Michigan Mayor a Student of Local Gang Peace Process : Truce: Gary Loster, leader of troubled Saginaw, meets volunteer activists and takes notes on cease-fire.

The city of Los Angeles, which has often been accused of exporting gang violence, is now exporting peace.

Mayor Gary Loster and seven other civic leaders from crime-plagued Saginaw, Mich., came to the San Fernando Valley on Thursday to see how a group of volunteer activists organized a groundbreaking truce among Latino gangs. The cease-fire just passed its 10-month anniversary.

“What I’ve heard and had a chance to see is outstanding,” said Loster, after spending several hours in discussions at the Jet Center gym in Van Nuys. The gym is co-owned by William (Blinky) Rodriguez, a moving force in the truce that for almost a year has helped prevent gang-on-gang killings in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.

“We’ll be taking these things back and try to put things together,” Loster said.

One of the United States’ poorest communities, Saginaw is one of many Midwestern cities that flourished and suffered with the American automobile industry. Its population, once more than 100,000, has shrunk to 70,000 and more than half the residents are identified as lower or moderate income.

In 1993, its crime rate was listed at almost twice the national average. Things bottomed that summer when a series of six shootings in a single week shocked the town into action.

“The community became enraged,” said Loster. “For a small city, six or seven murders is a big problem.”

The city initiated an innovative crime and gang task force that included representatives of federal, state and local law enforcement.

Since then, crime rates have begun falling again. Since April, there has been a 60% decline in homicides and a 20% reduction in felonious assaults. Now, Loster wants to take the next step.

“I want to go into prevention and intervention, where we can begin to work with our young people like you’re doing here,” he said to about a dozen people sitting on metal chairs in a back room at the gym.

Rodriguez, whose son was killed in a drive-by shooting four years ago, described the events that led him and a colleague, Donald Garcia, to bring representatives of gangs throughout the Valley together last Halloween to make peace. He also talked about how difficult it has been to keep the truce going, to prevent insignificant snubs and slights from flaring into violent confrontations.

“An ongoing spirit of violence has been destroying this community for a number of years,” Rodriguez said. “Youths were getting high on the violence.”

He said a key to keeping the peace has been the respect gang members give to him and Garcia, a onetime gang leader who spent much of his life in prison before reforming, and the other hand-picked activists. Also important has been the willingness of activists like brothers Steve and Alex Martinez to climb out of bed to mediate disputes before dawn.

“Our slogan has been: ‘No mothers crying, no babies dying,’ ” said Rodriguez.

Police statistics bear out the results. During the first six months of the year, violent crime fell 12% valleywide. In the Foothill Division in the northeast Valley, homicides fell from 24 to seven, which police attribute primarily to the truce.

Loster and the others took notes and the daughter of another Saginaw civic leader, who used to live in Sylmar, filmed the session with a hand-held video camera. The civic leader, Dee Guerrero, had touted the truce to other Saginaw officials, and they decided to look at it firsthand.

“We can see the excitement,” Loster said. “We can feel it.”

Also attending the meeting was Marco Torres, a representative of Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon. “This is one of the council member’s biggest priorities,” Torres told Loster. “A handful of guys have done what organizations getting millions of dollars since the 1970s” failed to do.

Torres said one thing the organizers have succeeded in doing has been to change the gang culture in a fundamental way by showing gang leaders that it’s not heroic to drive by someone’s house and shoot out the window. “The message is out there: ‘If you use a gun, you’re a coward.’ ”

As they have all along, however, Rodriguez, Garcia and the other activists took little credit Thursday for the truce. Rodriguez credits God’s intervention.

“If you want to define the terms,” he said to Loster, “it is men of God standing up and being obedient to the call in perilous times.”

Loster nodded. What it all comes down to, he said later, “is what Blinky said so well. No mothers crying, no babies dying.”