Be Equally Tough on Causes of Violence

Just as some were asserting that our epidemic of violence was in remission, it has returned to Los Angeles with a demoralizing vengeance.

Three murders--Ennis Cosby on a dark freeway offramp, 17-year-old Corrie Williams on a bus, Laurence Austin at his silent-movie theater in the Fairfax area--have attached human faces to the plague of 10,000 homicides in Los Angeles County since 1991.

While supporting the police in their efforts to find the killers, we must also reflect on how to reverse this epidemic. We absolutely need more and better police, more homicide detectives and criminalists. But there will never be enough police to patrol every dark road, every bus, every movie theater where madness may erupt.

There is a public consensus to be tough on crime. But no matter how many anti-crime bills I author or vote for, including three strikes for violent offenders, the feeling grows that violence is out of control. We need a new consensus to be equally tough on the causes of violence.

Most of our public officials, including Mayor Riordan, exhibit little commitment to violence prevention. The city’s prevention budget is minuscule. After the slaying of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen 17 months ago, the mayor sought $5 million in federal funding for anti-gang programs. A year later, Los Angeles received $1 million, which is equal to one-fourth of the budget for the city’s advertising campaign proclaiming “Together we’re the best.”

A comprehensive approach to combating the causes of violence would include:

* Breaking the cycle of domestic violence. Instead of being hypnotized and numbed by the O.J. Simpson case, we should promote awareness, empower women and toughen penalties.

* Reducing the number of school dropouts. Mobilize a service corps of 3,000 local college students, paid through tuition reductions, to work as after-school tutors in public schools.

* A living wage. This would lift thousands of families from the grinding poverty that breeds violent frustration. Glossy city brochures promote “unskilled low-wage workers” as a business attraction, and tax subsidies too often go to those who don’t need them, like DreamWorks.

* Drug treatment. Drug addiction is the most important factor in the cycle of crime, violence, arrests, prison and parole, yet only 1% in prison receive comprehensive drug treatment, and many become addicts. We need “drug courts” like those in Oakland and Santa Monica that are dedicated to counseling and treatment.

* Rebuild L.A., anyone? The public-private partnership that emerged after the 1992 riots with a goal of 57,000 new inner city jobs has been quietly euthanized. Community leader Father Gregory Boyle has been saying for years that a job is still the best anti-crime program, so why are hands-on efforts like his so underfunded?

Taking any one of these initiatives is daunting. To sustain them requires a larger vision for restoring urban peace.

Fifty-five years ago, an LAPD memo proposed to take gangs “out of circulation until they realize that the authorities will not tolerate gangsterism.” Yet the quagmire deepens.

We need a new approach. If our government can engage in a full-scale peace process in Northern Ireland, why not in South and East Los Angeles?

When the Irish paramilitaries began a cease-fire in 1992, there was a diplomatic flurry, a presidential visit and economic assistance. While those efforts have suffered setbacks recently, violence has been reduced and replaced by a framework for peace. When Crips and Bloods initiated truces the same year, they were ignored as untouchables. But even the LAPD commander for South-Central credited the truces for “a real decrease in violence,” and warned that “if social conditions and unemployment remain the same, you will have continuing unrest.” No one responded.

We need an inclusionary peace process in Los Angeles that reinforces gang truces and follows up with economic incentives. What is needed besides local leadership is a full-time urban peace envoy like George Mitchell, the president’s mediator in Belfast, or Dennis Ross in Israel.

What prevents us from committing ourselves to prevention? Some think law-and-order can be achieved without prevention. One of the mayor’s gurus, UCLA professor James Q. Wilson, writes that he “has yet to see a ‘root cause’ or to encounter a government program that has successfully attacked it.”

But psychiatrist James Gilligan, who directed a study of violence at Harvard Medical School, believes that violence is a disease that can be treated. Violence, he believes, arises from an uncontrollable experience of shame.

Too many kids are born into zip codes of shame. They live in a city glutted with guns, drugs and alcohol. They plan more for their funerals than their futures. When shame and dishonor get the better of them, self-destructive violence results.

We need to transform these zip codes of shame to communities of hope. We will pay one way or the other. The cost of holding a kid in the California Youth Authority is $31,000 a year; the cost of educating a child, $4,500. A prison cell costs $100,000.

By contrast, every tax dollar spent on substance abuse treatment programs saves taxpayers $7 by lowering crime and health care costs. Rand Corp.’s Peter Greenwood suggests that we invest in parent training and child care for young, single, poor mothers to break the cycle.

The public should question the irresponsibility of anyone in public office who fosters these breeding grounds of violent shame while leaving the rest of us to reap the lethal consequences on dark roads, on public buses and in silent-movie theaters.