Fact and fiction on L.A.’s mean streets

Pop quiz: What do these things have in common?

1) Too many of Los Angeles’ many anti-gang programs.

2) The memoir by a white/Native American foster girl about growing up among the gangs of South L.A. that turned out to be faked by a white, private-school Valley girl.

Answer: Both the programs and the memoir have gotten warm praise. Both have fine intentions (the fake-memoir writer felt “there was good that I could do” by writing it). Both got healthy checks (something under $100,000 for her; about $80 million a year for L.A.’s anti-gang projects). And both managed to get by with nobody really challenging whether they were what they said they were.

Former creative writing student Margaret Seltzer -- I know, very creative -- has been judged and dispatched to literary Siberia. But what has the city done about gang programs that may be less than they seem?

As you’d expect, not what it should. City Controller Laura Chick’s recent report spanking the city’s mishmash mess of gang prevention and intervention efforts follows other studies stretching back into the mists of bureaucratic time, all saying the same thing: There’s too little money, spread piecemeal among too many disjointed operations. A boy is killed in the Valley; the city finds dough for an anti-gang program there. A baby is murdered in South L.A.; another wad of money for a different program.

Programs use different yardsticks, or none at all, to measure success, and they answer to no single authority. Last month, a “reformed” gangbanger, beneficiary of $1.5 million in city dough for his “No Guns” anti-gang organization, was sent away for eight years for peddling semiautomatic weapons illegally.

Some programs get parceled out like congressional earmarks: to make everyone happy, not because they work.

Eight years ago, when Mayor Richard Riordan agreed with Controller Rick Tuttle that the LA Bridges anti-gang project needed to be shut and overhauled, some 300 LA Bridges supporters and contractors packed City Hall for the vote. And LA Bridges just kept rollin’ along.

A year earlier, the council had OKd a $300,000 consultant to figure out whether LA Bridges was helping. When Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina’s husband’s company didn’t get the job, he complained that he wasn’t getting a fair shake because of “who I’m married to” -- and the council OKd $100,000 to start the process all over again.

Does this look like kids’ needs are No. 1?

Chick’s idea for whipping things into shape is a tough-love Hallmark card message to the City Council and departments: If you love anti-gang programs, let them go. Put them all in the hands of someone in the mayor’s office, maybe the gang czar, but give that person the real power that “czar” implies. The bucks and the responsibility must start and stop at the top.

“You need to end the tradition of dysfunctional politics mixed with these social service programs,” Chick told me, “and try to stop handing out money based on entitlements where agencies are built around the fact that they know the money will keep coming and are never held accountable for success or failure.”

Margaret Seltzer -- who told a reporter that she’d worked to reduce gang violence in L.A. but didn’t say how -- almost got away with her fake memoir because any outrage you can make up, the gangs can make real. Six-year-olds, infants, a minister praying in a phone booth get gunned down. Last week, a college-bound 17-year-old football star was murdered three doors from home. With so many dead, we sometimes report them by the Guinness Book method -- the oldest victims, the youngest, the most promising.

When I tried to reach Councilman Tony Cardenas, who heads the city’s committee on gang violence and youth development, he was in his car in his driveway telling his 15-year-old son that the boy couldn’t wait at a bus stop to go to an event at a skateboard shop -- it was too dangerous. “I don’t want to treat my kid like that. I don’t want to be the councilman who admits to his son that I don’t feel you’re safe in my city -- that’s terrible.”

So what to do? My vote is no more autopilot budgeting for gang programs. They need warranties like the ones on cars, and expiration dates like the ones on milk. Prove themselves or the money plug gets pulled.

Thomas Shaw is 9 years old. He’s the little brother of that star football player. And he asked their father, “Dad, are they going to kill me too?”

What do you say to that? “I hope not”? Thomas is why we need anti-gang programs, and why those programs need a single authority and single standard to measure up to. Otherwise, we might as well just give the kids those millions of dollars. They can paste them over their chests to try to stop the bullets.