D.A. Defends Crime Prevention Efforts

The woman at the front of the room called for quiet. She smiled at a crescent of anxious faces in the school auditorium.

“My name is Laura Priver and I am an assistant district attorney,” she began. “I want you to understand that I am not a social worker. I am not employed by the school district. I am a prosecutor.”

The parents, 20 or so, shifted uneasily in their seats. The message they were about to hear was simple and sobering: Your children are truant. We can help you fix that. Or we can send you to jail.

The place was the Tracy Avenue School in Baldwin Park, but it could have been any of several hundred elementary and middle schools in Los Angeles County. The message was part of an ambitious anti-truancy campaign being carried out by Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti--one of the linchpins of his hopes to win reelection to a third term against very difficult odds.

Garcetti, facing a strong challenge from head Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, is in deep trouble politically, far weaker than he was four years ago, when he barely won reelection against another top deputy, John Lynch.

In a campaign that has so far been largely conducted through stump speeches to civic groups, he has spent much of his time touting the programs he has inaugurated or championed that attempt to prevent--not merely punish--crime.

One such program is Abolish Chronic Truancy (ACT), which takes deputy district attorneys out of the courtroom and puts them into schools such as Tracy Avenue to scare parents into keeping their children in class. The payoff, the district attorney believes, will come years down the road, when children who have been forced to stay in school eventually graduate and become productive, law-abiding members of society.

Other Garcetti programs send prosecutors into classrooms to teach kids about the criminal justice system; pair them with firefighters who act as their mentors; attempt to keep gangs off the streets; alert nightclub patrons to the dangers of “date rape” drugs; and teach college women about stalkers.

These programs offer a departure from the standard view of a prosecutor as someone who operates only on the nether side of a police booking desk. Garcetti considers them to be among his greatest accomplishments, proof that he is a new kind of district attorney, one who is able to blow away the cobwebs of tradition and find new, innovative ways to protect the public from crime.

His critics, including Cooley, accuse Garcetti of frittering away scarce resources on programs that might seem well-intentioned but are tangential to the office’s central goal of prosecuting crooks, and that probably could be better done by someone else.

“Crime prevention is good,” Cooley said in a recent interview, “but it’s not necessarily best done by a prosecutorial agency.”

He acknowledged the merit in some of Garcetti’s programs. But, he said, “some of them have no merit at all. . . . He’s totally lost the sense of the central reason of what a public prosecutor should do.

“Real crime prevention? All in favor of it,” he said. “But some of these programs don’t belong in the D.A.’s office.”

Garcetti says that this difference is why voters should keep him in office.

“This office truly is more than simply prosecuting crime,” he said recently. “When I can point to . . . 44,000 kids that we’ve kept in school that we believe otherwise would have dropped out . . . that’s the kind of D.A. I am, that’s the kind of D.A. that my opponent says we shouldn’t be.

“We shouldn’t have anything to do with crime prevention, he says. Well, he’s wrong. I think the voters and most progressive D.A.s throughout this country now understand that our role is so much larger than simply prosecuting crime.”

Crime Prevention Trend Spreading

Garcetti is right in at least this last point. In the last few years, district attorneys across the country, supported by federal and state seed money and inspired by the “community policing” movement that took root in police departments in the 1980s and early ‘90s, have begun pushing into areas of crime prevention that once would have been considered the jurisdiction of social workers, educators, police or no one at all.

Although Los Angeles County has had some form of crime prevention in its district attorney’s office for more than 30 years, it was relatively modest until recently. Jerri Patchett, who headed Garcetti’s Crime Prevention and Youth Services bureau from shortly after his election in 1992 until her retirement earlier this year, said it was among Garcetti’s top priorities from the start.

“Prior to Gil, the only kind of outreach being done in terms of crime prevention was written materials. There were brochures and newsletters. But Gil had a vision where he wanted hands-on programs and more outreach to youth,” she said.

She and Garcetti decided early on to target young people from the ages of about 8 to 12, believing that was the crucial time to arrest delinquency before it began to spiral out of control. That remains the target group for Garcetti’s major programs.

On the surface, at least, some of these efforts are impressive:

* ACT, the anti-truancy effort, was founded in Compton by head Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas Higgins in 1991. It was expanded countywide under Garcetti and now has a staff of 12 lawyers serving 340 schools in 36 school districts. Its budget this year was $1.2 million.

Over its lifetime, Higgins said, the program has targeted 50,000 to 60,000 students who had excessive absences. Their parents have received letters under the imprint of the district attorney--”that gets their attention,” Garcetti says--asking them to meetings much like the one Priver conducted in Baldwin Park.

There, they have been told that they face criminal charges if they don’t make better efforts to get their children to school.

Actually, only about 40 parents have been prosecuted under the program, Higgins said. The point is to scare them, and help them if necessary.

“I don’t want to punish you; I want your children in school,” Priver told the parents at the meeting she held. “If I never see you again, I’ve done my job.”

