A Message Written in Blood

Los Angeles County prosecutors last week charged a 16-year-old with murder, allegedly committed to impress a Pomona street gang. The circumstances in one respect were shockingly ordinary: Half the homicides in the county involve gangs. What made this one stand out were its chilling randomness, public setting and high-profile victim. The midday, drive-by shooting outside a Pomona courthouse killed California Highway Patrol Officer Thomas Steiner.

Los Angeles is used to being called the gang capital of the nation, but outside of poorer neighborhoods where gangbangers turn streets into war zones, not everyone is used to seeing the consequences firsthand. Not everyone understands that, in the rest of California, gang killings make up 14% of homicides, not half.

Researchers can’t explain this “extraordinary disproportion” even after factoring in the county’s larger population and accounting for age, ethnic and racial differences, according to a recent report from California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer. Other kinds of homicides are no more prevalent in Los Angeles than elsewhere in California.

The Rand Corp. researchers who prepared the report suggest that what sets Los Angeles apart “is not a general propensity for violent behavior, but rather the existence of a specific milieu that has fostered the development of a violent gang culture unlike any other gang culture in the state.” Obviously, this is fodder for more study, but not at the expense of action.

The Lockyer report likens gang violence in Los Angeles County to a long-term epidemic and calls for long-term strategies to counter it, and not just when the homicide numbers are climbing.

Twenty years ago, elected officials in Paramount -- the city southeast of Los Angeles, not the studio -- reached the same conclusion. Another Rand study, done in 1982 for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, had just ranked Paramount one of the 14 most troubled suburbs in the country, a “disaster area” of crime and blight. The first step taken by shamed city leaders to turn their town around was a program to keep kids from joining gangs by refusing to accept gangs as normal.

Today Paramount is known for pocket parks and picket fences. No longer a model of suburban blight, it draws officials from Hawaii to New Jersey to see one of the longest-running anti-gang programs in the nation. “Role models” who are trained and paid by the city teach second- and fifth-graders that joining a gang is as deadly as taking up smoking. Evaluations show that, unlike other school-based programs -- the more scattershot anti-drug DARE comes to mind -- the 15-week course shows results in changed attitudes and declining gang membership.

Just how urgent this message is was brought home last week in the very public death of a California Highway Patrol officer, husband and father of two sons.