New Anti-Gang Proposal Targets Middle Schools

By JODI WILGOREN

Sept. 20, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Revamping the city’s approach to keeping children out of gangs, a panel of Los Angeles City Council members and community leaders proposed a new program Thursday that would nearly double the money now earmarked for at-risk youths and target students at 18 middle schools citywide instead of the more diffuse system now in place.

Dubbed “L.A. Bridges,” the $9.1-million prevention and intervention program would be funded with about $4 million in state and federal grants, plus $5 million the City Council has already approved for anti-gang efforts. It is the brainchild of a special ad hoc committee formed in the wake of last year’s slaying of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen in a drive-by shooting in Cypress Park and the result of seven community-based meetings citywide.

“This committee has reached into the soil of our society and looked at the roots of gang violence,” Chairman Mark Ridley-Thomas said at the panel’s final session. “It has tried to create new prongs to add to the often one-pronged approach of law enforcement.”

L.A. Bridges targets middle school children because they are at the age when the FBI and academic researchers have determined youths are most vulnerable to gangs and available for intervention, officials said.

Overseen by the city’s Community Development Department and a so-called gang czar, the project would involve hiring eight new government employees, including the gang czar, but would largely be run by nonprofit agencies working at the neighborhood level in everything from homework centers to parent-youth bonding programs to conflict-resolution teams. Staff members are still working out the program’s details, especially after some of those attending Thursday’s meeting said they feared it did not attack the roots of the gang problem.

“Working in the middle schools is good,” former gang member Charles Rachel testified at the hearing. “I started gangbanging when I was in ninth grade. It took me through seventh grade and eighth grade to kind of decide.”

Starting as a four-year pilot project at $9.1 million annually, the new program would begin at 18 middle schools in neighborhoods where the Los Angeles Police Department reports the highest levels of violent crime, between 200 and 600 such incidents per year. The schools are located in 10 of the city’s 15 council districts and 12 of its 18 police divisions, including three sites in the San Fernando Valley, one in Hollywood, one in the Harbor area, eight in South Los Angeles and five elsewhere.

If more funding becomes available, policymakers propose launching a second phase of the program at 14 additional middle schools, whose neighborhoods each have 100 to 200 violent crimes annually.

“It’s about time that an agency in this city really focus on preventing problems that can arise in the future rather than dealing with the consequences after the fact,” Councilman Mike Feuer said during Thursday’s hearing.

Officials believe the city of Los Angeles is home to 400 street gangs with 60,000 members. Last year, there were 408 gang-related slayings in Los Angeles County. During the past 20 months, police have responded to nearly 9,000 violent crimes in neighborhoods around Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools.

L.A. Bridges would replace a host of individual programs for at-risk youths run through the city’s police, community development and parks departments, and is scheduled to start next July. Three nonprofit agencies--Hope in Youth, L.A. Stars and Community Youth Gang Services--now contract with the city to run prevention and intervention programs, but their funding from the city will dry up in January. Any group could bid for a piece of the new program.

Like Feuer, Councilwoman Laura Chick praised the diverse panel of activists, law enforcement officials, clergy, academics and business leaders for coming together in an unprecedented forum at City Hall.

“If we could replicate this kind of approach and attitude on the rest of the list of citywide problems, we could move someplace,” she said.

Yet there remained criticism around the table as the new program was unveiled, with some saying L.A. Bridges appears too touchy-feely, ignoring the crises of violence and unemployment plaguing urban streets.

“You can’t just take a gang member out of gangs. What you’ve got to do is replace the reasons they’re in gangs,” said Councilman Mike Hernandez. “You talk to a gang member, they want a job. If you can’t give them a job, you might get them out for a weekend or a week, but the reality is, that’s not a long-term solution.”

Father Greg Boyle of Dolores Mission Church agreed.

“We can’t view job creation as some distant byproduct,” he told his colleagues on the committee. “If we abandon intervention, we will always undercut our best efforts at prevention. We have to do intervention better than just having teams and peace-building and running into kids and saying, ‘Look, give peace a chance.’ This doesn’t make sense to me.”

Responding to the criticism, city staff members promised to rework the proposal before it returns to the full City Council for approval next month.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Target Schools

The $9.1-million annual anti-gang effort initially would target 18 Los Angeles middle schools:

* Virgil

* John Adams

* Luther Burbank

* George Washington Carver

* John A. Sutter

* Charles Maclay

* Mary McCleod Bethune

* Horace Mann