By Kathy Amoroso
April 10, 2006

Over 100 mayors, police chiefs, and other local and federal law enforcement officials gathered in Los Angeles on March 31, for a Mayors Summit on Gangs, presided over by Conference of Mayors President, Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill.

Hosted in Los Angeles by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the meeting featured a keynote address by U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, and included remarks from California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, Conference Vice President Dearborn Mayor Michael Guido and Advisory Board Chair Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer.

The meeting, the Conference’s second national summit on the topic, was devoted to an examination of the rising problem of gangs and gang violence in our cities. Participants discussed the best ways to target law enforcement and other resources to both proactively prevent the development of gangs in our cities, and to combat the existing problem of gang violence across the country.

The Summit was sponsored by the Mayors’ Institute for Community Policing which is supported by the COPS Office at the U.S. Department of Justice. COPS Office Director Carl Peed also participated in the session.

“This examination of the rising problem of gangs is a very pertinent subject, something we feel deserves a summit” O’Neill said in opening the session. “I am delighted that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is able to join us for our discussion today to share his plans to combat gang violence as he has made this increasingly deadly threat one of his top priorities,” she added.

“Today we’re here to talk about gangs and to confront the epidemic of gang violence that continues to hold America’s cities in its grip,” Villaraigosa said in welcoming the summit participants. “Today we’ll also be hearing from our brave men and women in blue. We need to listen to them because they’re on the front lines and we need to hear the messages about how to deal with gangs and gang crime. They’re saying that they’ve been to too many funerals, they’re tired of being outgunned by gangs, and that we need to back them up by backing sensible gun laws. I’d like to acknowledge New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his leadership in taking that crusade across the nation, speaking to our policymakers in Congress, and making it clear that we have to do something about sensible gun laws,” Villaraigosa said.

“They’re also telling me that they’re overstretched and outmanned and that we need to support them by stepping up to the plate and putting more officers on the streets. I hope part of the discussion today will be about getting the federal government to step up, once again, to support a COPS initiative across the nation that truly provides an assist to our cities so we can augment our forces and have the resources that we need to fight gangs and gang violence,” Villaraigosa added

“More and more we hear from them that in the fight against gangs we need to be smart and vigilant. It’s not enough to talk tough, we need a multi-pronged strategy to address this issue of gang and gun violence. That yes, we need to focus on suppression, but we also need to coordinate and balance our enforcement efforts with prevention programs that work,” he continued.

“Yesterday we had an opportunity to hear from Fresno Mayor Alan Autry at our Task Force on Poverty meeting, who really talked about this whole issue of fighting gangs and poverty with a multi-pronged strategy that I think we can all learn from. And here in the City of Los Angeles I can tell you we have the largest number of gangs and the most gang violence of any city in the nation. As you know, we export gangs across the nation and it’s an issue that’s becoming one that is quite alarming to cities, not just in our region but all across the country,” he said.

“Our police force is outmanned here in Los Angeles. We have about 9,000 police officers in a city of 4 million. To give you an example, New York, with a population of eight million has 35,000 officers, Chicago with a city of about three million has something like 18,000 officers, and so we need to obviously address this issue. We have about 463 known gangs and nearly 39,000 gang members in the city of Los Angeles. So working in concert with the Los Angeles Police Department, we’re developing a comprehensive and coordinated gang strategy that we will be announcing in the coming weeks.”

“I want to say finally that one of the things that has become crystal clear to us is that we need to target our anti-gang policing resources on hot spots where the most gang activity is occurring. It includes state of the art camera surveillance equipment in selected high crime areas including public housing developments. Yesterday we announced a grant from the Department of Justice, and a grant from Motorola to provide high tech cameras that could see into a very high crime area from a patrol car, cameras that would help us track kids to and from school, but we didn’t just stop with that, we also put together a commitment to provide more social services there, a multi-pronged comprehensive approach to dealing with gun and gang violence. We’re going to be targeting kids 10-15, the ones who are most vulnerable to recruitment by gangs, target active gang members and their associates and intervene as they’re being released from jail.”

“We’re going to flood a specific area, a hot spot, and we’re going to move out from there. I look forward to hearing more from you and all the gang experts we will be hearing from later here today. This issue is an issue that isn’t just about public safety. There’s a poverty connection to this problem, make no mistake. Mayor Autry yesterday did an overlay map where he showed all the poverty in his city, all the crime in his city, all the failing schools in his city and they all overlapped in the same areas, and those of you who were present, I think, could easily say the same for your cities.”

“I am here with the United States Attorney for Los Angeles Deb Yang, and we are here because we want to demonstrate that we understand we have a serious gang issue in the United States and that there is a serious gang issue in your communities, and I’m also here to demonstrate my commitment to continue to help you with that. Early in my tenure as Attorney General, as I spoke to the law enforcement community around the country, it was clear to me that gangs and the spread of meth were considered locally as the two most dangerous threats to our communities. So I directed that each U.S. Attorney appoint an anti-gang coordinator within each U.S. Attorney district, go out into the community, talk with state and local officials, and develop a strategy unique to each district. So we have been working very hard to identify the scope of the problem and talk about which solutions may exist with respect to this issue.”

This is the kind of issue that cannot be solved solely by law enforcement efforts. It requires a great deal of commitment to preventing youngsters from getting involved in gangs in the first place. It also requires a commitment at the back end -- that to the extent that a young person gets involved in a gang, and that they are subsequently prosecuted and then released, that we have to provide ways and means to make them to become productive members of society once they serve their time.

Let me say that those principles are embodied in the President’s very successful Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) initiative, which has focused on violent gun crime and we want to shift some of the focus from violent gun crime and use the principles we have seen succeed so well to fight gangs. PSN is based upon the principles that every community is different, the challenges are different within each community, so the solutions are going to be different. And so we have to be flexible in looking at solutions to this problem. PSN success is also based upon the principle that it requires a team effort – federal government working with state and local officials. We know that this kind of collaborative effort can work in attacking violent gun crime. We’re now seeing violent gun crime rates at the lowest level in 30 years, and we believe the same can be seen with respect to fighting gangs. And we’re going to have $30 million available for communities across the country for grants, to provide technical assistance, and to provide additional training to address this issue.

In a new initiative, we’ve allocated $15 million for this year to target six communities in this country that have serious, serious gang activity. We had U.S. Attorneys submit applications for these moneys and we had 47 applications, which indicates the scope of the problem, and we selected six communities in the United States based upon the severity of the gang problem, based upon the ability of that community to leverage partnerships, and based upon the infrastructure within that community to focus on prevention, enforcement and prisoner reentry. The following six areas have been selected to receive $2.5 million in grants to implement this comprehensive anti-gang strategy: Los Angeles; Cleveland; Dallas-Fort Worth; Milwaukee; Tampa; and the “222 Corridor” that stretches from Easton to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. One million of that grant will be provided to each site to focus on prevention, and $500,000 to each of those six sites will focus on prisoner reentry.

In closing the Attorney General told the mayors, “In many respects, you are the ones who are on the front lines and so I am committing the Department of Justice to do what we can to help. I would encourage you to seriously think about working with non-profit organizations and faith-based organizations in your communities. They’re invested in the success of our efforts here today and they provide wonderful resources and assets in helping us win this war against gangs.”

COPS Office Director Carl Peed specified the mayor’s role in the fight against gangs. “If we’re to make meaningful and lasting progress toward eradicating or reducing gang activity in this country, mayors’ administrations must play a key role in the solution. I have the opportunity to travel and talk to police chiefs and sheriffs all across the country and they always say two things -- one, we can’t arrest our way out of this problem and two, it’s more than just a law enforcement problem. It is my understanding that generally gang members hail from the same communities that they plague. We cannot just snap our fingers and eliminate them. Instead, we have to develop new, effective, practical and sustainable approaches to reducing and preventing gang activity. And that is our charge and that is why all of us are here today. It is what your constituents demand of their local governments, and it is what is expected of our federal government.”

A panel of experts on gangs and gang activity from the City of Los Angeles, moderated by Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Maurice Suh, then addressed the session. The theme of the panel was “lessons learned from the experience of Los Angeles.” Panel members included Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell; Constance Rice, Co-Director of Advancement Project Los Angeles; Bruce Riordan, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California; and William Woodruff, Deputy Administrator for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Department of Justice.

The luncheon speaker was California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. “I thought about and looked at our gang problems basically as a series of symptoms of dysfunctional systems or ones that weren’t sufficiently integrated and focused. Los Angeles provides the best single example of how things historically go wrong. About 14 percent of the homicides in California are gang related. 20 years ago, 14 percent of the homicides in Los Angeles County were gang related, and now 50 percent of the homicides in LA County are gang related. We’ve been fighting gangs for years and years, and frankly it’s seems to be getting more complicated and worse. So what do we do? Every community points to something, some effort to try to address gangs in their area. They draw on those basic models of suppression, intervention and prevention. Gang Suppression Teams, run out of my office, help with high end wiretaps and things of that sort. A single wiretap on a gang leadership unit frequently can run up to $1 million. A lot of our traditional drug enforcement work has been gang related as well, as has a lot of firearms work which has been notably successful.”

“The Boston Gun Project in California has been replicated in Stockton and Northern California, and we saw that with that combination of enforcement, suppression, outreach, intervention, and social services in a very, very intense way, in Stockton there was a 75 % drop in gang-related youth violence.”

The afternoon session opened with a best practices panel, moderated by Conference Vice President Dearborn Mayor Michael Guido, and included presentations by Conference Advisory Board Chair, Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer, Houston Police Chief Harold L. Hurtt, Richmond (CA) Mayor Irma Anderson, Long Beach Police Commander William Ballaird, , and Fresno Mayor Alan Autry.

The final panel included presentations from federal officials to update the mayors on resources available at the federal level to combat gangs. David Hagy, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice; L.T. Chu, Senior Intelligence Analyst, MS-13 National Gang Task Force, Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Tawana Waugh, Senior Public Liaison Specialist, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), U.S. Department of Justice, all addressed the mayors to close the meeting.