Revamped Anti-Gang Unit to Focus on South-Central L.A.

Los Angeles County’s largest gang-prevention program this week reshuffled its staff to concentrate the majority of its resources on South-Central Los Angeles and to further shift its emphasis from “crisis intervention” between feuding gangs to classroom lectures aimed at younger children.

Community Youth Gang Services, which is funded annually by $1.9 million in Los Angeles city and county revenues, is eliminating 10 of its 14 “target areas” throughout the county and shifting workers from those programs to the four remaining areas in South-Central. Those areas have boundaries that match the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street and Southeast divisions and the Sheriff Department’s Lennox and Lynwood stations.

In each of the four South-Central areas, the youth gang units have put in place a parent-teacher coordinator, a graffiti-removal program, a two-member team of educators to present anti-gang lectures at elementary schools, and a crisis-intervention team which patrols streets to head off gang confrontations.

The agency was created in 1981 by the county Board of Supervisors to send intervention workers into gang-plagued areas. But in the last several years, as gang confrontations grew more violent and less predictable, service officials pulled many of their staff members off the streets. The intervention workers were reassigned to work with younger children in an effort to convince them to avoid gangs in the first place.

Today, only about 25% of the agency’s 75 workers are assigned to crisis intervention, said Steve Valdivia, the agency’s executive director. The majority of the agency’s work has gone toward “preventive” services, often consisting of school programs for elementary and junior high school students, in areas ranging from Venice to Pico Rivera to Hollywood to northeast Los Angeles.

Valdivia said the decision to pull prevention programs out of those areas and limit them to South-Central Los Angeles was a recognition that the agency was spread too thin to make a dent in South-Central, where killings over gang turf squabbles and soured drug deals have created nightmarish conditions. Nearly 30% of the 452 murders committed by gang members in the county last year occurred in the agency’s four South-Central target areas.

Valdivia noted that because the agency’s budget has remained essentially unchanged, the size of his staff has fallen to 75 from 124 in 1983.

While neither the county nor city of Los Angeles have adopted formal gang-prevention strategies, a countywide gang task force of law enforcement experts has been increasingly supportive of programs that provide more recreational, educational and counseling programs in the inner-city to compensate for cuts in many government-funded programs during the last decade.

Valdivia said the new South-Central strategy has “worked in other areas of the county, particularly on the Eastside.” In the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles, once a hotbed of gang murders, there were no reported gang-related killings last year. One of the reasons cited for the change by police and community workers is more than a decade of coordinated gang-prevention programs by parents, grass-roots organizations and government agencies.

The number of crisis-intervention teams in other areas of the county will drop significantly. Only two of five will remain in East Los Angeles and only one of three will remain in West Los Angeles.

County Supervisor Ed Edelman, who has been the staunchest supporter of the agency among Los Angeles politicians, said Wednesday he will contribute $50,000 from his office to restore one crisis intervention team in unincorporated East Los Angeles, which he represents. The money comes from a $200,000 fund that was allocated to each supervisor last year for anti-gang and drug programs in their districts.

Edelman said he supported the deployment change, and said he believed that it no longer made sense for the agency to focus most of its attention on street-level crisis intervention because the increased presence of cocaine-selling gangs made the notion of counseling unrealistic.

“Now you’re fighting a different kind of gang warfare out there,” he said.

In January, the Los Angeles City Council allocated $2.1 million to create a Youth-at-Risk Advocacy Unit and begin programs aimed at keeping children out of gangs. The youth gang services is among numerous public and private agencies expected to apply for a share of the new money.