The City of Los Angeles needs a new unified, comprehensive plan to tackle the entrenched culture of gang violence that continues to take hundreds of young lives every year, said top city and county officials and community leaders yesterday. Hundreds of people packed into the Los Angeles City Council Chambers to listen to the findings of the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development.
“Gang members are as violent as ever,” said panelist City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, citing the recent spike of 14 percent in gang violence in 2006.
The violence not only affects the individual victims but their families and entire communities, said the panelists. Eighty-eight percent of sixth graders have seen multiple instances of violence, according to Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent David Brewer. “We cannot educate our children under those circumstances,” he said. “If you stabilize the communities, I will educate them.”
The City Council commissioned the Advancement Project to create a citywide gang reduction strategy last year. The report calls the region’s gang homicides and violence an “epidemic.” It offers more than 100 recommendations, including creating the political will to tackle this issue, confronting the size and scope of the problem and addressing the “conditions in neighborhoods and the unmet needs of children that allow gangs to take root, flourish and expand.”
“Children are not born violent,” said Advancement Project Director Connie Rice at the public hearing. “Children become violent because we fail them.”
Tags: gangs, los angeles, violence, youth
I was kind of struck by this quote by Mayor Villaraigosa with FBI Director Robert Mueller: “We have a message for these gang leaders: We are coming with everything we have. We are coming with services and suppression, and we are putting you out of business.”
It will be interesting to see if the FBI presence will aid in LA’s gang crackdown
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