Mayor, act now to stop the gangs

I’m up in the San Fernando Valley talking to a small and wiry 15-year-old kid who says he’s expecting the call any day now -- the one telling him he’s going to be “jumped in,” or forced to fight as his official induction into a gang.

He got involved with the gang when he was in juvenile detention, he tells me, where gang members rule and never let up on recruiting. He asks me to call him Steven instead of his real name when I write about him. He’s got enough trouble, he says, without me spotlighting him.

Now that he’s back home, he says, a big part of him wants to do right by his mother and stay out of trouble. But it’s all around him.

Which way will he go?

I met with Steven at the West Valley Leadership Academy in Canoga Park, where director Paul D. White insists there are ways to save Steven and any other kid who wants to steer clear of gang life. While I was in the Valley, I also met with William “Blinky” Rodriguez, who runs Communities in Schools in North Hills and says he too knows how to make a difference.

I’ll listen to anybody who thinks he can help slow this run of violence. It seems like another kid goes down almost every night, and there’s more squabbling than problem-solving at City Hall.

The streets have changed for the worse, said Rodriguez, whose 16-year-old son was gunned down in front of Sylmar High in 1990. With many older gangsters locked up, he said, thousands of school dropouts are running the streets without supervision from parents or marching orders from gang bosses.

“There’s a lot of testosterone out there,” he said. “And guns are out of control. Who’s going to deal with the NRA? Who’s got the cojones for that?”

Rodriguez believes in strong policing. But he says there isn’t enough focus on prevention and intervention. Kids need alternatives to gangs, he said. His staff of 10 organizes athletic activities and goes into schools and other locations in an attempt to talk kids out of trouble and into jobs, but a recent cut in city funding makes him feel like he’s using “a water gun to fight a raging blaze.”

White went further, calling out everyone from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to President Bush and religious leaders, accusing them of blowing vast fortunes on useless studies, expert panels, weak-willed czars and programs that don’t work.

He even took a shot at programs like Rodriguez’s and the venerated Homeboys gang intervention operation run by Father Greg Boyle, calling them “gangster clubhouses” that “dignify” gangs.

“The problem is not gang members,” said White, the author of “White’s Rules: Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time.” “The problem is that we have inane programs and inane people running them,” and solving the problems of gang violence “is not a priority” despite decades of lip service.

Most gang members want out, White says. The first step in a successful strategy should be to focus on them and forget the others. The plan he describes is radical, commonsensical and in some cases untenable if not impossible, but still provocative.

He would require parenting classes for every adult whose child is convicted of gang-related activity, and religious organizations would be recruited to provide free, quality day care for single mothers under 21 who need to be in school or at work.

Schools are part of the problem, White says, with administrators turning campuses over to gangsters in order to keep funding, which is based on daily attendance. Instead, he says, gang-style clothing should be banned at schools, and parents and students should boycott any school that isn’t safe.

Another problem, he says, is the county probation system, which now serves as a gangster academy. He thinks the federal government needs to take it over.

“We’re in the public relations capital of the world,” White said, arguing that politicians and celebrities should get behind a citywide “jumping out” campaign, with billboards all over L.A. listing an 800 phone number any child can call for help in avoiding trouble on the streets.

White and Rodriguez might not agree on everything. But both have been on the front lines for years, and if we’re ever going to reverse these deadly trends, we’ll need their best ideas and everyone else’s too. And we’ll need someone to take responsibility for implementing them.

At Tuesday’s funeral for Jamiel Shaw, the 17-year-old L.A. High football star gunned down 10 days ago, Mayor Villaraigosa had this to say of Shaw:

“I think he’d tell us that we have to offer more than words of remembrance. I think he’d tell us to remember with our actions.”

Why wait another day, Mr. Mayor?

Instead of spreading yourself so thin that nothing of import ever seems to get done in Los Angeles, make gang violence your top priority. End the feuding over who’s in charge of what. Get to the bottom of what works, and make it stronger. Take the lead, because I’m sitting with a 15-year-old kid in Canoga Park who could go either way, and he’s one of thousands.

Steven is telling me he didn’t like White’s rules when he got to his academy: Hike up your pants, hit the books, get a job, don’t lie, no drugs or alcohol, no violence, no gangs. But by the second day, he was already thinking he could handle the call he expects from his gang recruiter. He says he’s considering telling him he’s changed his mind about banging.

“And if you call this number again, you’re going to have a problem.”

Sure, he says, that could be a risky move. But not as risky as the alternative.

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steve.lopez@latimes.com