Grab the Life Preserver

The Boston minister was preaching intolerance, and hundreds of men and women packing the Crenshaw district’s West Angeles Church of God in Christ Thursday nodded and shouted encouragement. The community must no longer tolerate gang violence, the preacher thundered. Los Angeles cannot allow “its children to hold it hostage.”

“Amen,” the audience responded. “Amen.”

The rousing speaker was the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, and he came at the invitation of Bishop Charles E. Blake and Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton to announce the start of an L.A. version of a program that Rivers and others have used to ease Boston’s violence, by “ministering, monitoring and mentoring” hard-core gang members and wannabes.

The Los Angeles TenPoint Task Force will work closely with police. The idea is that trained local clergy and church members can fill a leadership gap in communities where violent gangbangers bully and murder freely and without consequence, in part because parents are absent, police overwhelmed and witnesses intimidated.

In the early ‘90s, Boston had problems similar to those that now plague Los Angeles. Finally, a particularly appalling shooting mobilized the Boston clerical community: At the funeral of the young murder victim, gangbangers chased another child into the church, beating and stabbing him in front of mourners. Los Angeles has had nothing quite like that, but the recent drive-by killing of 13-year-old Joey Swift as he left a Bible study class comes close.

The TenPoint effort is, very purposely, led by clergy, not politicians. But the nascent effort will need broad support to succeed. Getting everyone on the same page in L.A. is always challenging, however, and this time it may be particularly tough. After the meeting, Councilman Nate Holden spent several minutes in front of TV cameras, complaining that he and other City Council members hadn’t been properly invited. If engraved invitations to politicians could stop a single homicide, maybe someone would care.

Meanwhile, a local gang counselor offered the only reasonable response to Rivers’ plan: “Seems like what we’ve all been trying isn’t working. So if this worked somewhere else and it can maybe work here, I’m happy to try it.”

Los Angeles is drowning in its own blood -- as of Friday, 18 people had been murdered in the previous 28 days in the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau alone. A Boston preacher is offering to throw a life preserver. This is no time to ask where it came from or whether the toss was just-so.