Conversation : ‘A Bomb of Violence Was Dropped in the Valley’

There have been at least eight gang-related shooting deaths in the San Fernando Valley over the past two and a half weeks, a sudden surge after months of quiet. Does this mean the end of a truce begun Oct. 31, 1993, among Latino gangs in the Valley? William “Blinky” Rodriguez, Valley director of the nonprofit dropout prevention program Cities in Schools, has been involved in preventing gang violence since his own son was killed in a drive-by shooting five years ago. He has spent much of the past week in efforts to cool hostilities. As he talked with TRIN YARBOROUGH, Rodriguez was often interrupted with updates and pleas for assistance.

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I’m afraid this Labor Day Weekend could be long in more ways than one. Right now we’re going through the fire.

For a year and a half, with the truce, people saw things they never imagined. They saw 70-year-old gang rivalries go down, played sports with guys from major rival gangs, had a quality of life they’d never experienced in their whole lives. People could go to the corner grocery store, go make a phone call or just walk down the street without sweating with fear.

They were just beginning to take a deep breath, look around, and say, ‘Dang, this is nice!” And families, too, parents, could stop biting their nails and worrying every minute. As for the police, it’s like they were on a semi-vacation. We had something really special going, something historic.

All that’s in jeopardy now. In the past three weeks it’s been like a bomb of violence was dropped in the Valley. We’re still trying to determine what’s going on.

But working with gangs and with individuals within gangs is a long-haul process with roller-coaster rides up and down, not some kind of quick fix. When something happens it doesn’t necessarily mean a truce is ended. There are a lot of hard-heads out there, but we’ve talked to many individuals and neighborhoods that don’t want to see this thing explode and spread.

After the first shooting, we went to the hospital where the young man was on a machine before he died, with a lot of [his friends] standing around saying, “This ain’t right, this ain’t right.” And we talked with them and let them vent their anger. What we do is just listen and hope to cause dialog between people and groups who have problems with each other.

We know all the places to go, where gang members will be gathered. When we drive up it can be a delicate situation. You don’t know who might fly off the handle. But people are usually glad to see us. They respect us because we’ve gone to bat for many of them in other aspects of their lives--done job counseling or talked to their parole officers on their behalf, gone to court and to hospitals and funerals. And the weekend before this madness kicked off, we had a barbecue and a handball tournament that 250 gang members from two of the oldest rival neighborhoods took part in. Merchants donated prizes and one, Marcello Martinez of Pacoima, even donated all the meat.

But I have to say that while some of us had a firm grip on a truce, got real amazing results, a lot of people didn’t step up to support it. Our group got virtually no funding. Job training and education are very important, but somebody’s also got to do the street-level hard-core work, and there are some agencies that don’t want to deal with that.

Many other guys have also stood up as pillars in their neighborhoods to calm down things. But often I felt we were in the wilderness. Either I was commissioned by the Lord to do this work or I’m half-crazy.

My faith was never tested more than when my son was killed. If I was ever going to lose my faith, I would have rolled over on that one.