Summer of Success

A Model for a Comprehensive Gang Violence Prevention Strategy

Connie Rice presented the Advancement Project's youth gang reduction strategy to the Los Angeles County Education Coordinating Council on April 26, 2007. The following are edited excerpts of her remarks.

"Los Angeles is to violence as Bangladesh is to diarrhea," according to a former World Health Organization epidemiologist. Children don't worry about getting shot on the way to school in most neighborhoods, but in areas that have been left to fester for decades the containment and suppression paradigm has proved useless. Top law enforcement officials agree - we can't arrest our way out of this problem. Violent gang crime costs the taxpayers and victims over $2 billion every year, not including property crimes. If gang homicides were reduced by 20 every year for five years, $100 million would be saved.

Over the past 10 years, 450,000 children under the age of 18 have been arrested, and 100,000 children have been shot over the past 30 years. In the past 15 years, 15 law enforcement officers have lost their lives. In the city of Los Angeles alone-the scope of our report-300,000 children are trapped in gang-saturated zones; 120,000 of them in zones of violence and live in poverty.

Of the 400 gangs and 39,000 gang members active citywide, between 7 and 8 percent are persistently violent. So we need to focus on protecting children from that smaller core, and prevent gangs from recruiting more children.

But we're stuck on stupid when mass incarceration is our first and only response, and nonviolent offenders return to their communities having learned violence in jail. The research shows- the only thing that will work is a comprehensive, public health-based, wrap-around strategy that addresses the root causes of violence. There are effective intervention programs, and the city, county, and school district together spend a whopping $958 million a year on the issue, but what's required is a coordinated, systematic approach with built-in accountability. There is no one in government whose job is to get kids out of gangs.

And wraparound strategies work. Look at the example of the 2003 "Summer of Success." With $300,000 left over from his election campaign, plus privately-raised matching funds, former city councilmember Martin Ludlow was able to saturate "the Jungle," a battleground for four feuding gangs in his district, with midnight swimming, midnight soccer, tutoring, reading programs, hip-hop contests, and other activities. The idea was simple: violence would decline if youth who normally only had access to gangs were offered meaningful alternative activities scheduled round the clock. During nine weeks of that summer, local basketball courts stayed open past midnight for tournaments and games. Youth had paid internships to conduct outreach to the community. Gang intervention workers from the Amer-I-Can collaborative negotiated with local gangs for safe passage and no violence agreements. LAPD Safer Cities community police officers cooperated with the program (but unfortunately, other LAPD officers refused to cooperate with the effort). Neighborhood community groups collaborated to offer computer games, tutoring, and as many other program opportunities as possible during the 8 pm to 3 am hours when most of the violence was occurring. A prominent radio station featured the program throughout the summer.

The results were stunning. Murders were reduced to zero, and every kid in that neighborhood was safe for 9 weeks. This effort demanded the participation of school facilities, the Department of Water and Power, the recreation and parks department, and numerous other city and county departments, and required budgets for overtime, liability agreements, insurance, and so on, but compared to the value of saving even one child's life, the price of this program was a huge bargain. Applying a similar strategy throughout the county -while adding economic development and other services- would systematize the effort, and finally address the public health emergency that gang violence presents.

The community has to co-pilot this effort, and civic and faith-based funding needs to be built into it. Los Angeles County, too, needs to make this happen at the regional level-gangs don't stop at city limits. This is about their hearts and minds and the way they think about themselves. And it's about politics. We may know what to do on a micro level, but this is about systemic, lasting change.