The day after Janice Hahn won the special election in California's 36th congressional district two weeks ago, the communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee regurgitated a lie about her that Foxaganda had perpetrated years before. That lie had been turned into one of the
most rancid attack-videos on record, titled, "Give us your cash, bitch." It was so racist and sexist that even the campaign manager of her tea party opponent in the race called it "highly offensive."
But NRCC Communications Director Paul Lindsay apparently hadn't gotten the memo:
Janice Hahn is now Nancy Pelosi's problem. Between her pattern of unethical behavior and close ties to LA's most dangerous gang members, Hahn is adding to the pollution in the swamp of Washington corruption built by Nancy Pelosi's Democrats.
What ties? Hahn, like scores of public officials over the past 25 years, believes that gang violence and other crime can be reduced by employing former gang members to intervene. The reasoning is straightforwardly obvious: They know gang life, speak the language and have street credibility that no outsider can possibly match. Hahn has, therefore, like many city councilmembers, mayors, police chiefs, community-based organizations, church leaders, grant providers and corporate donors supported this model of gang intervention. Despite its imperfections, and despite its pitiful underfunding, it works.
I've seen it firsthand.
I arrived as deputy editor of the editorial page of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in February 1986 just as the gang wars that would ultimately take thousands of lives were heating up. I later learned that my young boss, who had been the only vote against hiring me, thought it would prove the accuracy of his judgment to assign me to the gang beat. How long before somebody from "cow country," as he always called Colorado, freaked out?
So, before I'd even unpacked all my kitchen utensils, I was spending 20 hours a week in some of the city's toughest districts, riding around in the late afternoon and after dark in LAPD and Sheriff's Department patrol cars—"rollers," the gangs called them. Before my first month was out, I'd seen more than two dozen gang arrests, almost all of them at gunpoint with suspects proned out on a sidewalk or the middle of a street. From the uniformed officers who were supposed to be serving and protecting these mostly black but increasingly Latino neighborhoods, I'd heard enough despicable racism to prove to me once again that the spirit of Jim Crow had never been confined solely to the Deep South.
One day, we stopped a young African American boy on the street. He couldn't have been more than 10. One of the officers, the one I privately called a kleagle, gave him a rough time, squeezing him by the shoulder and demanding to know where his older brother was. "Don't know," he said. The cop persisted. But the kid wasn't talking. As we drove away, the cop said words to the effect of "That one's lost."
I went home thinking that if everyone had taken that approach with me when I was 10, I'd probably be doing life behind bars or dead by now. Giving up on 10-year-olds, no matter how street-tough they may be, seems a particularly pernicious way to guarantee a bad result.
Surely somebody else was on the job besides these guys in uniform, some of whom, I thought (and was later proved more right than I could have imagined) were more gangster-minded than those they were assigned to fight.
The cops hadn't made me sign a liability agreement before allowing me to sit in the back seat of their cruisers. But when I asked to ride along with the interventionist teams of Community Youth Gangs Services, the waiver was two pages long. The condensed version: If I got blown away or maimed, it wasn't the fault of CYGS or the city, whose coffers provided most of the money for the program. Shaped along the same lines as Philadelphia's Crisis Intervention Network, CYGS took an aggressive interventionist approach by putting unarmed former gang members into marked cars that patrolled areas where street crime was most prevalent. The main goal: Prevent violence. A modest program. Three cars each night for a sprawling urban region. Not as well funded as programs putting former gangsters at the front of classrooms to tell young people about the evils and foolhardiness of who they used to be.
Twenty-three-old Ángel Riojas was my first-night's partner. His name was Spanish, but he was Yaqui Indian. He was paid $1.50 an hour over the minimum wage plus health insurance. He was supposed to give me an hour's orientation in the conference room before we headed out. Instead, we sat on the secondhand furniture and compared homemade tattoos. He had about 20, including a red spider in a blue web on the side of his neck. I had one (since removed): my intake and I.D. number when I did my 23 months of reform school time. He had spent a total of five years in juvenile detention and a year in an adult facility. Until 10th grade, I had strutted around with a gang. But compared with the one Ángel had belonged to, we were the Cub Scouts.
When the sun went down, the two of us drove away from the CYGS offices into what one of my editorial page colleagues tediously called the "heart of darkness," South Central L.A. Before midnight, Ángel would hold the head of a dying 15-year-old, a Florencia 13 gangster gunned down so close by that initially we thought someone might be shooting at us. Ángel soon identified another dead member of Florencia 13 who had been hit nine times in the same shooting but somehow managed to drive to county hospital and stagger in the emergency room door.
