Showing Kids a Better Way

Shots ricochet off cinder block. Around a corner, 45 fifth-graders from the city’s largest public housing project pile into a bus bound for the Getty Center. It is a Saturday, the second day in what will stretch into six days of gun and gang mayhem, much of it in and around this Watts neighborhood. Brewster MacWilliams couldn’t have ordered a better demonstration of why he is taking kids who keep chattering over the stutter of a semiautomatic to an art museum. “If you can show them another life,” he says, “they’ll jump at it.”

Last month’s “horrific days” showed new Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton another life -- and another city. It was the ultraviolent Los Angeles of more than a decade ago. Now Bratton is unapologetically using his celebrity on the elite party circuit to demand outrage from the city’s comfortable about what is happening to their neighbors.

MacWilliams, a freckle-faced, up-and-coming director with Hollywood’s Biscuit Filmworks, was one of hundreds who answered a similar call after the 1992 riots. He showed up at a South-Central church and helped pass out food. Moved by the welcome he received, he kept going back.

The Santa Monica resident hooked up with another Westsider on a mission that cynics wrote off as well meaning but loopy: recruit camp counselors to take inner-city kids to the mountains and the beach, places most of them had never seen. Volunteers would mentor fifth-graders on the cusp of deciding which path to take in lives that offered too few choices.

Ten years later, Los Angeles City Camp survives the skeptics. The fifth-grade campers come from two elementary schools that bracket the Nickerson Gardens public housing project. The 15 adult volunteers from throughout the city are now led by MacWilliams and fellow 10-year veteran Anthony “Big A” Morland, a thick-necked ex-boxer with the calm, round face of a Buddha. The security guard and father of four started volunteering with City Camp when his oldest son, then a fifth-grader, received an invitation to the camp’s first meeting. When he and his wife were two of only three parents to show up, Morland stayed to help.

He tells of a youngster everyone wrote off as a sure gangbanger who now plays football for the University of Arizona and may be on his way to the NFL. MacWilliams brags about another who has applied to be a city firefighter. The two counselors speak of kids who marvel at the quiet during their end-of-the-year weekend at Big Bear, away from the drone of gunfire and police helicopters. On the yellow wall of the private, nonprofit City Camp’s rented office on Central Avenue ([323] 249-6332) is a giant blue peace symbol and signatures of 500 campers who have passed through the doors. Opposite hangs a butcher-paper flag of red and blue handprints that last year’s campers made after 9/11. They marched that flag through the housing project. Residents came out to sing “God Bless America.”

“We’re not martyrs,” MacWilliams says, explaining why he’s in the office instead of home with his wife (she volunteers too) and 9-month-old son. “We enjoy this.” But he and Morland also know that a dozen field trips aren’t enough and imagine what they could do with more than a handful of volunteers and a single year to turn around lives.

If the new police chief needs help convincing others in this city why they should care -- and what they can do that cops can’t -- he can point to this 10-year-old miracle and the need for more like it throughout the city. It’s a story right out of Hollywood. It is a story worthy of a Hollywood ending.