One of this morning’s must reads is the Alex Kotlowitz article in today’s New York Times Magazine called Blocking the Transmission of Violence about gang violence as a public health problem.

The article is about the work of Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa, and who now has founded an organization called CeaseFire. “Slutkin,” writes Kotlowitz, “wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).”

So far, so good.

And Kotlowitz is one of the writers able to assess such a program with more clarity than most. He is the author of such much lauded books as,There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America.

According to Kotlowitz, Slutkin says that “….violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS,” and so “the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. …”

Slutkin’s chosen method to “stop the infection” is to use what he calls “interrupters,” hard core former gangsters and shot callers to step who step in to try to stop cycle of retaliation when violence occurs.

This method of hard core gang intervention, as it is called, is all the rage now—both in Chicago and in Los Angeles, and it is unfashionable to criticize it.

However if examined more closely, although Slutkin talks in terms of health and cures, on the face of it anyway, his approach is symptomatic, not curative at all.

Rather than stopping “the infection at it’s source,” maybe the better analogy for Slutkin’s work—and hard core gang intervention in general— is that of a tourniquet. If one stops the immediate bleeding maybe one can address the underlying illness, and there’s something to be said for that.

On the other hand, the approach is something of a slippery slope. It is a rule of thumb that to successfully mature out of the gang, most people find they need to move out of the neighborhood. Otherwise it’s just too difficult. With this in mind, metaphorically speaking, is it wise to send former alcoholics repeatedly into the bar to try to talk the other bar patrons out of drinking? Maybe. Maybe not. At present, the risk/benefit ratio still remains unclear.

There are many things about this approach that are controversial. But it is an approach that must be discussed. Here’s an excerpt:

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A story in this morning’s LA Times gives an intelligent, nuanced glimpse of some South LA gang unit officers who seem to demonstrate the kind of policing that we’d all like to see more of in this city. The writer, Joe Mozingo, and photographer Barbara Davidson also include a video as part of the story and unlike some of the Times earlier efforts, it works pretty well, and genuinely augments the printed reporting.

Here’s an excerpt:

…Los Angeles Police Department officer, Ryan Whiteman, turns down an alley where a gray-haired man in a maroon velour tracksuit is standing in a carport.

“Rudy, I know you don’t live here,” he says. “Why are you over here?”

Whiteman opens his door and hears the clink-clink of glass on asphalt. He drops his head. “Rudy, I know the sound of a crack pipe dropping. Give me that pipe!”

Rudy sheepishly walks it over. Whiteman shakes his head. “I just wanted to talk to you,” the officer says.

He scribbles out a citation as he wheedles information out of the man.

Whiteman is in the vanguard of a push to target hard-core gangs, not with sweeping paramilitary force but with aggressive, targeted enforcement by officers who know the players in the hood.

The mayor’s office and the LAPD are promising to consolidate thinly scattered anti-gang resources and pour them into 12 beleaguered neighborhoods — gang reduction zones — where intense suppression would be coupled with gang intervention and prevention programs.

That coupling reflects an epiphany of sorts, with law enforcement now voicing a refrain that has long been the lonely cry of civil libertarians and community activists: Street gangs are a social phenomenon that cannot simply be bludgeoned out of existence.

“What we’ve really had in the past is a mass incarceration strategy,” said Jeff Carr, L.A.’s deputy mayor for gang reduction and youth development. “We’ve locked a lot of people up and we still have this epidemic problem.”

In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that gang reduction zones would be the linchpin of his plan to overhaul the city’s anti-gang efforts. The goal is to build a network of agencies and nonprofits to lock up hard-core gangbangers, break cycles of retaliatory violence and keep troubled kids off the precipice.

So far eight of the zones are running, with only the law enforcement part in place. The prevention and intervention side of the equation has been in disarray for years, with programs dispersed through different departments and never evaluated to see if they worked.

The mayor is vowing to change that…..

When Bill Bratton talks abut policing smarter not harder, this appears to be a move in the direction of what he means, officers who are focused on the true troublemakers, not the people on the fringe. With luck the officers have gotten to know (and hopefully like) a community well enough to know the difference.

(photo by Barbara Davidson, LA Times.)

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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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If my schedule will cooperate, I’m going to try to sort through the various views of Special Order 40 and where LA ought to go with it from here. This includes the points of view of LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, City Councilman Dennis Zine and his proposal to amend SO40, the proposal contained in Jamiel’s Law (which is just a little different than what Zine is suggesting), the view taken by the Police Protective League, which in general supports Zine’s proposal.

In the meantime, take a look at this opinion piece in Sunday’s LA Times in which researcher Monica Varsanyi tells what 450 police chiefs across the country said when asked how they feel about cops doing immigration enforcement.

