TUESDAY | February 19, 2008

Once again, we have a new report on gang violence in Los Angeles. Residents will soon learn if elected officials are committed to implementing sweeping changes to the city’s approach to curing this plague on our youth. Gang violence costs taxpayers at least $2 billion each year with an incalculable human cost to actual victims.

L.A. City Controller Laura Chick released her long-awaited report last week, recommending a fundamental shift in how the city administers its myriad of gang intervention and prevention programs. Her recommendations are expected to set off major turf battles—not in gang-riddled neighborhoods, but inside the corridors of City Hall.

For years, the city’s anti-gang programs have been spread throughout more than a dozen different departments that have little knowledge about each other’s programs and little if any communication about measuring performance. This absence of coordination and accountability has denied new resources to effective programs and allowed ineffective programs to operate way too long. The buck does not stop anywhere since no single person or department is directly responsible for this hodgepodge of efforts developed over the years and funded by a variety of different sources. If this were a real war on gang violence, the generals would have court-martialed a long time ago.

Chick is urging the city to create a consolidated Anti-Gang Office under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's direction that would coordinate both responsibility and oversight for the city’s programs. The Controller’s office would then issue regular fiscal and performance audits to determine what works and what does not. This common-sense approach should have been implemented a long time ago.

There is little doubt that Mayor Villaraigosa and L.A. City Council are truly concerned about ending the scourge of gang violence. What remains uncertain is whether the City Council is brave enough to lead fundamental reform in an entrenched bureaucracy and to cede authority and responsibility to one elected official. Previous efforts to take action in a significant way have died at the hands of elected officials who refused to upset the apple cart to achieve dramatic results.

The City Council should implement Chick’s recommendations immediately without months of drawn out hearings or turf battles. The stakes are too high and the victims too many. As part of the structural reforms, more money must be spent on programs that work. However, no additional funding should be requested or allocated until the recommendations are implemented and a top to bottom review of all programs is completed.

Chick’s report, together with last year’s anti-gang “Marshall Plan” from Connie Rice and the Advancement Project, provide L.A. with a well thought out template from which to build the most effective anti-gang strategy in our country. There is no reason why the nation’s epicenter of gang violence should not also become ground zero for a comprehensive solution.

The only question remaining is whether the city will make it happen. We will all know soon enough.

And that’s The Business Perspective. 

Gary L. Toebben
President & CEO
Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

The Business Perspective is a weekly opinion piece by Gary Toebben, President & CEO of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

by Gary Toebben, President & CEO, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

L.A. Business
THIS WEEK
View the latest issue of the Chamber's weekly e-mail newsletter.
Contact us to subscribe.