Ex-Gang Members Work to Bring Peace to Streets

In tattered storefront offices from Pico Boulevard to Central Avenue, in apartments in the city’s toughest housing projects in Watts, in attractive homes in Southwest Los Angeles and on the city’s deadliest corners, the work of promoting peace goes on night and day.

Away from the glare of television lights, often with no public notice, ex-gang members are at work in the city’s most volatile trenches.

And, they say, their work is paying dividends, helping to bring down the city’s homicide rate.

Six years ago, 466 slayings were recorded in South Los Angeles. That number jumped to 481 the next year. But a steady decline began in 1994, and homicides in the area dropped to 223 last year.

And with the sharp drop came a cavalcade of experts offering explanations: the three-strikes law, gang injunctions, curfews, community policing, an improving economy, changing demographics.

Rarely has any credit been given to those gang members and ex-gang members whose various peace treaties and cease-fires, they say, have helped make the streets safer.

Scoffing at Officials Who Take Credit

Standing on the corner of Vermont Avenue and 88th Street, Raymond “Mad Dog” Lafayette laughs when he hears that Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, the Los Angeles Police Department and the mayor have taken some credit for last year’s drop in homicides.

“When I would go out for a drive-by, Gil Garcetti was the last thing on my mind,” said the tall 23-year-old gang member who has spent three years behind bars.

Lafayette said he quit the thug life because a group of older, retired gang members convinced him of the futility of it all.

“I don’t even know who they were, but they made some serious sense,” he said.

They may have been from Unity One, No Guns, Focus, Exodus, FACES, BOSS, Islamic HOPE, RISE or other small grass-roots organizations composed largely of ex-gang members that operate on little or no budget.

They operate on love, they say. And they have grown weary of seeing too many sons and daughters in caskets. They say they have put themselves between rival guns when word circulated that a payback shooting was in the works. They then would take to the streets to appeal for peace and brotherhood.

But they also know that much work remains.

“The murder rate may be down, but it is still too high,” said Bobby Brougham, an ex-gang member and president of the organization Exodus. His 16-year-old son was shot to death in a Los Angeles park. “One hundred is too many,” Brougham said. “This year we’re going to get it down even more.”

Community Groups Play a Role

Other groups, composed of victims’ families, or community groups that work to keep young children out of gangs, have also played a role in helping bring peace to the streets.

It was the street gangs in Watts that started the peace movement in 1992 when gang leaders signed a truce. That treaty is still holding, they say.

Two weeks ago, the Grape Street Crips from the Jordan Downs housing project played football against Nickerson Gardens’ Bounty Hunters. More than 400 people attended. There were no fights.

“They’ve always downplayed the gang truce because they didn’t start it, the gangs did,” said Daude Sherrills, an architect of the Watts treaty. “You can bet if the mayor or City Council started up the Watts gang peace treaty, you’d be hearing about it every . . . day.

“How would you feel if you stopped the killing and here comes the mayor and Garcetti saying they fixed it? They never set foot in the ‘hood, and they take the credit.”

Garcetti is not personally familiar with any of the grass-roots groups, his spokeswoman Sandy Gibbons said.

“But he said that he would be more than happy to give credit to any community-based organization that is working to reduce crime,” she said.

Riordan’s press secretary, Noelia Rodriguez, said it is difficult to measure the effect ex-gang members are having on the homicide rate.

“The mayor has worked hand-in-hand with the D.A. on the crime issue, especially gang injunctions,” Rodriguez said. “The fight to make Los Angeles safer is a multifaceted one, and the mayor welcomes all citizens to fight crime. If they believe they have had a positive influence on the crime rate, we would encourage continued efforts.”

Those efforts continued last week at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee center, where former-gang-leaders-turned -community-activists gathered to renew their vows, as they put it.

Dewayne Holmes, an ex-gang leader who works for State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), spoke of the drop in crime.

“Not to take anything away from anyone, but I think that more than anything else, it is the people on the streets who are responsible,” Holmes said. “Stiffer sentencing, and some more police on the streets may have helped a little, but the people getting involved on the front lines is the overwhelming reason crime is down.”

