When the LA Times snatched David Zahniser from the LA Weekly last summer, it was a very, very smart move. Dave Z is extremely intelligent, savvy and skeptical—particularly about City Hall.

So, after Antonio Villaraigosa delivered his State of the City speech last Monday, I figured I could afford to look on the bright side of AV’s gang plan (which I looked at here and here), because I knew I could count David to mad dog it, so to speak.

Yesterday, his first round of analyses came out in an article that focuses on the main thing that could reduce Antonio’s gang strategy to rubble—-or more accurately to business as usual (and not in a good way).

In a word: Evaluations.

I spoke with David on Friday as he was still wrestling with where he wanted to go with his analysis of the gang plan. (That’s one of the excellent things about him. He’s not afraid to wrestle mightily until he finds the right thread to follow.)

You can find the article that resulted here. Below I’ve excerpted a few relevant clips:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a splash when he announced plans last week for ending L.A. Bridges, an anti-gang initiative under fire since the Riordan administration for failing to demonstrate clear results.

….in dropping the L.A. Bridges programs and shifting the money to his appointed “gang czar,” Villaraigosa put off yet again answering one key question: Are these programs, which last year received $13.2 million, successful in quelling violence and keeping kids out of gangs?

When Villaraigosa’s proposed budget is made public today, it is expected to offer an additional $7.2 million to gang prevention and intervention programs, allowing the same contractors who ran programs under L.A. Bridges the opportunity to apply for even more money.

Because the anti-gang efforts are being redesigned, a full evaluation of those programs won’t be practical until at least 2010, said Deputy Mayor Jeff Carr, the city’s gang czar.

What??? Didn’t the mayor promise he would hold all of his gang programs to a rigorous outcomes-based standard? And now many of the much criticized gang prevention and intervention programs operating under the umbrellas known as LA Bridges I & II, may have the chance to get funded all over again…..with no evaluations for another two years or more????

Among the problems with Bridges is that many City Council members have long had their pet programs within it, and have resisted seeing them too closely scrutinized.

Dave Z details a disheartening history of people who were told—explicitly or implicitly—that they couldn’t evaluate LA Bridges—ranging from former City Controller Rick Tuttle, to today’s Controller Laura Chick, to Connie Rice, to my pal Jorja Leap.

In 2000, the program came under fire from then-City Controller Rick Tuttle, who said it was so poorly run that it should be shut down. The council responded by denouncing Tuttle — and demanding that L.A. Bridges stay put.

“I knew it was a bad idea 10 years ago, the way Bridges was going,” Tuttle said last week, looking back on the fight.

City officials received an evaluation of L.A. Bridges’ intervention programs two years later, which found that one city contractor had taken two teens out of gangs. Meanwhile, gang-prevention contracts were so lax that workers could meet the city’s requirements by taking certain children to a baseball game and a picnic in a 12-month period, Carr said.

[SNIP]

“Los Angeles has historically awarded agencies multiple contracts year after year after year without holding them accountable by tying the dollars to proof that the desired results have been achieved,” [Chick] wrote in her report.

Here’s how Jorja lays it out:

Leap said she offered the Community Development Department a free review of L.A. Bridges four years ago and got nowhere. But she voiced hope that results would be measured this time around, using basic questions such as: Has a targeted child stayed in school? What is their attendance record? Were they placed on the state’s gang database?

If the city fails to evaluate its redesigned programs, support for such initiatives will evaporate, Leap added.

“This is it,” she said. “If they blow this, it’s over.”

Look: We want and need the mayor’s program to succeed. And we don’t expect overnight miracles. But we do expect some kind of reasonable accountability and measurability—and we’ll keep demanding it until we get it.

Photo by Gina Ferazzi, LA Times

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After watching a shockingly hideous Democratic debate last night (What is wrong< with Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous????)…..let’s turn to the local:

Wednesday night I was on Warren Olney’sWhich Way LA? with Councilwoman Janice Hahn (plus LA Gang Czar Jeff Carr, and activist Charlotte Austin-Jordan, a woman who’s lost 2 kids to gang violence), and, in the course of the show, Hahn made an important promise.

The show had to do with the mayor’s gang plan introduced on Monday at the State of the City speech, which came on the heels of last week’s decision by the city council-–after endless turf battles—to move all of LA’s gang intervention and prevention money and programs to the mayor’s office, as had been strongly recommended by City Controller Laura Chick.

Hahn was on the show in particularly to discuss her support of a November ballot measure that would ask LA residents to pay three dollars a person per month toward gang violence prevention and intervention programs, a tax that could generate an additional $30 million a year. (On Monday, Hahn and Councilwomen Jan Perry and Wendy Greuel announced that they’d joined together to form what they are calling Mothers Against Gang Violence in order to push the three-buck a person ballot proposal.)

