Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT PREVENTING VIOLENCE : ‘We’re Talking About an Epidemic

I’m an epidemiologist by training. I track diseases, I look at what causes disease and who’s at greatest risk to get them. Then I try and find ways to intervene and prevent it.

In 1981 I began to look at the leading causes of death in L.A. County. And the more I looked at this data, the more I realized that homicide is the leading cause of death for the population under 45. Particularly among the male population aged 15-34, and particularly African American and Latino males.

We’re talking about an epidemic. Since 1981, about 5,000 more people have died because of violence than were killed by AIDS. And the public health resources that have been poured into AIDS are incredible compared with what has been poured into violence prevention.

Violence may not seem like a disease, but public health professionals have learned that we can isolate by age and sex and geographic location where violence is most likely to occur, and we’ve found that if you can get in and intervene, violence appears to be preventable in the way that other public health problems are preventable.

I’ll give you an example of a very successful violence-prevention approach. Jordan High School, which is in the middle of the most violent parts of L.A., has a very low level of violence. They have some very successful programs. They have an excellent peer-counseling program. When kids have problems or disputes, most schools provide adult counselors. But at Jordan they have trained students to do the counseling, and kids are more willing to go to their peer counselors.

Jordan High School and its immediate surroundings have far less violence, far fewer homicides and fewer expulsions for carrying weapons than other schools in the same area.

So we have successful models, but people haven’t given them enough support. What if every business in Los Angeles of over, say, 150 people, adopted a school and allowed employees to produce an after-school program and bring kids into the business and begin to train them? Kids want jobs, desperately. They are just not available.

When you talk to kids who grow up in poor, violent environments and come out OK, you find that there are concrete reasons why they made it. Studies on what gang-proofs a kid, for example, have found that these kids have had at least one person who they felt really cared about them. It might be a teacher, a parent, or just a close friend. And they have had a job. And they have had after-school activities.

These are pretty concrete things, and a lot of kids living in violent neighborhoods don’t have or don’t know how to accept these things. Things the rest of us take for granted.

If you talk to gang kids you find an extremely high-proportion of them have been abused, or have witnessed violence in their homes, and kids who witness and are victims of violence are much more likely to be involved with violence as they get older.

Many children are growing up believing that violence is a normal way of life. We need to change that perception.

But we haven’t taught that violence is unacceptable. We’ve glorified it. We’ve glorified it in movies, our heroes are violent.

I was at a meeting where a woman stood up and said, “Why don’t we bring the National Guard into the schools?” And my first reaction to that was, well, we’ll just declare war on our kids and take care of the problem that way.

When you send a young person to prison, what you give them is a master’s degree in how to continue to perpetrate criminal and violent behavior.

The “three strikes and you’re out” proponents want to lock these kids up forever, just write off a generation. Who is going to pay for keeping people in prison all of this time? It currently costs $30,000 a year to keep a person in prison in California. How are we going to pay for that? That means the programs that are likely to be cut are the programs that could provide long-term solutions.

There are people who say we’ve coddled poor communities, that we’ve given them a fair shot and they didn’t take advantage of it. I would like to say to those people, “Spend a day going to school and living in a violent neighborhood, just a day, and see if you still believe if they’ve been coddled.”

Recently I was talking to a kid from Compton, and this kid said to me, “You know, I can buy guns on my street, I can buy drugs on my street, but I can’t go to a movie”--because there are no theaters in his neighborhood.

We have got to understand that people living in poor neighborhoods are no different than anybody else, they are simply in different circumstances and they are trying their damnedest to protect themselves and their kids.

Yes, a lot of them have lost control of their kids. But a lot of people in middle-class neighborhoods lose control of their kids too, they just don’t use social programs because they are able to pay for the kinds of programs, like psychological counseling, that can turn their kids around, or help the family turn itself around if necessary.

To people who say to me, let’s write these people off, just keep in mind we spend approximately $3 billion a year in this county on the results of violence, and most of it is paid for by the taxpayers.

For more information about the Violence Prevention Coalition, call (213) 240-7785. The coalition is planning a march to “Stop the Violence Now” at 10 a.m. Saturday at Olvera Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles.