Gang emergency

Street gangs have been insinuating themselves into Los Angeles' civic psyche for at least half a century, leaving more than a few residents philosophical about the youth violence periodically reported from disparate urban neighborhoods. Gang life was glamorized in pop music in the '80s, on the big screen in the '90s and in the fashion choices of suburban kids for at least the last decade. Over the years, high-profile shootings of innocent Angelenos waiting at bus stops or riding in the back seats of family cars have set off brief spasms of official resolve, which quickly disappeared but left the city with ineffective programs that drained public coffers and fed taxpayer cynicism about government's ability to do anything useful.

Today, then -- three months after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's announcement that he would disband the anti-gang program L.A. Bridges, five months after City Controller Laura Chick released a scathing report about the city's gang efforts, more than a year after the mayor named a "gang czar," nearly two years after Advancement Project Co-director Connie Rice reported on what the city does wrong and how to fix it, three years after then-Councilman Martin Ludlow began a series of hearings on how to deal with gangs -- it is easy to reject as hyperbole the claim of experts that the city faces a gang emergency. It is easy. And it is wrong.

It is too easy to miss the emergency because the city's elected leaders have failed to adequately articulate just what the problem is that anti-gang programs are trying to solve. What is Villaraigosa's point man on gangs, Jeff Carr, trying to do as he breaks apart L.A. Bridges and works on putting together a successor? Is the goal to reduce crime? We are told emphatically that crime in Los Angeles has dropped to levels not seen since the 1950s (although the number of gang members has skyrocketed). Is it to eliminate gangs? Gangs, like the poor, are with us always. Is it to be able to hold the mayor accountable for progress? Villaraigosa will likely be well into a second term, with a gubernatorial election looming, before the first evaluations of new anti-gang programs are completed. Is it to give the mayor an arrow for his reelection quiver? It may sometimes seem that way.