A Gap We Need to Narrow

As Ventura County’s substantial Latino community grows steadily larger and more influential, both public and private sectors need to step up efforts to bridge gaps in education, opportunity and justice.

Perhaps the greatest of those gaps is not ethnic at all. Instead it is a question of economic class.

In a three-part series starting today, Times staff writer Fred Alvarez describes the difficulties facing young people growing up in Ventura County’s barrios--neighborhoods all across the county where most of the residents are poor and nearly all are Latino. The series looks at how the low expectations of educators and police often become a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. It also presents efforts to change things, notably by individuals who overcame the handicaps of barrio life to achieve success.

Ventura County’s population is now about 30% Latino. That statistic does not convey the widening gap that separates Latino residents who are steadily filtering into the mainstream, succeeding in school and achieving prosperity, from those who are living on the margin of poverty, buckling under the weight of problems that have undermined barrio communities for decades.

Narrowing that gap is a challenge with roles for private groups as well as public institutions.

Mentoring programs such as Upward Bound and community efforts such as El Concilio Del Condado de Ventura and El Centrito De La Colonia provide guidance and support, often from people who know barrio life firsthand.

Police efforts to reach out to these communities are a good beginning but there remains a vast gulf between official perception of racial profiling and the way it is experienced on the street. Despite diversity training and official proclamations that profiling is not a problem in Ventura County law enforcement agencies, many area residents believe that police and deputies are frequently influenced by ethnicity and attire in their decisions about whom to stop and question.

Actions to end that perception would go a long way toward building a Ventura County with liberty and justice for all.