Anti-gang battle needs more than just cops

The 204th Street gang was a no-show Thursday in Harbor Gateway. I was there to personally thank members for their generosity in allowing African Americans to walk down the street, but the Latino gangbangers were nowhere to be found.

Najee Ali, who had organized a little demonstration of love and unity, walked around the neighborhood with me looking for a gang member he might recognize. They were supposed to drop by and sign a document calling for an end to violence.

“They don’t want to show their face now,” Ali said, attributing their reluctance to the fact that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials were coming later in the day to announce a crackdown on the gang by local, state and federal agencies.

I went off on my own after a while, trying to find gang members. Call me naive, but I wanted to see what they had to say about race relations, what sucked them into gang life, what might get them out and why they thought it was OK to cordon off sections of the city for their exclusive use.

I had no luck in the end, and Ali’s news conference kind of fizzled too, devolving into a discussion of whether the agreement he had with gang members was a truce or a treaty and what it all meant in the end anyway.

“It ain’t gonna work,” 20-year-old Darren Brown told me. He was there because of his friendship with the family of a 14-year-old black girl shot to death Dec. 15, allegedly by Latino gang members. “The people who called the truce are nowhere to be seen,” Brown went on, so it isn’t worth anything.

We were across the street from Del Amo Market, which Brown said he had never been inside despite living three blocks away.

Why not? I asked.

“Fear of getting shot,” he said.

You don’t have to work hard in this neighborhood to find a story that flips things around the other way. Why do the black kids have to throw signs at people and curse, asked a 35-year-old woman named Alva, who gave me a tour of recent shooting sites and said two of the victims were Latino. And why did it take a black victim to bring in all this heavy artillery from the police and the media?

Ali walked by with the family of the 14-year-old who was killed, and Alva asked him why he hadn’t invited the family of the slain Latino man to his ceremony. Ali told her that family was welcome and so was every other family, and the whole point of his being there was to bring people together.

It’s a nice thought, but it’s going to take more than a truce or a treaty to stem the bloodshed in Harbor Gateway and across the city, and it’s also going to take more than the big guns and injunctions dragged out by the mayor and law enforcement officials Thursday.

Gang violence is going up citywide while overall crime goes down. In the San Fernando Valley, 2006 saw a 42% increase in gang-related crime. In Angelino Heights, residents are still in mourning over the death of a 9-year-old girl hit by a stray bullet last month, and law enforcement officials enraged them with the news that gang members who fired the bullet that killed her are not culpable because they shot in self-defense.

Go ahead and drop a hammer on the bad guys, says Connie Rice, who recently completed a city-financed report that warned of gang violence spreading into previously safe neighborhoods.

“But before you lower the boom, what you need to do is go in and let guys know we’ve got exit ramps for you if you don’t want that third strike,” Rice said. “We’ve got a bridge out. Job training. If you can’t read, we can help. If you’re on drugs, we can get you off that.”

Rice’s report said the city’s efforts are disorganized and under-powered, with little accountability for 23 scattered agencies that spend $82 million in city funds. Get it together, she said. Appoint a czar. Go after the toughest members of the nastiest gangs. But don’t expect much in the way of long-term success until suppression is backed up by smarter intervention and prevention.

City Councilman Tony Cardenas agreed. The chairman of a committee on gang violence called it the Hurricane Katrina of Los Angeles and said the city can’t expect state and federal officials to hand over money for intervention until it gets smarter on its own.

“The situation is out of hand,” Cardenas said. “Even firefighters and paramedics are getting shot at, and the reason to point this out is that we have a broad spectrum of victims we’re talking about. It’s not just poor people in poor communities. Everybody’s affected by this, and it’s a war that’s got to stop.”

We’ve got 40,000 gang members and only 61 gang intervention officers, Rice said.

Is it any wonder the gangs are in control?

If indeed the violence spreads to previously safe neighborhoods, it’ll put the problem on everyone’s radar screen. Maybe then we’ll be interested enough to discover that Rice is right when she says the cops can do only so much.

Although some gang members are sociopaths who need to be locked away for good, many are products of economic, educational, cultural and social forces that have destroyed families and communities. They grow up with absent dads and addicted moms in places where the manufacturing jobs of yesteryear gave way to a service economy that doesn’t buy you a house and barely pays the rent.

“If you don’t have a job for them, it’s over,” Rice said about what happens if you’re lucky enough to talk a kid out of a gang. “[Father] Greg Boyle is right. The only factor that has ever substantially reduced crime by gangs is jobs.”

She had a thought too on how to create them.

“You need a Manhattan Project to create violence-reduction jobs like the public works jobs from World War II,” she said, telling me Los Angeles has arrested 450,000 minors in the last 10 years and sent many of them off to prisons at tremendous public expense. “You create jobs because it’s a whole lot cheaper than what we’re doing now.”

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.