* RESCUE recruits county firefighters to serve as volunteer mentors to at-risk youth. This year, 84 middle school students are spending one afternoon a week with the firefighters, who oversee their homework, talk to them about their problems and sometimes let them help out in the firehouse and on emergency calls.

The students chosen for the yearlong program are “not the real bad kids, not the really good kids, but the ones who could fall between the cracks,” said Angela Valenzuela, who oversees the program.

Ray Ramirez, a likable, spiky-haired eighth-grader from Los Alisos Middle School in Norwalk, has been spending every Thursday afternoon since September with Fire Department Engineer Steve Augustine.

When he began the program, “he was failing school,” said his guidance counselor, Carol Miyahara. “He was doing foolish things . . . immature things.” She could see the potential for serious trouble.

Within months, Ray was doing his schoolwork and taking an interest in class. His trips to the principal’s office became less frequent, then stopped altogether. His grades soared. This March, Ray received an award for being the most improved student in his homeroom.

“Ray’s a good man,” said Augustine, a friendly, easygoing 36-year-old. He has tried to help Ray improve his study habits and show him that the skills he is learning in school--English and math in particular--have important applications in the real world. Ray has a new goal in life: to become a firefighter or police officer.

“It’s just a total success,” said Ray’s mother, Patti Ramirez. “The main thing is, he’s made the choice to follow the right path.”

* LEAD (Legal Enrichment and Decision-making), based on a program developed by Dist. Atty. Charles J. Hynes in Brooklyn, N.Y., sends prosecutors and investigators into fifth-grade classrooms on their lunch breaks to teach students about the criminal justice system. The idea is that young people who understand the system--and also such concepts as tolerance and decision-making--are less likely to break its laws.

“I think if we don’t do something to dissuade them at an early age and get them to take pride in themselves, then we might be seeing them down the line” in court, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Daniel, who volunteers at Elysian Heights Elementary School.

* Other preventive programs include JOIN, aimed at reducing the recidivism rate among juvenile delinquents; Love Me Not, aimed at giving women the information they need to fend off stalkers; SAGE (Strategies Against Youth Gangs), a controversial program that includes the use of civil injunctions against street gangs; and the “drug rape” program to alert nightclubbers to the dangers of GBH and rohypnol, the so-called “date rape” drugs.

Success or Failure Difficult to Track

Do they work?

That is the million-dollar question about any crime prevention program, and for the most part the answer is: maybe.

Higgins claims that 90% of the students targeted by Abolish Chronic Truancy “turn it around” after their parents’ first meeting with a prosecutor, and that most of the rest reform their attendance habits after further intervention. But there has been no attempt to track the students after they leave the program, so there is no way to know whether they are more likely to graduate or less likely to commit crimes.

Similarly, no statistics will tell whether RESCUE is improving student performance or LEAD is keeping children from lives of crime. Intuitively, the programs make sense. Anecdotally, the participants can cite dramatic success stories. Empirically, no one can prove they work.

Such programs are “the politically correct, popular, Hula-Hoop thing of the moment,” said Peter Greenwood, a researcher at the Rand Corp. who has studied crime prevention programs. “The parents like it, the kids like it, everyone gets a warm, fuzzy feeling,”

But without further studies, he said, it’s impossible to say the programs do any lasting good. He did say that ACT “sounds like an appropriate deal.”

Within Garcetti’s office, there are those who question his priorities.

Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich, one of Garcetti’s top juvenile crime officials and one of his biggest critics, said he supports LEAD because it uses volunteers and doesn’t cost the department any money.

But he questioned the wisdom of using lawyers for the Abolish Chronic Truancy program. “You’re talking about $160,000 to have a truant officer,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s the best use of a trained trial lawyer.”

Cooley repeatedly has questioned Garcetti’s decision to create crime prevention programs while simultaneously cutting a program that dispatched prosecutors to the scenes of shootings involving police officers. He considers it the ultimate example of misplaced priorities.

Garcetti cut Operation Rollout in 1996, saying he couldn’t afford to continue it. He restored it this year after a storm of criticism, including suggestions that the program might have uncovered wrongdoing in police shootings by the Rampart Division anti-gang unit.

But Garcetti’s office says the crime prevention programs don’t take much money out of the department’s budget, and wouldn’t have made a difference in the Operation Rollout suspension. Much of the funding for the programs comes from grants. ACT, the most expensive, is being run this year with $800,000 in state and federal grants and $467,000 in county money. Some programs are entirely funded by grants.

A larger issue, the one raised by Cooley, is why the prosecutor’s office is running these programs in the first place. Couldn’t they just as well be run by the sheriff, say, or, in the case of RESCUE, the Fire Department, which supplies the volunteers?

Garcetti and his supporters respond: Why not the district attorney?

“Some people are of the school that our job is to sit back and wait for the cases to come to us,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Sharon Matsumoto. “But . . . why not go out and prevent that crime in the first place. . . . I think every agency that’s involved in law enforcement has that responsibility.”