A Hard Look at the Job Ahead

For all the hoopla and excitement over Antonio Villaraigosa’s election as mayor of Los Angeles, today’s inaugural festivities begin not with a party but a prayer. Villaraigosa has described this morning’s interfaith service at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels as a chance to reflect on the “daunting task” ahead. The real reminder came Thursday, when the soon-to-be mayor joined a throng of others at the cathedral for a far sadder event -- the funeral of slain Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Jerry Ortiz.

Ortiz worked for the county, not the city, but the gang crime he worked to halt knows no boundaries. So it was fitting that Villaraigosa was at Sheriff Lee Baca’s side last week at a news conference announcing the arrest of the man charged in Ortiz’s murder, a 27-year-old reputed gangbanger with devil horns tattooed on his shaved head.

Ortiz, a 15-year veteran and Medal of Valor winner, had gone to a home in Hawaiian Gardens to investigate an earlier shooting. He was shot in the face as he stood on the doorstep in the middle of a gloriously sunny Southern California afternoon.

It is a tribute to Baca’s understanding of the roots of gang violence that, in addition to expressing understandable rage at his deputy’s alleged murderer, he called for renewed efforts to keep young men from joining gangs and to help those who are already members find a path out. Villaraigosa must step up to that challenge.

He has already vowed to find the money to hire additional police officers, and we will hold him to that promise.

But Baca and Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton are among a new generation of law enforcement leaders who understand that society can’t arrest its way out of this problem. They have embraced a three-pronged approach of prevention, intervention and suppression.

What the greater Los Angeles area lacks is a dynamic leader to energize the social-services side of that equation -- to rally government, nonprofit and religious groups to set aside turf battles, to take a tough-minded look at what gang prevention and intervention programs actually work and jettison those that don’t.

Los Angeles’ new mayor is not short of challenges. This is a city of failing schools, gridlocked traffic and housing that schoolteachers and bus drivers can no longer afford. It is also a city of fatherless children, widows and widowers, and parents who have buried murdered sons and daughters.

In a cathedral hallowed by such grief, Villaraigosa is right to pray for strength.