The Million-Dollar “To Do” List

Admittedly this is an LA-centric story. But its theme has broader implications.

According to the Daily News, LA’s city controller, Laura Chick, announced last Friday that she would ask the Los Angeles City Council for a half million dollars to “develop a comprehensive approach to stemming the city’s gang problem.”

It should be mentioned that our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, already has his gang plan. And, two months ago, the City Council received its own 131-page “comprehensive citywide gang reduction strategy,” researched and written at a cost of $600,000 by civil rights attorney, Connie Rice, and her Advancement Project.
(For those who don’t know, yes they are related. Connie [Constance] Rice and Condi [Condoleeza] Rice are cousins.)

Anyway, it seems that Laura told the City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development that her plan will further develop Connie’s plan into “… a very clear and very direct path to how does the city do it right,”. (As opposed to what? A meandering path?)

Okay, so let’s review: If Laura gets a green light from the council this means the city will spend a total of $1.1 million to analyze what to do about gang violence, then re-analyze the analysis.

In truth, Laura Chick is a bright and generally levelheaded woman. We like that she goes around auditing and quantifying things for us. She is, after all, our city controller; it’s what we expect of her.

But when she or any other elected official appears to be substituting expensive “reports” and “studies’ for actual problem-solving action, it makes us feel irritable.

So to save us and Laura from such grief and irritation, I’ve got a better idea. How about we skip this new report, and I’ll write out a nice, sensible ten-item To Do list, specifically aimed at reducing gang violence without spending another half million on PowerPoints. Admittedly, my strategy’s not as thorough as Connie’s. But, it’s a much speedier read. Plus it’s implementation-ready. No additional focus group or blue ribbon committee required:

WITNESS LA’S VERY DIRECT (AND NOT AT ALL MEANDERING) TEN POINT GANG VIOLENCE REDUCTION PLAN

POINT ONE: It’s about the schools, stupid. A little over a year ago, we were horrified to learn that the Los Angeles Unified School District has a fifty percent drop out rate. At the city’s worst performing high schools like Locke, Jordan, Fremont and Jefferson, the numbers are much grimmer. And so what do we imagine those multi hundreds of kids do once they leave the classroom behind? Disaffected adolescents with too little sense of purpose, and too much time on their hands, are likely to find new hobbies. And, chances are, you and I won’t like those hobbies.

Put another way, there’s a direct and tragic path from failing schools to the juvenile justice system. Fix the schools, and you’re part way at least, at least, to fixing the problem
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POINT TWO: When it comes to gang violence, mental health is the elephant in the middle of the room. Now by that I don’t mean mental illness. I mean lack of health—i.e. the after affects of childhood abuse, physical and/or sexual. Depression. Post traumatic stress…. Severe anxiety. Every study of the kids languishing in juvenile facilities tells us that a terrifyingly high percentage of them are suffering from the emotional effects of some severe trauma or other. First the trauma of an abusive family withers a kid’s hopes and aspirations. Then post traumatic stress, produced by seeing friends killed and other acts of violence, increases the damage exponentially. Yet, there is very little in the way of public policy that seems to recognize or address these facts at all.

POINT THREE: Above all, mentoring. In nearly seventeen years of reporting on gangs, I’ve learned that, if there is one silver bullet on the prevention and intervention holster, it is caring adults who pay attention. Mentoring doesn’t solve everything, but it’s the keystone. If kids don’t have someone in their lives (preferably several someones) who repeatedly tell them they are precious and irreplaceable, there’ll be hell to pay later. A kid without hope is a dangerous kid. Mentoring saves lives. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over. No kidding. Everybody seems to want a gang czar. What about a mentoring czar? If we genuinely want make a dent in this mess called gang violence, we need a city-wide mentoring drive. All hands on deck.

POINT FOUR: Nothing stops a bullet like a job. Alright, we know that. What was once considered an over-the-top, bleeding-heart notion is now, thankfully, conventional wisdom. The problem is, not enough people are willing to hire the guys (and young women) who most need hiring. Programs like Streetlights and PV Jobs that provide training and placement for “disadvantaged” youth and adults, are fabulously—and quantifiably—effective, but they are few and far between. We give tax breaks to companies who hire folks off public assistance, why not to those who hire homeboys and homegirls?

