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Since the Los Angeles riot of 1992, gang members and ex-gang members have
saved countless lives through periodic truces, and have called for programs
of investment and reconstruction in ghettos and barrios. In early 1992,
several busloads of gang members from Watts traveled to City Hall in Los
Angeles to propose rebuilding their torn communities, expanding recreation,
and providing security for school children and the elderly. In 1993, a
Gang Peace Summit in Kansas City drew 164 gang members from 26 cities
along with 53 observers who called for a healing process as well as community
economic development. In 1996, national Barrios Unidos sponsored a National
Peace Summit in Washington DC and introduced the “Cesar E. Chavez
Peace Plan” which emphasized community truces, barrio enterprise
zones, and development of a national violence prevention network.
These proposals and many others like them have been spurned. Too few civic,
business, or law enforcement officials have been willing to recognize
the cries for recognition and assistance from the streets. For example,
after the 1992 riots, Los Angeles officials agreed to create an organization
called “ReBuild LA” which promised $6 billion in private investment
to create tens of thousands of jobs in riot-torn areas in five years.
But in less than two years, the organization folded for lack of corporate
interest.
The war on gangs is a deadly quagmire. What is the alternative? At the
peak of the Rampart scandal in Los Angeles in 2000, the following blueprint
for immediate action was forwarded to the Mayor and Police Commission
but received no response. It remains as valid today as then.
1. Peace Process Coordinator. The Mayor should appoint one or more official
Peace Process Coordinators to develop and recommend to him a gang violence
prevention plan. Examples might be Luis Rodriguez, Connie Rice and Fr.
Gregory Boyle.
2. Peace Council. The Mayor should appoint a Peace Process Council, to
be chaired by the Coordinators, composed primarily of individuals with
a demonstrated record of effectiveness in working to promote gang truces
and other gang violence prevention projects, either on the streets or
within the criminal justice system. The Council would need a staff of
approximately give full-time field representatives.
3. Violence Prevention Pilot Projects. The Council would identify and
become active in violence prevention efforts in at least three initial
areas where gang tensions or violence threaten to become out of control.
The Council and staff would intervene through mediation, identifying of
grievances, and lobbying to bring needed resources or policy changes to
those neighborhoods.
4. The Way Home: Counseling, Education and Skill Training. Vast numbers
of at-risk youth are being socialized in the streets outside the institutional
reach of families, schools and employers. Many dream of better lives,
but have few if any bridges to a better future. They need counseling,
drug and alcohol treatment in many cases, educational remediation, job
training, tattoo removal, and life-skills management that can only be
successfully implemented outside the present system and with the direct
participation of former gang members who have turned their lives around.
The Council should draft an plan for this “Catcher in the Rye”
safety net, including funding sources, and make recommendations to policy-makers
for its implementation.
5. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. The City can do little about de-industrialization
and the corporate globalization processes that have left our inner city
economies abandoned. But the City can turn thousands of lives around and
sustain hope. The City should require, as a condition of any public subsidy
or permit, that all businesses over a certain size be required to hire
and retain at least one former gang member who has transitioned through
the remedial program defined in item 4. This requirement should
apply to all public agencies as well.
If this seems unfeasible, remember the following facts that are a shadow
on our future:
• two-thirds of all nonwhite adult males are arrested and jailed
between the ages of 18 and 30 nationally.
• on any average day in America, one of every four African Americans
between the ages of 20 and 29 is in jail, prison, or on probation or parole.
• there are 14 million arrests annually in the US
• the cost for police, guards and law enforcement functionaries
is $74 billion annually.
• the total number of inmates in local, state and federal prisons
has quadrupled in the past 20 years to more than two million.
• in the 1970s, the US rate of incarceration was about 100 per 100,000,
little changed since the 1930s; by the mid-80s, the rate doubled to 210,
and by 1998 the rate was 690 per 100,000.
• the United States has five percent of the world’s population
and 25 percent of its prisoners.
• (data from Platt, in Social Justice Journal, Vol. 28, No.1, 2001)
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