Minced Words and Mayhem

A two-pronged approach -- cops and community -- is central to city leaders’ efforts to stop young street criminals from killing each other and anyone who gets in the way. But you would never know this from the predictable outcry against Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton.

On Monday, Bratton and Mayor James K. Hahn marshaled a force of federal agencies in his battle against the gangs responsible for half of the city’s 639 homicides this year.

Meanwhile, a handful of critics is waging a war on words, and a selective war at that. The new chief is sending the wrong message, they complain, by calling gang activity “homeland terrorism,” admonishing parents to “control your kids” and exhorting the city to “get angry” about gang shootings. We’d predicted on the chief’s first day that self-proclaimed experts who have spent years failing to solve the gang problem would attack whatever he tried. We didn’t expect that the mayor would so quickly fret that the “bottom line” is to be “careful about our choice of words.”

Hahn, who hired Bratton and has made quelling violent crime his priority, knows that the real bottom line is a mother sobbing over her dead 14-year-old, his college dreams shattered by a bullet. Last month in South Los Angeles alone, this street war cost 20 lives within a three-week stretch.

If Hahn wants to regain the African American support he lost when he dumped former Chief Bernard C. Parks, he can do so by slowing the murder rate, not by attending to the semantic sensitivities of Urban League President John Mack and Ken Lombard, president of Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s development company.

Crime-busters have for too long split into irreconcilable camps: jobs versus jail. Bratton and Hahn seem committed to marrying the two.

But the same activists who challenge the chief’s choice of words when describing the sociopathic criminals who blow holes in human flesh and -- yes -- terrorize whole neighborhoods somehow tune out Bratton’s unequivocal condemnation of past LAPD brutality and racial profiling, his emphasis on smart, focused policing. He’s practically been pleading for community help in restoring the peace, but his critics only focus on the word “war.”

Fortunately, others hear his full message. As of Tuesday, there had been just one homicide in South Los Angeles this month. And residents, long silenced by fear, are talking, producing leads in nine unsolved homicides. Those are the words that matter.