POINT FIVE: More cops. More cops. More cops. (Did I mention more cops?) Yes, the LAPD now has approximately 9,300 sworn officers. It’s still not enough. When you have more adults on the playground, the kids behave better. It’s that simple. (And the officers behave better too, because they aren’t forced, by default, into a command and control model.) Suppression is only one third of the holy trinity of prevention, intervention and suppression. But it’s a third we can’t live without. Back in the spring of 2003, when demoralized officers developed their “smile and wave”/minimum enforcement stance as a protest against then-Chief Bernard Parks’ complaint policy, gang violence shot through the roof. Even the homeboys wanted the cops back. Times have improved, yet if we expect the police to apprehend the truly bad guys who cause most of the harm, we need to give them adequate resources to do it.

POINT SIX: While we’re on the subject of police….Look, I know the department and the mayor are infatuated with such gee-whiz strategies as Most Wanted lists and multi-agency task forces. But an effective long-term gang enforcement approach has to involve community policing. And real community policing, by definition, requires a different sort of relationship between the police and the populace than we presently have—or have ever had— in this city. Recently, an upper level LA County Deputy Sheriff told me that he was convinced the key to good community policing was for every officer to volunteer a certain number of off-duty hours in the community where he worked. (This is going to sound like a detour, but stay with me here.) For example, officers could, say, mentor wannabe gang members.

(Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger once talked about trying out a version of this idea when he was heading up South Bureau. He figured such volunteering would pay off in a multitude of ways for all concerned.) First of all, the city gets more mentors. But, more importantly, it fosters deeper and more nuanced relationships between officers and the neighborhoods they serve. The department complains that it can’t get people to come forward with information about gang crimes. Yes, this is partly because folks are spooked by the threat of retaliation, but it’s also due to the fact that many of those living in LA’s most gang-plagued neighborhoods don’t like or trust the police. Yet, if you are coaching the troubled kid in the ‘hood in reading, boxing or photography, people are bound to see you in a more humanized light. (You’ll, by the same token, see them bathed in that same light.)

And, if they like and trust you, they’ll tell you stuff.

POINT SEVEN: Safety without numbers. One of the primary reasons kids say they join gangs in the very beginning, is for protection. If a boy doesn’t feel safe getting to and from school or, worse, doesn’t feel safe in school, he is apt to find that safety in tough-guy numbers. That’s why we need a citywide effort to rethink the issue of school safety. This does not, by the way, mean it is okay to simplify matters by merely eliminating all the difficult kids—or more likely, “opportunity transferring” them from school to school until they simply fall off the radar.

POINT EIGHT: Juvenile (and adult) reentry programs. When kids and young adults are locked up, it gives them time to think and to recalibrate. More often than not, they approach their release date with the intention of doing better on the outside. But then (more often then not) they are returned to the same old streets, the same old friends, the same old dysfunctional family situation, the same old pressures and temptations—with little or nothing in the way of light weighing against the darkness. When it comes to juvenile reentry programs, there are plenty of best practice methods to study. But, in the interest of saving money and time, here’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version:

A kid or young adult getting out of lock-up needs an individualized and realistic step-by-step plan for the future—plus a fail-safe action plan about how to get back on track when he or she screws up, because most of them will screw up at least once. Count on it. They also need monitoring and support throughout the process, pre and post release counseling (preferably for both the kid AND his or her family), and finally, immediate placement, either back in school or in a job, or both.. Idle hands and all that.

Yeah, all this is expensive. But, the present dollar figure for incarcerating a kid in the state of California is $90 thousand. And, 90 grand buys a lot of therapy.

POINT NINE: Don’t forget the girls. And not just the girl gang members. This means the girlfriends of the gangsters, the ones who have babies by the homeboys, and wait in line to at LA County Men’s Central Jail if their over-18 guy gets arrested. Then, if he gets killed or convicted—or just plain disappears—they are the single mothers who often perpetuate the cycle without ever intending to do so, and end up raising the next generation of gang members.

POINT TEN: In the end, it’s about community. Perhaps the most essential uber point that Connie’s Advancement Project report makes is that, for any of this to really function well, all the different elements need to work together, not as discrete programs in isolation, but as interdependent parts of a cultural ecosystem. On a good day we call that community.

If you want a bottom line, this is it: for us to discern the steps necessary to reel in the thousands of kids emotionally and psychologically adrift every day on LA’s streets—some of them stumbling toward the the precipice that, if they step off it, can too easily lead to doing grave damage to themselves or others—-we have to sincerely believe that every one of those kids belongs to all of us—and make clear to each of them that they have a legitimate place in our local and greater community.

Yet, to do that requires a radical shift in thinking—and real leadership. Not reports.