And be sure to read the compilation in this morning’s LA Times Opinion in which 40 “prominent Angelenos”—chosen from one end of the political spectrum to the other—sound off on Special Order 40.

UPDATE: I missed linking to Rick Orlov’s column on the issue, which is at least fun to read, while advancing the dialog

Here’s pieces of his Bratton quote:

(ABOUT ZINE & HIS MOTION)

“He has not had a conversation with anyone, including my leadership team. He talks so much about being a reserve officer, he should go to his commanding officer for clarification.”

(ABOUT SO 40 IN GENERAL)

“I don’t understand what’s so difficult. We don’t ask people their immigration status if they are not breaking the law. Once they are arrested, we check to make sure they are in the country legally.”

“Our priority is going after gangbangers,” Bratton said. “Once they are arrested, we check their immigration status and if they are in the country illegally, turn it over to ICE.”

I love when Bratton gets on his high horse. (I’m not being ironic here. I actually do.)

And here’s Councilman Dennis Zine:

“This chief doesn’t think anything needs to be changed,” Zine said. “Ask any 10 officers on the street and they will tell you they don’t know what to do with Special Order 40. They feel they can’t do anything.”

Which suggests that Bill Bratton’s right; it’s not a legal issue, it’s a training issue. The problem isn’t with Special Order 40, it’s with the rank and file’s knowledge of it—-meaning the training and oversight on the matter is faulty.

But….although I’ve taken a POV on the issue before, I’m willing to concede that its a complex matter with various valid perspectives to consider. So I’ll continue to gather puzzle pieces for further discussion.

PS: I’ve put in a call to the LAPPL for clarification of their stand. Back with more on that tomorrow or the next day.

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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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We’ve now seen more than a week’s worth of politically charged emotional fiction pouring from sources ranging from KFI AM radio screamers John and Ken, to author Earl Ofari Hutchinson in yesterday’s LA Times op ed, to a new online column by Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic Monthly. All contain the message that murdered football star Jamiel Shaw would likely not have died were it not for the restrictions of Special Order 40—the 1979 police mandate adopted by then LAPD Chief Darryl Gates that prevents officers from questioning people solely to determine their immigration status or arresting them solely for violations of immigration law.

Here’s how those master’s of veracity John and Ken put it:

If Special Order 40 didn’t stand in the way, the illegal would have been deported, and Jamiel would be alive. It’s as simple as that. We say that Mayor Villar, Chief Bratton and the City Council have blood on their hands!

But let’s review the facts, shall we?
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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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This is how it always happens. There is a high profile killing of a kid whose death breaks our hearts and we put pressure on lawmakers to Do Something to ease our collective pain and rage. In reaction to this pressure, bad laws are passed and loathsome state initiatives are voted into being.

The death of Polly Klass produced California’s Three Strikes law The cocaine-triggered death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias produced the mandatory mimimums and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and resulted in the filling of our prisons.

And now we have the searing heartbreak of the death of high school football star Jamiel Shaw–which has stimulated as a brand new push to make his death feel less horrible, less pointless, less painful……by taking a giant, irrational chunk out of Special Order 40.

It seems that the gang member who allegedly killed Jamiel was a 19-year undocumented Central American who had been brought to the US as a toddler, joined the 18th Street gang as an adolescent, then got himself locked up a weapons charge. When the time came fror his release, the LA Country jail officials, rather than turning him over to the Feds for deportation as Federal law demands, they simply let him let him out—no immigration checks, no nothing.

Now Jamiel’s family, wants the City Council to pass as a “modification” of Special Order 40 that would allow police to question anyone who is a gang member and then to turn them over to INS.

Today, council member Dennis Zine, who usually is a bit more sensible than most, will introduce this badly thought out motion to the city council.

So lets see….how exactly would this work? If the cops run into a 15 year old wanabee who has committed no crime but whom an officer or two thinks might be a gang member do they get to turn them over to INS? Will they turn over their mothers, dads, and younger sisters too, or just the 15 year old?

And who gets to decide who is a gang member? Will we use Cal Gang as our arbiter—nevermind that the gang database that is known for its howling inaccuracies?

We have a federal law on the books that, had it been enforced, would have resulted in the deportation of the screwed up young man who took Jamiel Shaw’s life away. We don’t need poorly conceived amendments that will usher in a host of unintended consequences (as poorly conceived out laws and the like always do).

But, hey, why be logical?

Of course, what we really need is comprehensive gang prevention and intervention programs. (Not to harp on this issue.)

Maybe if we tried harder with prevention and intervention we could have saved both Jamiel Shaw and his killer.

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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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