Gang Intervention

Even for a gang member, Ivan Valencia led a particularly precarious lifestyle. He was a commuter. Valencia, 30, was a member of the Temple Street gang, which operates mostly on the southern edge of Silver Lake and Echo Park. He lived seven miles away, on West 55th Street in South Los Angeles -- where five other gangs operated within a quarter-mile of his house. "He was living out of his area," LAPD Capt. Tina M. Nieto said. "People move all the time in Los Angeles.

A veteran South Los Angeles gang intervention worker has been forced to resign from his agency and will no longer work the streets on behalf of City Hall after he was caught manipulating time cards, officials said Friday. Harry Warren, who bounced in and out of jail as a young man, had been a high-profile intervention worker and youth counselor for 20 years. He was forced to resign recently from Chapter Two, his nonprofit agency, after being confronted with evidence of financial impropriety, several officials confirmed.

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre announced Tuesday that the L.A. Bridges gang intervention program will be started at Burbank Middle School in Highland Park. The city-funded L.A. Bridges program targets students and their families at the middle school level in an effort to dissuade them from joining gangs. At least 1,700 youngsters from Burbank Middle School and the surrounding neighborhood will be served by the program. "L.A.

Serious gang-related crime has tumbled 40% over the last three years in the troubled neighborhoods surrounding the sites of Summer Night Lights, Los Angeles' park program designed to curb violence, newly assembled police data show. This was the third summer that City Hall has run Summer Night Lights, offering recreational activities, mentoring and counseling programs, meals and other services at parks and public housing complexes. Launched in the summer of 2008, Summer Night Lights expanded to 24 sites this year.

A landmark gang intervention program involving vocational educators and county mental health counselors may soon make its way to the campus of San Clemente High School. In a unanimous vote Monday, the Capistrano Unified School District Board of Trustees approved the gang intervention counseling and career center, which also involves the efforts of the County Health Care Agency and the Capistrano-Laguna Beach Regional Occupational Program.

When Donald Garcia was 2 years old, his father was killed by Pacoima gang members at a San Fernando park. As a young boy, Garcia recalled, "I wanted to become a cop and arrest people who did bad things like what they did to my dad." Instead, he became a killer. For second-degree murder and other crimes, he spent half of his life -- 31 years -- in prisons, jails and juvenile halls.

An unavoidable side effect of the electoral process is that pet projects are often jeopardized when veteran officeholders are defeated. Unfortunately, the KYDS program, the west San Fernando Valley's largest private nonprofit gang intervention effort, faces just such a situation.

There was a logjam at the door of a makeshift schoolhouse one recent morning, because everyone was being scanned with a metal detector. There was a reason for that. Of the 50 students filing in for class, 45 were once gang members -- in at least 30 rival gangs. It was a swaggering crowd, with shaved heads and baggy pants, gold chains draped around thick necks. Many still used their street names: Brick. Q Ball. The students sat on metal folding chairs.

The leader of an embattled South Los Angeles gang intervention agency has pledged to press on with his work, even as he conceded that his agency is about to lose its contract in a second pocket of the city, two weeks after City Hall officials severed ties with him. "It's in God's hands now," said Kevin Mustafa Fletcher, a former member of the Swan gang and the executive director of Unity T.W.O., one of the city's more high-profile gang intervention agencies. In an impassioned three-hour interview at his Avalon Boulevard headquarters Wednesday, Fletcher said he had been unfairly targeted -- swept up in politics and abandoned by former allies who are themselves looking to cash in on the flood of public money that the city is setting aside for gang intervention.

Officials on Monday unveiled a federal bill that would create national standards and accountability for gang intervention workers as part of a Los Angeles-based effort to professionalize the growing and controversial field. The bill, which was introduced by U.S. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), is the first such national initiative to regulate intervention workers who act as liaisons between law enforcement and communities. Police and intervention workers have a long history of distrust, but authorities have come to rely on intervention workers for such matters as monitoring street gossip and preventing retaliatory shootings.

