Hooked on Hope : Violence <i> Is</i> Preventable, Says the Woman Hired to Stop It

First thing on a recent Monday morning in Billie Weiss’ office: She has just returned from a conference on the cresting tide of juvenile crime. Went well, she says. As well as a conference on kids killing kids can go. Turns out Los Angeles County is hardly alone. And that is reassuring. Sort of.

The session has buoyed the spirits of Weiss. But not for long. While she was gone, she is told, random gun violence claimed four more. Lord, she says, when is it going to end? By now, that is more a mantra than a question. Besides, at the moment she possesses neither an answer nor the time to ponder one.

First comes the meeting on the rising rate of domestic violence, then another on child drownings, and then those statistics indicating that a certain ZIP code in Los Angeles County is among the most, if not the most, dangerous ones in the United States for young men to grow up in.

If ever there were a Sisyphean task in the 1990s, Weiss may have it.

According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus was the cruel king of Corinth condemned forever to roll a huge stone up a hill in Hades only to have it tumble down again just as he reached the top. Unlike Sisyphus, though, Weiss was not condemned to carry out this duty. She sought it. Her title: director of injury and violence prevention for the county of Los Angeles.

If this seems like an unlikely task for a soft-spoken, 60-year-old former Las Vegas dancer who lives in Pacific Palisades, consider that Weiss knows firsthand the brand of pain she is attempting to prevent. A mother of five, she has an incarcerated son who has battled a decades-long addiction to heroin and the crimes often committed to support such a habit. And she has close friends who, through the years, have lost children to random violence.

Though she occupies ground zero--a skeptic might suggest that being in charge of violence prevention in Los Angeles County is a little like being in charge of dust control at a Texas rodeo--Weiss’ is a surprising view: Yes, modern-day violence is a pox, she says. But with the right medicine, it can be treated, even cured.

“If we reported four deaths from AIDS in kids aged 15 to 19 over the course of four days,” she says, referring to a recent spate of killings of young people, “then the Centers for Disease Control would be out here asking questions and wanting us to investigate and get to the bottom of it.

“Violence is preventable.”

As elegant as she is doughty, Weiss would have fit in well on the set of “Steel Magnolias,” except for her use of street slang such as “the ‘hood,” “punk” (a cigar-sized marijuana joint) and “joy pop” (when a reformed drug addict thinks he can use without getting hooked again).

“I’m a white, middle-class, middle-aged woman, but that doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about what I see,” she says.

From her too-cramped, first-floor office on Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles, she sees a much different city than the one she knew as a child. “As kids, we used to take the bus to Hollywood,” she says. “We didn’t worry.”

After years of motherhood and part-time jobs--including a Las Vegas dancing gig that ended when she was asked to “entertain” men at the bar--she returned to college to study epidemiology, the science of epidemics.

Nine years working with infectious and chronic diseases for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services convinced her that the biggest menace to public health wasn’t a disease at all. Not cancer. Not heart disease. Not even AIDS.

“Whenever I looked at the numbers, I could see that violence was the No. 1 threat to public health,” she says. So in 1990, she and the county health department sought a state grant and private donations--her job, preventing violence, was not considered a “core public health function,” so it could not be paid for with general funds.

Part medical detective, part counselor, part activist, she and her staff of seven, some of whom are volunteers, determine which neighborhoods are plagued by what, and then recommend to the county, schools, churches and community groups what to do about it.

When statistics indicated that a disproportionate number of children in a certain South-Central neighborhood were getting struck by cars, she embarked on a three-year program that called for meetings with parents to discuss pedestrian safety and for having preschool teachers read traffic safety-oriented storybooks three times a week.

When statistics showed that West Los Angeles and Torrance had more suicides, those areas were targeted for more suicide prevention programs.

Every few months, she ventures into gang-infested neighborhoods and holds focus group meetings with parents and children, who talk about what they think needs to be done on their streets.

Most recently, she and about 50 doctors, church workers, parents and school officials convened at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center to kick off a new program whose eventual goal is to have residents, clergy, school officials and law enforcement authorities meet after every murder and discuss what each could have done to prevent it. Weiss describes the idea, based on a similar venture in Atlanta, as the “it takes a village to raise a child” concept.