Right inside the entrance of the hospital, uniformed deputies manned a sheriff's substation 24 hours a day. One of their jobs was to arrest anybody they deemed suspicious before nurses or doctors even got to them. That's how we found the dead gangster, eyes open, handcuffed to a gurney in a brightly lit hallway. Ángel knew him slightly, a friend of a cousin, he said, not yet 18 years old. Like the other dead boy, "Florencia 13" was tattooed in elegant blue calligraphy on the back of his neck.
We headed back outside, with one of the deputies eying Ángel until we cleared the doors. I had a pretty good idea what that deputy thinking. Ángel lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of a flowerless planter. He didn't say anything and I wasn’t yet ready to ask any questions. Before he finished his smoke, a car unloaded in the emergency drive. Four young men stepped out and headed toward the hospital door. Ángel got up, called out to them and walked quickly but not menacingly to head them off. I followed cautiously. Two of the men young men had pistols in their belts. I could see their Florencia 13 tattoos.
They came, one said in Spanish, to see their friend. "You know you can't do that," Ángel sympathetically told them. "He's dead. I saw him. I'm sorry." They would be arrested before they got halfway through the door, he said. Or shot, if the deputies saw those pistols, and he pointed at one. They stopped walking. He kept talking. I kept my mouth shut.
The discussion soon shifted to revenge and the likelihood that the killers were a well-known rival gang in an adjacent territory. Ángel took this in stride. His first goal of keeping them out of the hospital having been achieved, he now wanted to keep them around long enough to deflect them from duplicating what had just happened to two of their own. Twenty minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes, I'm not sure how long they spoke. Never loud, never condescending, never disrespectful, Ángel chilled them out by speaking from the heart. He knew how they felt, he said. He had lost friends, a nephew and a girlfriend to the gang wars. He himself had once seethed with revenge. They argued. But they listened.
When they did finally leave, giving Ángel a personal vow they would go home and not hunt down the killers that night, I asked how he knew they wouldn't just ignore his advice once they escaped his charismatic grip. "I don't," he told me.
There's no way to know whether Ángel's efforts that Saturday night a quarter-century ago paid off in the long run. No visible payback was exacted for those two killings in the month I continued to ride along with the CYGS team, sometimes with other interveners, but usually with Ángel, who became my friend and who I still visit every few months in the Boyle Heights house where his parents once lived. He's got adult kids of his own now. They were never in a gang. He will talk into the wee hours about what we're still doing wrong regarding gangs. It all boils down to prevention.
In all the years since that bloody Saturday night so long ago, gang violence has risen and fallen in Los Angeles. Fueled by rivalry over sales of crack cocaine, it seemed beyond awful in 1986, and then it worsened. In the peak year, 1995, there were 807 gang-related homicides in the county. Despite a growing population, there has been less than half that number for the past decade during a time when we've seen a decrease in violent crime in almost every major U.S. city.
No one method can reduce gang affiliation and gang violence. Changing demographics, stepped-up prosecutions of the worst gang members, anti-gang "loitering" legislation, intervention work of the sort former gang members like Ángel Riojas did and the efforts of community leaders like Father Gregory Boyle have all contributed to curbing the impact of gang violence.
In 1988, Boyle founded what would later become Homeboy Industries, a non-profit organization that hires several hundred former gang members to work in a bakery, a silkscreen and embroidery operation, a café and catering service, a diner and several farmers markets. The slogan? "Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job."
Since then, Boyle has made a difference in the lives of thousands of former gang members and their families. And yet, a year ago, when he sought $5 million in private funding to bridge the gap between what Homeboy Industries brings in through its business and the $9 million budget, he was
hard-pressed to find donors.
Eventually, enough money came through. But there are at least 90,000 gang members in Los Angeles County and Homeboy Industries has only 425 employees. Billions are spent on law enforcement by Los Angeles, but only $25 million went to gang intervention programs in 2010.
Nobody should be fooled into thinking that all gangsters would be choirboys or chefs for Fr. Boyle's operations if given the chance. Prison is the only place for some of them. But this after-the-fact approach receives far too many of the resources that should being going into prevention. Focusing most of our resources on a "war on gangs" hurts the working poor whose neighborhoods now suffer more than ever from reduced recreation programs, underfunded schools, fissured infrastructure and poor economic conditions. Those failures constitute some of the reasons many youths join gangs in the first place.
To be truly effective, gang prevention programs must respect the basic humanity of everyone. Tamping down the violence requires no-nonsense dealing with the societal inequities of class and race that engenders it. We have to acknowledge that every child has value and can succeed. Acknowledging that means more than nice words. It means budgeting for it. Otherwise, we might as well stop pretending and give the finger to these youth the way that cop did to the 10-year-old 25 years ago.
The only way gangs will ultimately lose their grip is for us to start listening to the Father Boyles and Ángel Riojases a lot more attentively.