Devotion to Peace Pays Off for a ‘Born Leader’

Sometime during the first hours after a mistrial was declared in the Inglewood police-abuse trial last week, Khalid Shah paused to appreciate the scene at the unusual command center that had throbbed to life that afternoon in the offices of the nonprofit foundation he runs.

Shah, 49, who long ago left behind the life of a gang leader and felon to earn his living as a respected peacemaker, watched as officers from the Los Angeles and Inglewood police departments worked alongside volunteer “peace ambassadors.”

Some in the crowded conference room of the Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace Foundation, which Shah founded 14 years ago, had past gang affiliations. Representatives from the U.S. Justice Department were there, along with members of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, among others, working phones and laptops.

The goal of everyone in the room was to see that calm prevailed in the city, no matter how people felt about the trial’s outcome.

And, by day’s end, it was clear that the group’s yearlong planning efforts had been successful. Despite widespread disappointment and anger, police reported there was no trial-related violence in Inglewood or in neighboring communities.

Some Inglewood leaders credit Shah with pushing for the coalition that helped prepare residents to cope with what turned out to be an unsatisfactory outcome for many.

The peaceful response was especially heartening to Shah, who spent his 20s in state prison but, through his foundation, has since devoted his life to trying to stem the violence that has plagued poor minority neighborhoods and to steering young people away from gangs.

“He has turned his life around,” said black activist Najee Ali of Project Islamic Hope, “and he has set an example for me and others to turn our lives around.”

On verdict day, Shah said he got a glimpse of fulfillment.

“It was a beautiful sight to see all these people come together, to see our youth talking with our police officers, to see the enthusiasm of hundreds of volunteers,” Shah said.

He had helped form the Inglewood Peace and Fairness Coalition shortly after the videotaped confrontation between Inglewood officers and 16-year-old Donovan Jackson in July 2002 sparked outrage around the nation.

The videotape -- shot by a bystander -- showed Jeremy Morse, a white officer who has since been fired, lifting Jackson, who is black, and slamming him onto the trunk of a police car before punching him in the face.

On Tuesday, jurors found Morse’s then-partner, Bijan Darvish, not guilty of filing a false police report on the arrest. But the panel deadlocked -- seven favoring a guilty verdict, five opposed -- on the assault charge against Morse.

The following day, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley announced that his office would retry the Morse case.

“I am so proud of our community for not compounding one injustice with another,” Shah said.

Like others in the coalition of religious, political, business and law enforcement leaders, residents and community organizations, Shah had worried about a possible repeat of the deadly rioting that shook Los Angeles in 1992, after an all-white jury failed to convict any of the LAPD officers caught on videotape in the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King.

Shah said his concerns grew when, a few days after the Jackson incident, several hundred demonstrators showed up at Inglewood City Hall demanding justice.

“I heard things like ‘Burn it down’ and ‘No justice, no peace,’ and I began to worry about the message that was getting out to our young people,” Shah said. “Many of us felt we wanted to change that message to ‘Peace, no matter what.’

“We wanted to show that it is OK to be angry, OK to be outraged even, but it is not OK to resort to violence and destroy your community, your homes, your jobs,” he said. “There are other ways to fight injustice that don’t hurt the community.”

Helping recast the message was a task that the articulate, tireless Shah was amply suited to accomplish, say many of those who know him.

“He has a lot of standing in the community, and he used that standing in a very positive way to talk with great sensitivity about two difficult positions -- the concerns about violence and also the concerns of the community and how to acknowledge them and deal with them,” said Ronald K. Wakabayashi of the U.S. Justice Department.

Wakabayashi worked closely with the coalition to formulate and carry out plans to ensure a peaceful response to the verdict.

Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt F. Dorn called Shah “a born leader; there isn’t any question about it.”

“The coalition was a combination of many organizations and many individuals working together with one common goal. I am most pleased with the work they did,” Dorn said. “And, in my opinion, it was Khalid Shah who was the force behind bringing them together and keeping them together and keeping them focused.”

Even some of the activists who worried that the coalition’s actions could inadvertently damage perceptions of blacks have high praise for Shah.

