Dellums & Schwarzenegger: Better Tactics in the War on Gangs

With Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums at his side, Governor Schwarzenegger unveiled plans last month for a new, $48 million statewide anti-gang initiative. The proposed California Gang Reduction, Intervention and Prevention Program (CalGRIP) calls for a coordinated law enforcement strategy and harsher penalties for gang-affiliated offenders, along with funding for gang intervention and prevention programs.

The governor’s office says the initiative is unprecedented in its “comprehensive approach to the gang problem statewide.” “The state must coordinate the fight against gangs because when you crack down in one area, it pops up somewhere else,” the governor told his Oakland audience. And Mayor Dellums, whose city experienced an unsettling surge in violent crime last year, praised the governor for taking “this first and important step forward,” despite the “extraordinarily restricted budgets” within which the state is operating.

This public show of bipartisan support was a promising sign that some version of the CalGRIP approach may eventually come to fruition. That’s a good thing—as long as it remains truly “comprehensive,” and doesn’t lapse into the familiar pattern of bankrolling costly, ill-conceived gang suppression efforts while paying little more than lip service to prevention and intervention.

As legislators debate the merits of the governor’s plan, they would do well to heed the words of Connie Rice, whose recently-released Advancement Project report on Los Angeles gang policy capped an exhaustive study commissioned by the LA City Council.

“After a quarter century of a multi-billion-dollar war on gangs, there are six times as many gangs and at least double the number of gang members in the region,” Rice wrote.

“Law enforcement officials now agree that they cannot arrest their way out of the violence crisis and that their crime suppression efforts must be linked to competent prevention, intervention, and community-stabilizing investment strategies.”

The Advancement Project report argues persuasively for a fundamental shift in priorities, away from counterproductive suppression tactics and toward something more akin to a domestic Marshall Plan, which would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into far-ranging prevention and intervention efforts.

But with the state now facing an estimated $4 billion dollar budget shortfall, recommendations along those lines are bound to fall on deaf ears in Sacramento, regardless of how sensible they may be in principle. And so, most of the debate over CalGRIP has centered on questions of cost-effectiveness, with legislators wrangling over how much of the initiative’s $48 million price tag should go to fighting the increasingly expensive war on gangs (including money for newfangled weaponry like GPS tracking devices strapped to the ankles of paroled gang leaders) and how much should go to support prevention and intervention programs.

A trickier question involves the cost-effectiveness of those very programs. Which ones work and which ones don’t? For years, the bulk of public funding for gang prevention and intervention has been directed to big municipal projects that have delivered little in the way of lasting change—more summer jobs but no follow-up training for long-term employment, more money for parks and pools but no provision for maintaining services.

At the same time, dozens of dedicated grassroots groups around the state are tackling these tough challenges and producing positive results, despite meager funding and scant attention from either politicians or the media. Many of them work with volunteer staff, on shoestring budgets, in neighborhood churches and community centers.

Here are a few examples:

· In Van Nuys, special education teacher Melody Rossi’s Cloud and Fire Ministries does after-school tutoring for at-risk kids, manages a “one-stop connection” job referral and placement center, and works with the county probation and education departments to bring anger management classes into youth detention camps.

· At Palomar Community College in San Marcos, more than 500 students enrolled in Frank M. Puchi’s Future Teacher Diversity Corps have gone on to successful careers as classroom teachers—and at least 50 of them are former gang members.

· In Santa Barbara, an ex-gang leader named Matt Sanchez brings rival gang members together through camping trips and mentoring. Lauded by the California Wellness Foundation as “an intervention and prevention model,” his Hoods in the Woods program has been teaching at-risk kids how to resolve conflicts peacefully for more than 16 years.

· In Los Angeles, a job developer named Donny Gomez is training young men for the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighting strike teams. His Aztecs Rising group has already helped more than 250 former gang members become skilled firefighters and find employment with fire departments around the U.S.

Governor Schwarzenegger argues forcefully that the state must take a more innovative approach to law enforcement if we are to halt the viral spread of gang violence from one community to another. For his CalGRIP initiative to be both truly comprehensive and truly cost-effective, the state should take a more innovative approach to funding gang prevention and intervention—one that invests more heavily in resourceful, community-based efforts like these and doesn’t simply go on funneling scarce dollars into big government projects and failed social programs of the past.

Richard R. Ramos
Your Grassroots Community Leader in Gang Prevention & Intervention
Find out more at www.richardrramos.com