so much, however, and education officials recognize a need for expanded safety instruction and protection.

“It’s a hit-and-miss kind of thing,” says 95th Street School principal Charles Proctor. “If something happens on the news, we start talking to the children about being careful around adult strangers. If a child is hit by a car, we might stress automobile safety. But there needs to be an organized, systematic effort that prepares children for the real world.”

However, more comprehensive programs on a districtwide basis would require resources that, educators say, are unavailable.

“We’re not fiscally well. And I don’t know how we will recover, if ever,” says assistant superintendent for the district’s Office of Elementary Instruction, Barbara Smith, referring to Gov. George Deukmejian’s proposed budget for fiscal 1990-91, which leaves the Los Angeles district with a shortfall of $50 million in revenues.

In February, Dr. Lilia (Lulu) Lopez, coordinator of instructional planning and development for the district’s elementary schools, launched a pilot curriculum for the third and fourth grades to teach children everything from self-respect to letter-writing techniques to lobby politicians for more inner-city recreational facilities. But funds needed to train teachers and expand the program to all grades citywide have already been frozen. “One of my goals (with the pilot curriculum) was to bring the various school programs together so we don’t leave holes,” she says. “It’s very frustrating.”

Meanwhile, schools struggle to provide their students with safety as best they can. At 102nd Street, Principal Melba Coleman has gone to the City Council to obtain a guard to watch over her 1,200 students as they arrive and leave from school. According to city Department of Transportation guidelines, a guard is not needed because there is a traffic light a block away from the school. But, Coleman protests that her students live in projects across the street from the school. She notes wryly that previous principals have been trying to procure a guard for 19 years.

The police also have programs that address the issue of safety. Officers take the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program to fifth-grade classes and make a half-hour presentation, called CASEY (Crime Awareness Safety Education for Youth) to children in kindergarten through the third grade to tell them how to dial 911 and watch out for strangers.

Both programs are booked months in advance, and, says Sgt. Christopher West, the officer in charge of the LAPD’s crime prevention unit, “we don’t have remotely close to the resources” to establish more comprehensive programs.

Besides, he questions, “How do you teach somebody street smarts? It’s too esoteric a subject to quantify and teach in the schools.”

The ideal place for children to learn about life is in the home, police and school officials agree, but children frequently do not obtain information there.

“A lack of attention at home is a primary problem for many children,” says Westminster director Grace Payne, who sees teen-age mothers, many of them single parents with only an elementary school education and an income from welfare. “They leave the children to grow up like weeds. Children aren’t able to guide themselves and the parents aren’t either.”

Even parents who work hard to protect their children find that the going is difficult. From Watts, many commute long distances to work and may not see their children for 12 hours a day. When they return at night they are worn out, Payne points out. Also, she says, “The mothers aren’t going to tell the children these things (specifics on local gangs), because they don’t know about them. It’s the children who are out where they are exposed to them, not the parents.”

The solution for caring parents generally is to keep their children indoors. “If I have to, I’ll keep them constantly in the house,” says Diane Moore, who raises her 8- and 13-year-old sons in Watts. “They always ask, ‘Mom, why we never go anywhere? We always stay in this boring house.’ But I don’t want to be out there in the environment.”

At Westminster, officials say the Creative Child Project is proof that positive approaches to helping children can have dramatic results. “Our solution is love, attention and listening,” Payne says. In the afternoon hours, the danger zone for latch-key children, 50 8- to 12-year-olds from the neighborhood’s schools are shepherded through academic lessons as well as instruction in social manners and habits by a teacher, three volunteer “foster grandparents” and a social worker. Children remain in the Creative Child Project for only two years, but since the program began in 1971, Payne says, 90% of her youngsters have finished high school, and 20% have graduated from community colleges.

Educators agree that given half a chance, children will respond positively to the support they are given. “Kids don’t want to get hurt,” says McGuinses. “They want to have fun and be happy and live in a safe environment.”

At Westminster, Lucinda says she wants to grow up to be a nurse “to try to save people from dying.” Horatio wants to be President of the United States, and Luis wants to be a king. One of his royal edicts would prevent children from playing on the streets after dark. “The gangs could drive by and shoot them,” he explains.