Although the coalition efforts “are very important and a model that should be used nationwide as an alternative to potential violence when you’re not happy with the judicial system and law enforcement, we have to be careful not to become dependent on such models,” said activist Ali, a leader in the Donovan Jackson Justice Committee.

“It can also have a negative and damaging effect by stigmatizing black youth and the black community,” he said, “and perpetuate negative stereotypes that blacks will be violent and burn the neighborhood down if they are unhappy.”

For the retrial, Ali would like to see the coalition focus on what happens in the courtroom. But his criticism stops at Shah, whom he said he is working to have nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Khalid Shah has been on the front lines of violence prevention longer than anyone,” Ali said. “He is someone who has risked his life trying to bring peace in the community.

“He is a good listener and sensitive to community needs, and he is very good at conflict resolution,” he said. “He is a motivator and an inspirational leader who is able to talk to the most powerful elected officials, but one who can also talk to the hard-core gang members in the projects. And there are very few activists who can do that.”

Shah, christened Bobby Watkins, was born to Mary and Billy Watkins, a gospel and blues singer with such stars as Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke and now longtime pastor of the Freedom of Spirit Church in South Los Angeles.

Shah’s parents split up when he was very young, and his mother raised him and his two brothers in the gritty Aliso Village housing project on Los Angeles’ Eastside.

Shah said he started running with, then became a leader in, an African American gang that evolved into the Bloods. His brushes with the law landed him in juvenile hall and county probation camps.

When he was about 18, some community leaders took an interest in him, helping him find a job and persuading him to leave the gang life.

But he went riding with a friend who was still in the gang. The friend killed a rival in a drive-by shooting that Shah said he had not known was going to happen.

Shah was convicted as an accomplice and spent 12 years in prison.

“I am embarrassed and saddened that I went through that. I talk to our kids” -- the at-risk youths Shah’s foundation works with -- “about it if I think my experience will help them stay out of the gangs. It’s a part of who I am, but I never use it as a badge of honor or anything positive,” he said.

“Especially now that I see all the pain and misery the violence causes to the mothers and others who loved these babies,” he added. “It breaks my heart I was ever a part of anything like that.”

Shah credits several people, including a prison guard, with encouraging him to turn his life around.

After serving his time, during which he took courses through a community college, Shah worked four years as a radiation technologist at local hospitals.

But he wanted to do something to stem the tide of gang violence.

“I had some pretty negative experiences in my life, but there was always someone who reached out a hand to me when I needed it, and it made a difference,” he said. “I promised God that if I got the chance, I would dedicate myself to something that would give thanks to the many people who reached their hands out to me.”

Shah became a Muslim in the early 1970s, when he took his current name, but he has since returned to his Christian roots. He speaks proudly of his two grown children from his first marriage -- a married daughter who follows her Christian faith and owns her own business, and a son in his third year in college -- counting them among “the many blessings in my life.”

Another is Dawn Osborne Shah, whom he married March 15. They wrote their own vows, each adding to their pledges of love and loyalty a promise to give back to the community.

Dawn Shah has worked at the foundation more than two years and was instrumental in forming a program that pairs mothers who have recently lost sons to violence with other women who have been through the devastating experience.

Shah got his big chance to give back in 1989, when he founded and became executive director of the Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace Foundation.

The organization runs gang-intervention and jobs programs, maintains a 24-hour violence prevention hotline, works with the families of murder victims and tries to raise community awareness and cooperation in stopping the killings.

When a 13-year-old boy was gunned down outside his church recently, the organization helped his terrified family find a new home, and used its street connections, which soon led to an arrest.

The group’s $1.2-million budget comes from government contracts, grants and private fund-raising.

County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, whose office works closely with Shah’s organization, said he is a knowledgeable, effective organizer who is always ready to help and who “has a unique ability to communicate with young people, especially with gang members.”

“He can give assurances that it is possible to move out of the gang culture,” Burke said. “It’s not easy, and he loses some, but he doesn’t let that stop him.”

The day after the verdict, Shah and some of the other coalition leaders met to assess their efforts. They know there will be more work ahead with the retrial, which could begin in as little as two weeks.

But first, there will be a short breather.

And, for Shah and his bride, a delayed honeymoon.