Certainly, with the city facing a $400 million deficit this year, an additional $30 million more for the desperately needed programs is a great idea- –especially now that we’ve got the beginnings of a coherent gang plan that will be administered under one roof. But, Hahn’s fundraising gambit begged a question: would politics as usual still call the shots should the measure be passed?

In other words: now that the City Council has been boxed into handing over control of the city’s gang money, would Janice Hahn try to yank that new $30 mil into the council’s pocket? Or would she put turf wars aside and hand it all over to the mayor?

Earlier in the week, I’d discussed the issue with one of Hahn’s aides, and he told me that he honestly didn’t know.

So toward the end of the Wednesday night’s show, I brought up the issue and said I hoped that the Councilwoman would do the latter. At that juncture, Warren Olney jumped it and asked her directly.

There was a pause, and then Janice Hahn, to her credit, showed leadership and made the right commitment.

“Absolutely,” she said.

So there you have it. After two years of turf wars over gangs….actual progress.

NOTE: LA City Beat has an interesting interview with Laura Chick about gangs and city hall turf wars.

ALSO, you can listen to the show here.

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PS: What kind of person asks a presidential candidate questions like: “Does Jeremiah Wright love America as much as you?”

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NOTE: I’LL BE DISCUSSING ALL THIS along with Gang Czar Jeff Carr and some others on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA tonight at 7 pm, KCRW, 89.9.) Just heard it’s been preempted by a special. May air tomorrow. Will let you know. (UPDATE: was just interviewed by KNX News, which will likely be on tomorrow morning.)

Maybe there was Kool-aid in my coffee yesterday, but for me this was the State of the City speech where Antonio Villaraigosa got a lot of it right—at least when it came to the gang policy part of the address, which was, as expected, the speech’s centerpiece.

The set-up was corny. Villaraigosa walked to the podium at 5 pm yesterday at the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters to the strains of Stevie Wonder’s Living for the City. He exited to Marvin Gaye’s Aint No Mountain High Enough. In between, he talked about traffic, the environment, education, law enforcement, summer jobs for youth, hate crimes, potholes, and how to solve the city’s record-breaking budget woes. (The LA Times has a rundown here.)

But gangs and public safety was the main event, and the primary broadstrokes were the following:

1. The city will focus on twelve gang reduction zones And, while we don’t have the money to really blanket those hot spot neighborhoods with programs and services, the mayor has freed up some bucks in the hope of doing some smart and focused prevention and intervention work.

Last year there were eight Gang Reduction Zones (or GRZs as they call ‘em for short). This year there will be twelve. The difference is that, last year, the GRZs were primarily places for law enforcement and related agencies to focus their attention. This year, the city is to allot $1.5 million dollars in prevention and intervention money for each of those zones. That’s not a lot of funding. But if those $1.5 mil chunks are allocated intelligently, not politically, they can make a difference.

Nobody who’s really studied the issue doubts that the target zone approach is a big piece of the prevention/intervention puzzle—even if all the resources aren’t yet there to do it correctly. Every gang reduction report in the last two years—from Connie Rice’s, to Laura Chick’s to the sheriff’s report, to the recommendations prepared for the LA Board of Sups—have emphasized the need for blanketing certain neighborhoods with resources in order to begin to change the “ecology” of the city’s poorest and most violent communities. If one bothered to read it, that’s what Connie Rice’s report said in it’s 100 plus (slightly mind-numbing) pages.

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At his 2006 State of the City address, Antonio Villaraigosa officially announced that he was going to attempt to assume oversight of Los Angeles Schools—a bid that crashed and burned when the local Superior Court declared the mayor’s plan counter to the state constitution, an opinion that was affirmed by the State Court of Appeals.

In 2007, the SOC speech focused on gang violence with a plan that featured such PR ploys as the 10 most wanted gang members list and the 11 Worst gangs list. Yet, despite much talk about millions for gang prevention and intervention programs, little new money few new programs actually materialized.

At 5 pm today at Parker Center Villaraigosa will give one more State of the City address to announce, among other things, his new new gang prevention/intervention and suppression strategy.

This morning’s LA Times editorial has some appropriate tips and cautionary notes for the mayor as he lays out his plan to address this and other issues that will face the city during the final year of his term.

The mayor is on the spot as never before. He has taken direct control of gang programs previously scattered across the city organizational chart. The total cost comes in at about $19 million — a tiny fraction of the investment that’s needed, and a mere sliver of the city’s budget — but those programs now become a test case for mayoral leadership, not simply for decreasing the scourge of gang violence but for demonstrating that he can make City Hall work. Villaraigosa must, once and for all, publicly set criteria and a timeline for evaluating each of those programs. That runs against his nature: He champions many initiatives but rarely offers benchmarks for judging their success.

