Antonio, Gangs and the State of the City

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.

It’s what the Harlem Children’s Zone project is starting to make work in a its targeted 100 block area in Harlem.

Obviously, no neighborhood ecology is getting a bigtime make-over in a year when LA has a $400 million dollar budget deficit. But, as Gang Czar Jeff Carr said when he talked to reporters a few hours before the mayor’s SOC, maybe this is a down payment on Connie Rice’s so-called “Marshall Plan” to address gang violence.

As it happens, the one or two examples that Villaraigosa brought up yesterday (as emblematic of the kind of thing he plans) were surprisingly smart ones. For instance, he said the city will follow lead set by Baldwin Village, which kept a single public recreation area open with classes and programs going until 2 am four days a week. He noted that assaults and violent crime in the area dropped precipitously in response.

Using that model, each GRZ will have one recreation area that is similarly open with “non-stop programming” four days a week. Granted, it’s only one more tiny piece of the violence reduction puzzle, but it’s an emblematic one. Give kids something positive to do, and they are less likely to take to the street. (This is, by the way, one of the first suggestions given by nearly every single gang member I’ve interviewed on the subject in the last two decades. When I ask a gangster what approach the city ought to take to help keep their little brothers and nephews out of gangs. “Give them something else to do,” they say. “You know, sports and recreation. They need to keep busy.” )

2. Not all of the prevention/intervention money will be allocated to the target zones. The $13 million that has been funding the unmonitored and unassessed LA Bridges programs (both Bridges I and Bridges II) are going to be reallocated to new programs to be cherry-picked for their effectiveness. Jeff Carr (who is the one who announced the folding of Bridges) made it clear that there are good existing programs that should reapply for funding. But the idea is a kind of zero-based programming that gets rid of the dead wood.

There will, of course, be plenty of political pressure to use that freed up money to fund various council members’ pet gang projects, but Just Say No. Please. If it it doesn’t demonstrably produce outcomes, don’t fund it. Which brings us to……

3. Measurement, measurement, measurement. Transparency, transparency, transparency. Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes.”We’ll measure what we we do,” said the mayor, “We’ll support what works. We’ll set clear, public and transparent goals, and we’ll open up our books to the rigorous scrutiny of our controller.”

Whatta concept, right? Transparent, outcomes based programs. But as we know, such pragmatic behavior is much too rare in government, be it city, state or national. All together the mayor’s initiatives would up the yearly funding for the city’s gang prevention and intervention programs from $19 million to to $24 million. A lot of eyes will be on the mayor’s office to see how well and effectively that money is used.

If Antonio just makes good on that one promise and all programs are subject to rigorous evaluation, we’ll have a real sea change here. “But evaluation is the key,” pal and gang policy expert Dr. Jorja Leap, reminded me after the speech. Exactly. Without evaluation we got nothin’.

One BIG, BIG word of caution, however: this is not to say we turn assessment over to the bean counters. Turning around a life, a neighborhood, a city is not a tidy process. It’s four steps forward, three-and-a-half back. Good professional evaluation knows how to take the realities of that process into account. Bean counters do not. Political pressure that wants results NOW really does not. So let’s evaluate intelligently, not ham-handedly.

As my mother used to say, let’s make sure we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Look, Villaraigosa’s no fool. He knows he’s got to have a big win somewhere. (Filling 400,000 more potholes than Jim Hahn did during the same period is nice. Don’t get me wrong. But it will not a second term make. And it sure won’t propel anybody to say….a serious run for the Governorship.)

AV lost the biggest part of the school takeover battle that was the centerpiece of his first State of the City speech. Then with last year’s speech, he set out a gang plan which no one took very seriously, and with good reason. Other than the law enforcement component, it was all smoke and mirrors—mainly because there was no money. We got ourselves a gang czar, which is good. Jeff Carr has gained a lot of respect by spending loads of time in the street, at crime scenes, and out in the communities, learning what was what. But he’s not had the power or the money to do much else.

Now all the gang resources are pretty much under one roof. This is the opportunity the city has needed to begin to form and implement a comprehensive gang policy. Let’s see what Antonio and the other Powers That Be do with it. (I’m looking at you too, City Council)

This morning more details will be announced. For instance, godfather of all California-based gang researchers, Dr. Malcolm Klein, has been asked to put together a system for assessing the six major risk factors that put a kid in danger of joining a gang.

Villaraigosa and Carr also have some specific ways they hope to engage community organizations in their strategy. And there is a plan to use some of the $24 million for a juvenile reentry program that will help kids to transition successfully into non-gang lives when they get out of County probation camps and/or the California Youth Authority. The idea is prevent young men and women from getting stuck in the revolving door that, at present, claims nearly 70 percent of the juveniles we lock up. All this and more is to be outlined at a 10:30 am press conference.

“Public safety is the first obligation of government,” Antonio said yesterday. “When you don’t have safe streets, everything falls apart. People become isolated. Kids turn into prisoners. Jobs evaporate. Families struggle just to survive. Public safety is the foundation of everything we are trying to build in the city of Los Angeles.”

Right. Now don’t screw it up.

*****************************************
You can watch the whole speech here.