Los Angeles County supervisorsTuesday awarded Homeboy Industries a $1.3-million contract, providing critically needed funding for the gang intervention program founded two decades ago by Father Gregory Boyle. Earlier this year, crushing financial problems forced Homeboy officials to lay off most employees . The organization, which uses jobs to draw young people away from gangs , had seen a steep decline in charitable contributions since the economic downturn even as demand for its programs soared.

The old friends were in their best suits, Ronald "Looney" Barron 's the color of caramel and Tommie "T-Top" Rivers' ribbed with pinstripes, a paisley pocket square peeking out just so. It was uncanny how their lives had mirrored each other's. They were born months apart, raised in the West Adams area. Both were good athletes, charismatic and bright, and both had squandered it all — rising to the level of "shot caller" in their respective gangs, turning their backs on their childhood friendship, then spending most of their 20s in prison.

David Martinez, pastor of Victory Outreach Church of the San Fernando Valley, whose ministry has affected the lives of thousands of former gang members, drug addicts and others over the last 35 years, has died. He was 67. Martinez, who had suffered a heart attack in December, died of a heart attack Sunday while vacationing with his family in Yosemite, said his wife, Faith. The Pacoima-born Martinez, a former gang member, founded Victory Outreach Church of the San Fernando Valley in 1975, after reaching out to the area's gang members and drug addicts.

Class was in session the other day in a squat building overlooking MacArthur Park. The assignment: "Baby Mama Drama." Scenario: A man is pinned down inside a house because he's in the "wrong" neighborhood — outside his territory. He's just visiting the mother of his child, who lives in your neighborhood, but the woman's new boyfriend is out front and not happy. The situation is tense and deteriorating quickly. What to do? Los Angeles officials are preparing to graduate their first class of city-sanctioned gang intervention workers, a significant step in the city's groundbreaking adoption of street outreach efforts designed to augment traditional policing.

Does Los Angeles have a conscience? Does it have a heart? If the answer to either one of those questions is yes, then we ought to share a common anguish over the crisis that threatens to cripple Homeboy Industries, the phenomenally successful gang intervention program founded 18 years ago by Father Gregory Boyle at East L.A.'s Dolores Mission. More than simply wringing hands, this county's wealthiest men and women need to step up and help put this invaluable program back on its feet.

For the last 20 years, Father Gregory Boyle has been writing -- and not writing -- the book that is his newly released memoir, "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion" (Free Press: 220 pp., $25). The difficulty was never a lack of material. For as long as I've known him, Boyle has been amassing a stupendously rich cache of stories about the homeboys and homegirls who one way or another found their way to his doorstep. Boyle was already not writing his book when I met him in the fall of 1990.

Top Los Angeles law enforcement and elected officials Tuesday acknowledged a recent rise in the number of killings in South Los Angeles and announced plans to bolster anti-gang activity in the area. Speaking at a news conference at the Los Angeles Police Department's 77th Street station, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton said a task force consisting of officers from the LAPD, California Highway Patrol, the mayor's gang-intervention program and other agencies would be formed to focus on the swath of the city south of downtown.

The city of Los Angeles should create a standalone department of gang prevention and intervention instead of relying on the mayor's office to oversee anti-gang programs as it does now, according to a report released Monday. FOR THE RECORD: The headline on an earlier version of this article incorrectly said a report had called for Los Angeles' gang-intervention programs to be taken out of the governor's auspices. The report actually said the programs should be taken out of the mayor's auspices.

After years in the L.A. street gang world, Ronald Lamonte Barron devoted his life to preventing young people from following in his footsteps. Barron, a former member of the Mansfield Crips gang that claims territory around Pico Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, was one of a few gang outreach workers who was trusted enough by Los Angeles authorities to counsel young offenders in the jails. Barron was leaving a bar in his old neighborhood Sunday night with his girlfriend when he noticed a tagger defacing a wall on Pico.

In parts of Prichard, Ala., children walk through broken glass and debris in bare feet. The roads, some unpaved, flood in the rain. Violence is pervasive. Young people call the community "Death Valley." Three years ago, John Eads, whose organization Light of the Village works with at-risk youths in Prichard, invited Father Greg Boyle to see for himself. Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles gang intervention and prevention program, was shocked by the poverty and despair.