This time, the mayor should be prepared, in six months at most, to demonstrate which programs work and eliminate those that do not. He cannot simply present one more report expressing exasperation at the lack of accountability. He cannot, as he did after his State of the City speech a year ago when announcing the “10 most wanted,” resort to gimmickry. He must demonstrate that City Hall can be effective not just with programs within his own office, or in the LAPD, but in every city department. And he must do this while articulating clearly for wary residents where he intends to take Los Angeles development, transportation and education. As he begins the final year of his first term, Villaraigosa must demonstrate that he can deliver.

Yep.

UPDATE: For those who’d like to watch Antonio talk but don’t plan to show up at Parker Center at 5 PM, you can catch the mayor’s speech live via the web here. Or if you’re within LA City, you can watch it live on LA Cityview 35 (check your local cable carrier to find out what channel that is in your area).

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Well it’s settled, signed sealed and delivered, written in stone…and thoroughly peed on by all who felt the need to make their mark on the thing:

Just before 1 pm today, the Los Angeles City Council voted to officially take all the city’s gang prevention and intervention programs and move the whole kit and kaboodle to the mayor’s office for oversight.

In act of transparent face-saving, Councilman Tony Cardenas made the needed motion using glowing terms that suggested that the idea of shifting control of the programs from the City Council to Villaraigosa’s office was his all along—never mind the fact that he’s been fighting the idea tooth, nail and press release ever since Controller Laura Chick made the transfer recommendation in her February report.

It was Controller Laura’s contention (and Connie Rice’s before her) that having the programs strewn among various city agencies made adequate oversight impossible (hence things like the No Guns scandal). Chick further pointed out that, if the city’s budget-challenged gang funds were to be used effectively, they needed to be consolidated under a single roof, and the most logical roof was that of the mayor’s office.

Cardenas, who has positioned himself as the Council’s gang guy (and despite his annoying behavior seems to genuinely care about the issue), is the chair of the Ad-Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development, a body that has managed in 2 years to do little more than spawn a gang intervention subcommittee, which itself spent nearly a full 11 months settling on a definition of gang intervention—and not a very good one at that. (I say this with all kindness and affection since some of the gang intervention players I most like and respect are on this $#$&^%$#* subcommittee, but too many cooks…..yadda, yadda, yadda.)

Yet, despite the fact that his own committee was displaying increasing signs of terminal dysfunction, Cardenas refused to cede power (and accompanying budget) to the mayor.

A City Hall source told me today that City Council Prez Eric Garcetti was the main person who managed to sit Cardenas down and slap some sense into him about abandoning his increasingly indefensible turf battle.

There was also another teensy, weensy event on the horizon that prodded Cardenas to cease his non-stop roadblocking. And that was the inconvenient fact that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reportedly intends to make gang violence reduction the center piece of his State of the City message to be delivered on Monday. And once the mayor put forth his own gang plan, Cardenas territorial foot-dragging would look more foolish than ever.

Faced with the aforementioned realities, yesterday Cardenas said the equivalent of “maybe. I’ll think about it,” as David Zahniser at the LA Times reported here.

But, what David Z did not spell out is that Cardenas demanded a 18-22 month “sunset clause,” which would have meant that at the end of 18 months or two years, even if the programs were working just swimmingly under the mayor, they would automatically revert back to council control.

In response to this so-called compromise Chick rightly said, .Oh, he-e-ell, no (or words to that effect)

So today Cardenas finally read the political graffiti on the wall, got religion, and embraced he relevant motion that authorized a transfer of power (with a review but not a Sunset clause), as if it was his baby all along.

“The Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development has been meeting regularly for over two years carefully reviewing all gang intervention, prevention, re-entry and youth development programs [and so on and so on and so on]….” began the motion.

“We have come to the conclusion that it is necessary for the Los Angeles City Council to move toward the immediate restructuring and consolidation of gang intervention……. [blah, blah, blah]….”authorize the Mayor to begin the consolidation of…”

You get the picture.

In other words, Tony Cardenas did the right thing for the wrong reasons. But that’s okay. With gang members still daily blowing horrific holes in the lives of LA families and communities and throwing away their own futures in the process, we’ll take this much needed move any way we can get it.

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PS: The shape of new agency at the mayor’s office has yet to be outlined. Will LA Gang Czar Jeff Carr run the thing? While smart, sincere, honorable and knowledgeable, Carr has yet to distinguish himself as the savvy political player needed to lead such an endeavor, so some feel that having a strong administrator to support Carr’s field and inter-agency liaison work might be a good combo.

Likely we’ll know more on Monday. So stay tuned.

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In an era of dire city and state budget slashing, LA City Controller Laura Chick released a report today that shows how the LAPD could get at least 500 more officers out from behind desks and on to the street by filling those same positions with civilian employees—who, as it turns out, cost an average of $29,000 a year less than sworn officers. Some of the positions include public information officers, front desk and security staff, court liaisons and the like.

