Fighting Gangs on Their Own Turf With Real Alternatives : Crime prevention: A $1.2-million state grant will be used to offer enticements to youths--and to come down hard if they stray.

All gang members, before they join up, reach a crossroads. Some rush headlong into gangsterism and others step across gingerly. But all reach a point where, with the proper guidance and intervention, they could probably have been turned in another direction, Juana Lambert believes.

“It’s not just a sociological problem, without solutions,” said Lambert, executive director of a program in northwest Pasadena designed to divert youths from the gang path. “I really believe we can have an impact on kids.”

Lambert’s program, Project DAY (Diversion Alternatives for Youth), will have a chance to prove her point. The 17-year-old program recently got word that it will receive a three-year, $1.2-million grant from the State Office of Criminal Justice Planning to try to put a dent in the gang problem in Pasadena and Altadena, where police estimate gang membership is about 2,000.

The program, one of 11 finalists among 41 applicants, had provided employment counseling, an arts program and other services for inner-city public school students. Now it will also help to focus the efforts of five agencies on youngsters of junior high school age who are at the crossroads--”at-risk” youths, program officials call them.

The five--the Pasadena Police Department, the Pasadena Unified School District, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, the Probation Department and Lambert’s community-based agency--offer both threats and enticements.

Project DAY, the program’s centerpiece, will offer a rich array of counseling, arts and sports.

There will be a probation officer monitoring students who are under court orders. A deputy district attorney will go after truants.

The school district will provide tutoring and sports programs. Police will pay particular attention to gang-related crimes and use the department’s youth advisers to shepherd teen-agers into constructive activities.

“This is the first time we’ve put together a comprehensive program using everybody who deals with the gang issue in this small community,” Lambert said.

Why do youths join gangs?

“Everybody looks up to gang members, or they’re scared of them,” said Michael Rhambo, who has been a Police Department civilian youth adviser for two years. “Or else (they join up because) they don’t want to be bothered (by other gangs). If they’re ‘down,’ they’re protected.”

The program--which will require the agencies to come up with about $300,000 in matching funds--seeks to weaken the attraction of gangs and substitute other things, Lambert said. “Programs don’t have to be fancy,” she said. “You don’t need all the bells and whistles.”

Here’s how this one will work:

* Potential gang members from the school district’s Youth Opportunity Center and its three middle schools will have special classes to steer them away from gangs and drugs.

“A lot of self-esteem training, a lot of confidence building,” said Pat Lachelt, health service’s coordinator for the district.

There will be tutoring, counseling for parents, and special attention to health and family problems at the Youth Opportunity Center, where behavior problems and truants often end up.

* A deputy probation officer, assigned to the same school campuses, will keep track of students who are on probation. Many at-risk youngsters are under court orders to attend school and stay away from criminal elements.

“We can bust him just for talking to another gang member,” said Bob Polakow, director of program services for the Probation Department.

The threat of detention even undermines peer pressures, Polakow added.

“They can tell their friends, ‘I can’t do it anymore, my probation officer is on me,’ ” he said.

* The district attorney’s office will go after truants, bringing parents in for meetings, referring youngsters to special Student Attendance Review Boards to investigate their reasons for not going to school and, ultimately, sending them to court.

“There’s a tremendously high correlation between truancy and gang activity,” said Michael Genelin, head deputy for the D.A.’s gang division.

The approach has succeeded in Los Angeles, in one case bringing 59% of the chronic truants back to a South-Central elementary school, officials said.

* The Police Department will deploy an officer specifically to go after gang criminals. And youthful civilian advisers, such as Rhambo, will be sent to the schools to try to influence children at the brink of gang membership.

“It’s sort of like a Big Brother or Big Sister program,” said Officer Glenn Thompson, who works with the advisers, most of whom are former gang members.

* Project DAY will offer art and cultural programs, after-school sports activities and counseling on everything from job searching to race relations.

In the program’s artsy-looking classrooms on Grandview Street in northwest Pasadena, counselors and art teachers offer understanding and gentle persuasion.

“Kids have to have someone interested in them, someone to help them think,” Lambert contends.

That could be someone such as Donna Brown, Project DAY’s employment counselor, who guides her teen-age charges through newspaper want ads, coaches them on handling interviews and advises them on job market realities.

A group of teen-agers were there the other day, talking about getting the brush-off from employers.

Ruben Lira, 17, a broad-shouldered youth, said some employers, seeing his size and Latino features, jump to the conclusion that he is a gang member.

“I go there and everybody looks at me as if, ‘He’s coming here for a job?’ And the manager just puts my application aside,” Lira said.

Brown nodded sympathetically.

Project DAY’s training program gets youngsters ready for such negative reactions.

“It’s a matter of being able to receive the negativity and go beyond it,” Brown said.

When Rhambo, 21, goes to public schools to warn students about the dangers of gangs, just his appearance can be very persuasive. He was paralyzed from the waist down when a drug dealer shot him in the back three years ago, after a dispute with his brother.

The sight of Rhambo in his wheelchair often acts as a deterrent for elementary students.

“They look at me sitting in the chair,” he said. “It’s not just saying it. It’s seeing it.”

Then Rhambo hits them with an account of former schoolmates who got involved in gangs and drugs.

“I show them a board with pictures of family members and friends,” the Pasadena High School drop-out said. “Everybody on the board is either dead or in jail.”

Maybe Project DAY could have made a difference in his life, Rhambo said.

“Maybe they could have gotten to me if somebody came out and talked to me, when I was young--before I was too involved.”