Constructive Outrage

Police typically have a difficult time solving gang-related shootings. Some witnesses may have their own gang ties; others, fearing retaliation, are too frightened to share what they know. However, the Los Angeles Police Department was deluged with tips Thursday after 15-year-old Deliesh Allen was shot on the sidewalk outside Locke High School in South Los Angeles just minutes after school was dismissed. Students lined up to describe to police what they saw, and passersby returned to the scene to provide information. Twelve hours later, police arrested 18-year-old Dejuan Hines, a former Locke student, at a relative’s home. Police say Deliesh was inadvertently hit by bullets Hines fired at members of a rival gang.

“I think people were just really angry,” said Assistant Los Angeles Police Chief George Gascon. “This little girl was so innocent. She had nothing to do with this feud between gang members. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Wrong place, wrong time. The phrase has become a convenient sort of shorthand, implying a victim’s innocence and a crime’s inevitability. But Deliesh Allen was in the right place -- crossing the sidewalk to her aunt’s car, heading home after a day at school. The one in the wrong place at the wrong time -- doing the wrong thing -- was the young man who strode through that crowd of students, blasting away with a firearm. Deliesh’s family has maintained a vigil at the hospital since she was shot. She is in a coma, and doctors do not expect her to survive. Family members say they are grateful for the courage of witnesses and the diligence of police in tracking down the man accused of being her attacker, but they cannot shake the image of Deliesh motionless in her hospital bed.

But other images just as troubling appeared in the same hospital over the weekend: gurneys being wheeled into the emergency room, holding the bodies of other victims of gang violence, including one young man who was an unintended target. And a swarm of teenage boys swaggering down a hallway, joking about how the wrong guy took a bullet meant for their rivals. “No sympathy, no compassion, as if it’s not people they’re shooting,” Deliesh’s aunt said by phone from the hospital. “It’s like we’re in Iraq, afraid to go out in the streets, and these gang members are Hussein and Osama.”

We cannot continue to cede city streets to gangbangers. City officials declared as much on Monday, when the mayor, school superintendent, police chief and school board members met and promised to create “gang-free” zones around city schools, with beefed-up police patrols and court injunctions. That’s good, but not enough.

What is needed now is the kind of community outrage that surfaced last month when 13-year-old Devin Brown was shot to death by police. That anger took a constructive turn. Hundreds turned out at community meetings, and ministers rallied their congregations to push for changes in police policy. Those protests lasted for weeks and prompted hours of radio and television coverage and led the LAPD to pledge to change its policy on shootings.

Now, community residents need to denounce gang violence as vigorously as they do police brutality. “If it’s a police shooting, the whole world is out, ready to tear up the streets,” said Khalid Shah, head of Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace, a gang prevention group. “But when it’s our kids killing each other, people are able to tune that out. The apathy takes over.” On Saturday, his group sponsored a meeting to protest Deliesh’s shooting. It drew 40 people, a sprinkling of reporters and one television camera.

Stepping up to provide information that helped police make an arrest was a good first step on the part of witnesses and residents. Ultimately, the community has to realize it can make a difference, and confront the menace of gangs head-on.