This is one of those cases where no one’s been thinking clearly, it seems. Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton have been, quite rightly, trying to hold on to the money needed to hire additional police officers for our drastically underpoliced city. But they are doing so in the face of budget amputations that will be draconian for other city agencies.

(For instance, unless something changes, it has been reported that with $2 million cut from the city library system, LA’s libraries will be unable to buy any new books. None. At all.)

But, during all this push for cop hiring, there has been a freeze on civilian hiring in the department, meaning that more and more cops are behind more and more desks, which is just dumb, said Chick in press conference today (although I don’t believe she used quite those words.) Chick pointed out that step one needs to be an unfreeze on civilian hires, so that the uniformed men and women can be moved out from behind counters and desks and on to the street—which is where most of them would prefer to be anyway.

“We do not need hundreds of police officers, at a cost of $30,000 a year more than a properly trained civilian, performing administrative functions that do not require carrying a firearm. While Chief Bratton has made major progress in deploying our officers more effectively, this report challenges us to fully engage in smarter 21st Century policing,” said Chick.

UPDATE: The LA Times’ Joel Rubin has taken the time to wade through the finer details of the 200 plus-page report and has a very good rundown here.

Bratton is reportedly down for it. And anyone with any sense should be too. The union has not weighed in yet. But we trust that they will see this correctly. ( Right guys?)

UPDATE: Okay, Tim Sands did release a message that states (I think) that he mostly agrees: with Chick, but it is so cautious and pretzeled that it’s difficult to tell.

This is the second smart report in a row from Chick. (Her gang report, on which there has STILL been no action, was very good and sensible as well.)

GO LAURA!

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In this morning’s LA Times, Tim Rutten has a worthwhile, if somewhat unorganized column in which he talks about the fact that law enforcement alone can’t solve the gang problem (which everyone with any sense, including our police chief and our sheriff, has been saying for years).

But Rutten has another point to make. He writes that, although two city-commissioned reports (each costing megabucks) have told us in detail what kinds of gang intervention and prevention strategies the city ought to be supporting for maximum effectiveness, due to political squabbling and turf battles among city officials, nobody’s very likely to convert the recommendations into action anytime in the near future.

(At least that’s generally what he said. Rutten’s column was littered with some strange analogies that, at moments, tended to muddy his thesis.)

Here are a few clips.

Gang violence is to Los Angeles politics as the weather is to conversation: Everybody talks about it, and nobody ever does anything about it.

Policing occasionally provides a temporary surcease, [surcease???] as it did last week when a drive-by murder next to a grammar school playground and a subsequent shootout between heavily armed gunmen and Los Angeles Police Department officers paralyzed parts of two neighborhoods northeast of downtown for hours. Early Wednesday morning, a police sweep apprehended 19 alleged gang members and seized guns and drugs.

But though the department is willing to take on gang violence where it becomes particularly virulent, treating this solely as a policing issue is a bit like asking the overextended, understaffed LAPD to engage in an endless game of Whac-a-Mole.

[SNIP]

Every few years, our political establishment runs out of ways to look away and begins demanding another study, a fresh approach, a new initiative. First came an assessment of Los Angeles’ anti-gang efforts commissioned by the City Council and written last year by civil rights attorney Connie Rice.

She’s one of those civic activists who is both principled and shrewd, but the report is a dead letter. It’s more than 100 pages long and demands new programs by the carload.

[SNIP]

Meanwhile, City Controller Laura Chick this month issued her own audit of ongoing anti-gang efforts. She doesn’t see a need for any new funds, but she wants to reallocate money from some programs and consolidate all of them under a single anti-gang czar, who would report directly to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He likes the idea, as do Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Police Chief William J. Bratton.

Chick’s proposal, however, is unlikely to go any further than Rice’s because it’s opposed by Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs the Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development.

Ironic that good gang policies are falling victim to bickering about who controls what “territory” between the supposed adults.

Anyway, read the rest here.

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Yesterday evening I was on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA talking about the mayor’s school reform plan and the recent vote that took place on Tuesday allowing him to take three high schools—Santee, Roosevelt and Jordan, and most of the middle schools that feed into them—under his mayoral wing.

The mayor is positioning this takeover as a partnership, meaning that he is involving the larger LA community both monitarily (He’s raised $50 million dollars toward the schools transformation he hopes to accomplish) and in terms of services. This is a smart idea in that it suggests an understanding of the scope of the challenges he faces, which assuredly require an all hands on deck approach.

I don’t come on until about halfway through the show, but the person truly worth listening to is Jordan High School social studies teacher, Mark Gonzalez, who outlined the all difficulties that his students at watts-located Jordan deal with daily. It was a formidable list.

Here’s the link:

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