Holmes said his life “has been anything but peaceful. I have been shot, I have been stabbed, I have been incarcerated. I don’t know anything about peace. But I want to know all about peace. We need to lay down the arms and fight for a different cause.”

Efforts Cross Geographic Lines

The campaign against internecine warfare has been taken up by some Latino gangs as well. The efforts of black and brown former gangsters go beyond Watts to South-Central, the Westside, the Eastside and the San Fernando Valley. Former gang leaders say they are uniting now in hopes of influencing younger, more violent gang members to put down their arms.

“We are an organization not only concerned about crime in our community, but crime in all communities,” said Victor Perez of No Guns, a group working for peace on the Westside and in the South Bay.

This new breed of peacemakers has the support of more-established organizations such as the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. Janine Watkins, a community action committee official, said the drop in crime has nothing to do with the politicians.

“The solutions are coming from those that are suffering, not from those that are creating legislation that perpetuates the problem,” Watkins said. “These guys that started the treaty, that work in the trenches all over the city, they are the solution. They have lived up to their word. You can bring in the National Guard, but if the neighborhoods aren’t organizing the peace, it is not going to happen.”

Police say the majority of homicides are still in some way gang-related, and a captain acknowledges that grass-roots groups have helped lower the crime rate.

Last year, drive-by shootings were down 27% citywide and gang-related homicides in the city were down 36.7% compared to the previous five-year average, according to LAPD statistics.

Capt. Tom Lorenzen, patrol commander at LAPD’s Southeast Division, whose 75 homicides were the most in the city last year, said the gang treaty and cease-fires have made a difference.

“I think we have seen a passing of the day where kids are going to get shot just for wearing a particular color,” Lorenzen said. “Those days are gone. I got to give them credit for that.”

Some groups say they would like to be recognized for their role in reducing the violence, but receiving such recognition is not what motivates them.

“As long as we are not a part of [the official] infrastructure, we will never get the credit for doing anything positive,” said Brian Mustafa Long, an ex-gang leader who runs the organization RISE in the Crenshaw district.

“But if something negative happens in the community, then you can bet . . . we’ll get the credit,” Long said. “We really don’t need them to pat us on the back. The truth never stays in the darkness. It always comes to light.”

Other former gang members say most government officials would never give them the proper respect--”props”--because by doing so, those officials would be admitting they have not been able to do the job themselves.

“We’re doing their job for them,” said ex-gang member Najee Ali of Islamic HOPE.

Activism in Prisons

The peace movement is not only being felt on the streets, but in California’s jails and prisons as well, some inmates say.

In Men’s Central Jail, while being processed out of state prison, Darren “CW” Williams, 36, said being a shooter on the streets is no longer something to be proud of inside prison walls.

“Don’t think you can shoot a brother and come up in here and think you gonna get any love,” said Williams, who served 13 years for murder. “That ain’t gonna fly anymore. You ain’t getting any stripes for killing a brother.”

Although the people working for peace celebrate the decline in homicide, they know all too well that heartache over losing a loved one is still common.

In his storefront office on Pico Boulevard in the Mid-City area, Bo Taylor, director of Unity One, is on the phone counseling a woman whose close friend has been shot to death. Taylor listens, only occasionally offering a word here and there.

“We’ve lost a lot of lives, lost a lot of battles, but ultimately we will win the war,” he said after counseling the caller. “There are too many people stepping up with a voice in the neighborhood. We are operating on nothing. No money at all. It’s basically volunteer work that goes unnoticed until the crime stats come out and the politicians brag about it.”

Sometimes the work for peace--”the love,” as they call it--is done by groups of volunteers trying to influence groups of gang members. Often the work is done one-on-one.

“I got one little kid I’m working on,” said Darryl Graham, an ex-gang member who now works at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee center. “This little guy, he’s from Grape Street. I’m working on him daily.”

Graham, 40, said he is making some progress, recognizing that victories often come in small increments.

“He’s not wearing the baggy pants anymore,” Graham said. “He got rid of the earring. It might not seem like much to a lot of people, but to me, it was like life and death. I can’t tell you how I felt when I saw him dressed nicely.

“Maybe, just maybe, he won’t have to go through what we’ve been through.”