“You make people responsible for the violence that occurs in their homes and in their neighborhoods--one neighborhood at a time,” she said.

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The books on Weiss’ shelves (“Saving Children,” “Urban Survival”) and the groups she works with (Drive-by Agony, Not Even One and the Child Death Review Committee) underscore the grim nature of her task. After five years, Weiss knows the statistics on Los Angeles County all too well:

Every 4 1/2 hours someone is murdered.

Every 8 1/2 days a child between the ages of 5 and 9 is slain.

Every 4 1/2 hours a student is expelled for bringing a gun to school or for being involved in an assault.

Between 1981 and 1992, 15,000 people died of AIDS, but 22,000 died as a result of homicide.

For children less than 1 year old, the third leading cause of death--after sudden infant death syndrome and congenital defects--is homicide.

But as an inveterate optimist, right down to her blue-and-gold “Violence Prevention Works” lapel button, Weiss can overcome this daily diet of dreariness because she has mastered a survival skill: She can siphon out the one drop of positive news amid the sea of negative.

For example, the Sheriff’s Department estimates that the county’s gang population is about the size of Inglewood, more than 100,000. To most people, that translates into despair.

But Weiss put pencil to paper and figured out that the 100,000-plus represents only 5% to 10% of the people in that age group. Which, to her way of thinking, means: “Ninety-five percent are trying to do right.” Besides, she says, “Not all gang members are violent. And there are some very, very bright kids in gangs. Gang members want to have a future too.”

And while firearm deaths have doubled since 1985, Weiss quickly points out that deaths committed by other means--knife, poison, blunt object, etc.--have remained steady over the last decade. “I see that as telling us that we can do something about the problem if we do something about guns. . . . You have to find that one thing that gives you hope.”

Or else?

“You couldn’t do this work otherwise.”

If she subscribes to poet John Donne’s any-man’s-death-diminishes-me philosophy, it is perhaps because she is no stranger to the pain felt by many of the people with whom she deals.

Although she says her oldest son’s 20-year drug addiction hasn’t yet killed him, she talks of having “lost him” a long time ago.

“Sometimes, I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier for him and everyone else to just overdose,” she says, her eyes welling. “Why do this to yourself?”

Other times, she harbors hopes that maybe one more trip to the halfway house is all he needs.

If that experience has not kneaded her emotions enough, she has been introduced to another kind of random tragedy as well: Her husband of 33 years was found to have Alzheimer’s disease in 1985--at a time when she worked in the health department’s chronic diseases section--and he is confined to a nursing home.

For inspiration, Weiss points to places such as Jordan High School in Watts, where after-school programs and peer mediation have been credited, in part, with a drastic reduction in violence. She also suggests that critics look at Boston, where the murder rate fell 50% in 1993, a decade after Massachusetts became the first state to treat violence as a public health problem.

“I’m not saying things are going to change tomorrow. When you’re talking violence prevention, you’re talking long-term,” she says. “Just like with tobacco, where it became unacceptable to smoke after 20 years, you have to get to the point where people realize it’s unacceptable to resort to violence.

“In 10 years,” she says, “things will be different.

“I want Los Angeles to be a place where my kids and my grandkids can feel at home, where I can see kids living without fear in their faces.

“It can happen.”

As she dashes off to dance class--which she does every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday as “therapy”--she snaps up her eyeglasses and puts them on. They are large and they are, perhaps by necessity, rose-colored.

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Profile: Billie P. Weiss

* Born: March 25, 1935

* Residence: Pacific Palisades

* Education: Cal State Fullerton, B.A. in biology, 1978; UCLA, master’s degree in public health epidemiology, 1981.

* Career highlights: Executive director of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Los Angeles County. Member of the Los Angeles County Family Violence Task Force, American Academy of Pediatrics Poison Prevention and Injury Control Committee, and Women Against Gun Violence.

* Interests: Dancing, skiing, reading, theater and walks with the dog.

* Family: Married with five children.

* Quote: “I want Los Angeles to be a place where my kids and my grandkids can feel at home, where I can see kids living without fear in their faces. It can happen.”