Los Angeles park lights send gang activity into the shadows

The odds are his mortal enemy.

And summer weather is sure to bedevil him, stirring rage and heating the ammo.

But the Rev. Jeff Carr is cruising L.A. in his Honda hybrid on a Saturday night, firm in the belief that he is chipping away at the seemingly intractable urban travesty of flying bullets and falling bodies.

"It's not undoable," he says of the challenge he took on nearly one year ago, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa looked up at the blond, 6-foot-3 preacher and asked him to be his gang czar.

"I hate being called the gang czar," Carr says.

Why's that?

"This is not a war on kids."

In fact, the official title is director of gang reduction and youth development, and Carr is showing me one of his latest attempts at both. In the Summer Night Lights program, eight parks in high-crime areas around the city are being kept open several hours later than normal, until midnight in some locations, from Wednesday through Saturday.

"Four to midnight is the most violent time in our city, from Fourth of July to Labor Day," Carr says.

He knows parks can be gang-banger clubhouses, so there's a risk in keeping the lights on and throwing open the gates. But there's a greater risk when kids have nowhere to go. Five summers ago, he points out, when one city park was kept open late, the crime rate around the park fell.

That's why Carr, ordained in the Church of the Nazarene and devoted for years to youth services in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., hooked up with the school district, the Recreation and Parks Department and other agencies to organize activities at the parks.

It wasn't easy in an era of budget shortages. He had to pass the basket at several nonprofits -- Ahmanson, Annenberg, Eisner, Hauptman, Weingart, Wells Fargo, California Endowment, LA84, Wellness Foundation -- raising nearly $1 million to pay for the whole thing. And he had to get the LAPD to step up patrols around the parks.

But the genius of the plan was to recruit 10 youngsters between the ages of 17 and 20 to work at each park this summer for a stipend of about $2,600.

"They're kids who could be either victims or perpetrators," he says as we arrive at Cypress Park.

All 10 of the hires are wearing gray Youth Squad T-Shirts, and so is Carr, who shakes hands and asks how it's going.

From what I could see, not badly.