Santa Monica Stung by Gang Program Failure

When shootings erupted in a corner of Santa Monica two years ago, the left-leaning city embraced a progressive solution: Give money to three young grass-roots activists, including a former gang member, and let them find a way to steer kids from violence.

But the effort has fallen apart. The young black and Latino activists who spearheaded the effort have dissolved their partnership. More than $300,000 of city funds bought little but bad feelings. It was another lesson--learned by many cities--about the difficulty of designing programs to reduce gang violence.

Computers and office furniture purchased for a program now sit in storage. The youth-violence prevention program, launched with high hopes, never really got past the planning stage.

The council is tentatively scheduled to take up the issue Tuesday, and may relaunch the program in a new form.

Those involved cite various reasons for the program’s demise: activists’ lack of experience, turf issues, conflicting personalities, missed deadlines and mistrust. One of the activists alleges that the city’s paternalism and racial insensitivity defeated the program.

“Santa Monica is a liberal bastion, but it’s all ‘save the whales,’ and let the blacks and Latinos die,” complained the activist, Oscar de la Torre, a former outreach counselor at Santa Monica High School.

The two others involved--community activist Manuel Lares and city employee Edward Bell--are more tempered in their criticism, but also echo charges that city regulations and controls were ill-suited to outreach work with active gang members.

City leaders counter that they went out of their way to empower local activists. But they acknowledge that their aims and timelines may have been unrealistic.

“I was full of idealistic hope that the process of putting together the organization would mirror the larger healing that would come about afterward,” recalled Mayor Michael Feinstein. “I thought it was the perfect story.”

The city tried to move quickly after a series of violent acts that drew national media attention.

In the fall of 1998, six people were shot, a shocking development in the mostly upscale city. Four of them died in what police said was a war of retaliation between rival Santa Monica and Culver City gangs.

The dead also included Horst Fietze, a German tourist killed in a robbery attempt. Fietze’s murder was thought to be unrelated to the gang violence, but further galvanized the city to confront youth crime.

Even before the shootings, some longtime residents had marked an upsurge in tensions between blacks and Latinos in the multiethnic Pico neighborhood, where some of the violence had occurred. The neighborhood is a pocket of several blocks in the southeast corner of the largely white city that was isolated by the construction of the Santa Monica Freeway. Many of the city’s blacks and Latinos are concentrated there.

Within days of the shootings, a group of local activists, De la Torre and Lares among them, had organized a peace march through the neighborhood.

At the same time, the city groped for solutions. Increasing police patrols was favored by some residents, but also had drawn heat from people who said the police already were harassing innocent people.

Santa Monica spends at least $7 million yearly on grants for social programs, and already funds youth programs in the Pico neighborhood. Determined to act quickly, city officials tried to overcome a common flaw among traditional gang-violence programs--their inability to reach older at-risk people, those in their late teens and early twenties already in trouble with the law.

In mid-1999, the City Council earmarked an extra $350,000 and sought proposals from a number of groups. In early 2000, bypassing more established community organizations, it selected the multiethnic trio of relatively untested young activists.

Though alike in their interests, the three activists had conspicuously different styles.

De la Torre, 29, has neatly cropped hair, a stiff, almost military bearing and slightly anxious air. He keeps a schedule packed with youth advocacy work. The son of Mexican immigrants, he grew up in the Pico neighborhood and earned a master’s degree in public policy. He was trying to start his own youth program, called Proyecto Adelante.

Lares, 28, who says he once associated with gang members, wears a long silver medallion, baggy shorts and tattoos. His smooth hair just doesn’t quite brush his shoulders; he frequently sweeps it out of his face. With his brash, surfer-casual air, he looks a little like the Che Guevara poster in his office. He headed a local chapter of a group called Barrios Unidos, and had worked as a staffer for then-state Sen. Tom Hayden.

Bell, 32, speaks in calm, even tones even when expressing outrage, is a crew leader in the city’s water division, and also grew up in the neighborhood. He is a board member of his church and cites a Christian outlook in his approach to community work. He was trying to start a group called Parachute.

City leaders favored the three because of their relative youth, their connections to the neighborhood and the fact that they knew gang members. Moreover, they bridged the racial divide: De la Torre and Lares are Latino; Bell is black.

They would be put on salary to work together, setting up a program to do crisis intervention, job training and violence prevention, among other things.

But things quickly went awry. The activists had some successes--a multicultural Mother’s Day breakfast, for example. But there were miscommunications. Objectives seemed fuzzy. Naming a board of directors, for example, was an especially trouble-fraught exercise.

De la Torre says the activists disagreed over the racial composition of the board--how many blacks would serve versus how many Latinos, adding that he disagreed with the idea of a 50-50 split. Bell denies this, saying the main problem was that the city kept changing its mind on who it would approve.

Julie Rusk, the city’s manager of community and cultural services, remembers only continual delays. Activists would call prospective candidates, then say they hadn’t heard back from them, she said. A board was never chosen.

The trio’s distrust of each other seemed deep. “It was difficult to open up communication,” said Jose Montano of Community Partners, a group hired to help administer funds and assist the new program.

Tensions rose through the summer as deadlines passed. De la Torre quit his job at the high school to work for the program full time. Lares says he was frustrated because he said the city expected him to neglect Barrios Unidos. In the end, they failed to reach agreement over a lease to rent offices at Bell’s church, and the effort was ended.

De la Torre, who is angry at Bell over the lease issue, says the effort failed in part because, “there were racial issues. . . . The leaders of the city said the blacks and Mexicans have to work together, not realizing there has been . . . years of violence between these two communities.”

Some residents said the city was simple-minded in believing there was a hard-core gang problem within the Pico neighborhood. Others questioned the biracial approach when the most serious violence seemed to be brown on brown. This is, they point out, a stable, rent-controlled community, not a ghetto.

Last winter, the city suspended funding.

Lares came away from the failure concluding that grass-roots organizations may sometimes be best left as they are--independent, personality-driven enterprises that operate outside the purview of city services.

De la Torre suggests that too much money all at once may do more to hurt than help some groups, which need to be allowed time to develop incrementally.

Race relations “isn’t a goal or a destination, it’s a journey,” Lares said. “People need to work side by side for common goals to get to know each other. You can’t wrench this ‘We-Are-the-World’ . . . thing out of it.”

There have been no more spurts of gang violence--only two killings in the entire city since 1998, one of them gang-related and in the Pico neighborhood. Police attribute the improvement to “some good arrests the last couple of years,” as one lieutenant put it. Mayor Feinstein says the city will continue to seek alternatives to gang violence. But he has a new appreciation for the difficulties.

“It’s a hard problem,” he said. “It doesn’t have a simple answer.”