L.A.’s Focus Must Not Slip

Church bells pealed last week when L.A. Mayor James K. Hahn and interim LAPD Chief Martin Pomeroy agreed to a yearlong experiment, teaming police with Boyle Heights residents.

To understand the neighborhood’s jubilation and appreciate what’s at stake, look back to a day in March when cheering grade-school students, flirting teenagers and obliging parents jammed the Aliso Pico Recreation Center. They had come to watch a basketball game. Instead they saw suspected gang members blow away a rival in the gym doorway. The body count there in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollenbeck Division stands at 24 already this year.

“You would think we would be used to this,” 34-year resident Lupe Loera told the mayor and the police chief. “We’re not.”

What is unthinkable is that any neighborhood would be.

This month we wrote about Boyle Heights’ efforts to reclaim its streets after a van full of alleged gang members killed a 10-year-old girl in her frontyard.

Moms in green T-shirts stand guard on street corners when school lets out--a thin green line against drive-by shooters. The local Catholic church had long worked to knock kids out of the gang rut, teaching neighborhood toughs, for example, to paint, bake bread--and get jobs. Now residents joined church organizers and successfully pressed the city to put in speed bumps and install street lights. They researched community policing programs in other cities. What they wanted was cops who agreed to stay on the beat for at least a year, who got out of their patrol cars and got to know the neighborhood.

In some of these neighborhoods, gangbanging is a family tradition, passed from dads who take perverse pride in their prison records to sons who try to top them in tattoos and attitude. The most promising programs to uproot this intergenerational pathology put police and residents together to brainstorm. This is what Boyle Heights will do.

In the 22 days since we last wrote about this, police say gangs have slaughtered rivals or bystanders in every part of the city: a 19-year-old man in the harbor area, a 15-year-old in a car-to-car shootout in northeast Los Angeles, another 15-year-old in a car-to-car shooting downtown. On a single night in the San Fernando Valley, rival gang members killed one young man and left another critically wounded; suspected gang members killed a third man outside a party. The month’s most notorious homicide was in the Valley too: 3-year-old Alfredo Cardenas Jr., dead in his father’s arms after a gangster shot at someone else and missed.

The mothers of Boyle Heights are battling the murderers among them as best they can. We commend the mayor for catching their backs--and urge him to name a leader or task force to work with other neighborhoods too.

Past promising efforts have faltered when city leaders’ attention span wandered or commitment waned. That can’t happen again if Los Angeles is to head off a return to the nightmare days of a decade ago when gangs made parts of Southern California unlivable. No one wants to get used to that.