Council’s Anti-Gang Panel Begins Work

A new Los Angeles City Council anti-gang committee met for the first time Friday, hoping to tackle an issue that has bedeviled the city for years.

The five-member committee has no budget. And just one week ago the council refused to let voters decide whether to raise the city sales tax half a percent to pay for more police.

Nonetheless, the meeting attracted a standing-room-only crowd, including county Sheriff Lee Baca and football legend and longtime anti-gang activist Jim Brown.

“We still have nearly 300 people each year dying because of gangs,” said Councilman Martin Ludlow, who heads the committee. “Los Angeles is the epicenter of gang culture worldwide.”

He added that there were believed to be 60,000 gang members in Los Angeles and that the havoc they wreaked cost the city tens of millions of dollars.

Other committee members are Tony Cardenas, Wendy Greuel, Cindy Miscikowski and Ed Reyes. All had voted to send the half-cent sales tax proposal to the May ballot.

Ludlow said the first order of business would be to study the possible creation of a city Department of Urban Affairs to better organize anti-gang efforts already in place.

Some of those programs have been criticized in the past as ineffective. L.A. Bridges, which targets middle school students for intervention, has been faulted by city officials for waste and poor results twice in the last five years.

That was the reason that City Controller Laura Chick urged the committee not to spend money until monitoring programs were in place to ensure that the dollars were used wisely.

Jacquelyn McCroskey, a professor of child welfare at USC, said the city already had 207 programs -- run by 30 departments -- targeted at children, teenagers and families. Her message: Perhaps money could be spent more efficiently.

Although gang violence has declined in the last two years, several dozen members of the public told the council that there was still much to be done.

“I don’t want to applaud efforts,” said Guy Leemhuis, a neighborhood activist in South Los Angeles. “I want to applaud outcomes.”