Fact and fiction on L.A.'s mean streets

Pop quiz: What do these things have in common?

1) Too many of Los Angeles' many anti-gang programs.

2) The memoir by a white/Native American foster girl about growing up among the gangs of South L.A. that turned out to be faked by a white, private-school Valley girl.

Answer: Both the programs and the memoir have gotten warm praise. Both have fine intentions (the fake-memoir writer felt "there was good that I could do" by writing it). Both got healthy checks (something under $100,000 for her; about $80 million a year for L.A.'s anti-gang projects). And both managed to get by with nobody really challenging whether they were what they said they were.

Former creative writing student Margaret Seltzer -- I know, very creative -- has been judged and dispatched to literary Siberia. But what has the city done about gang programs that may be less than they seem?

As you'd expect, not what it should. City Controller Laura Chick's recent report spanking the city's mishmash mess of gang prevention and intervention efforts follows other studies stretching back into the mists of bureaucratic time, all saying the same thing: There's too little money, spread piecemeal among too many disjointed operations. A boy is killed in the Valley; the city finds dough for an anti-gang program there. A baby is murdered in South L.A.; another wad of money for a different program.

Programs use different yardsticks, or none at all, to measure success, and they answer to no single authority. Last month, a "reformed" gangbanger, beneficiary of $1.5 million in city dough for his "No Guns" anti-gang organization, was sent away for eight years for peddling semiautomatic weapons illegally.

Some programs get parceled out like congressional earmarks: to make everyone happy, not because they work.

Eight years ago, when Mayor Richard Riordan agreed with Controller Rick Tuttle that the LA Bridges anti-gang project needed to be shut and overhauled, some 300 LA Bridges supporters and contractors packed City Hall for the vote. And LA Bridges just kept rollin' along.

A year earlier, the council had OKd a $300,000 consultant to figure out whether LA Bridges was helping. When Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina's husband's company didn't get the job, he complained that he wasn't getting a fair shake because of "who I'm married to" -- and the council OKd $100,000 to start the process all over again.

Does this look like kids' needs are No. 1?