Community Gang Cops
Celeste Fremon

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.)
Posted in Gangs, LAPD, Los Angeles Times |
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