Smart policies bring new era of peace to communities in Los Angeles

This opinion piece was written by Anne Tremblay, director of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) in Los Angeles.

In a city of nearly 500 square miles, roughly twice the size of Singapore, and home to over four million residents, there are nearly 400 gangs and as many as 45,000 gang members.

Fortunately, through strong leadership and calculated risk-taking, Los Angeles has continued to see historic declines in homicides and shooting victims. At the height of Los Angeles’ gang violence in the early 1990s, there were over 1000 homicides per year. By contrast, Los Angeles is now in its ninth straight year of fewer than 300 homicides per year. In 2018, the city saw its second-lowest number of homicides in over 50 years with 259 lives lost. This is still 259 too many, but behind this positive trend is a profound policy success.

Lessons learned from our Los Angeles approach may provide guidance for other cities facing similar challenges with gang or group violence.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has charged the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) with continuing this downward trend through focused, data-driven efforts that take us beyond traditional crime suppression.

The creation of the GRYD Office in 2007 and its significant expansion over the last five years, is key to those efforts. The GRYD Office oversees, develops and funds city-wide efforts related to community engagement, prevention, intervention and violence interruption.

A key component of this work is the city’s commitment to community-centred approaches. At GRYD we’ve partnered with 25 community-based organisations (CBOs) that provide direct services to youth and their families in 23 areas throughout the city.

Our vision is to make Los Angeles safer through the creation of healthy, peaceful and thriving communities in the neighbourhoods we serve.

1. DEVELOP A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH.

GRYD’s data-driven, comprehensive strategy includes the following components:

• Gang prevention services that increase youth and family protective factors, reduce gang joining and provide intentional youth development activities.
• Intervention services that increase protective factors and prosocial connections among gang-involved young adults.
• Violence interruption through a coordinated response to incidents of violence and proactive peacekeeping.
• Community engagement through a summer program that creates safe, inclusive spaces for communities and includes youth employment opportunities.
• The GRYD comprehensive strategy is anchored in community engagement. Our marquis community engagement program, Summer Night Lights, creates jobs for over 400 youth annually and brings all components of the strategy together at 32 parks during the summer months when youth violence traditionally spikes.

Components of the comprehensive strategy existed to some degree before GRYD was tasked with spearheading violence prevention efforts in the city, but they were fragmented and not informed by data. Each element has since developed as the city’s commitment to ending violence has grown through increased funding, resources, and personnel.

The shared lessons and synergy among the components have served to strengthen each component and build a solid foundation for the evolution of the program over time.

2. FOCUS ON PLACE WITH AN INVESTMENT IN COMMUNITY-BASED AND IN-HOUSE EXPERTISE.

According to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), half of all homicides in Los Angeles are gang-related, so addressing gang or group violence is essential to building a safer city.

To do that, we have zeroed in on the places violence happens.

Place matters not only because of Los Angeles’s geographic size but also because gang violence is concentrated in certain parts of the city. The creation of the GRYD Office allowed funding to be distributed to the areas of highest need rather than equally assigned among council districts like other types of city funding.

The territorial nature of Los Angeles street gangs also warrants a focus on place. Gangs in Los Angeles traditionally claim a territory as their “hood”. Violence may erupt among and between gangs over that territory — establishing who may enter the neighbourhood, who controls it and which youth may be recruited to join the gang.

Partnering with and funding CBOs with a significant presence in a particular area is key. The staff at CBO’s must understand the area gang’s history and dynamics. They often know who and what is driving the violence. Intervention CBO staff must have relationships of trust with residents and gang members in those areas as well as the knowledge and lived experience — what we call a “license to operate” — in a particular community.

This credibility puts the intervention workers in a position to proactively work to keep the peace, and in the aftermath of a shooting, prevent retaliatory violence, conduct rumour control and support victims with appropriate services.

As a city, we took a calculated risk to fund intervention workers, by allowing access to electronic crime notifications and sharing developing, sometimes law enforcement sensitive information, immediately after incidents of violence.

This is not done without a vetting process. The intervention workers are initially screened by the CBO that employs them and upon successful completion of a 140-hour training course, they are certified as GRYD community intervention workers. New GRYD intervention workers are supported by a network of seasoned intervention workers who mentor and guide them.

We also assign city staff by geography, and in ways that complement our police division boundaries so that all the players who come together in collaboration know the area and possess a sense of ownership. Many of the staff employed at the Mayor’s GRYD Office grew-up in the same or similar neighbourhoods to the ones in which they work.

City staff members possess the savvy to navigate City Hall, the cultural proficiency to work closely with community partners in the field (including those who were once gang or justice system involved), and are skilled at building relationships with members of law enforcement.

They are both a bridge and buffer between historically unlikely partners in this work — police officers and intervention workers.

The Mayor’s team of coordinators act as conveners and facilitators of monthly partnership meetings. They lead training for officers as well as CBO staff.

In the immediate response to shootings and homicides, the model relies on a triangle partnership as outlined in our GRYD Incident Response Program. This relational triangle combines the assessment and implementation strategies of gang intervention practitioners, the investigative and targeted suppression strategies of law enforcement, and the social work and community organising principles of crisis intervention via the GRYD staff. The interaction among these entities affirms the roles and boundaries of each.

Over time, this approach creates stability, allows for flexibility and builds mutual trust as the triad works collectively to address gang violence.

The efficacy of the GRYD incident response triangle partnership is documented in a recent evaluation report which estimated that there were 43.2% fewer retaliatory shootings and homicides compared with the control conditions not involving GRYD.

3. IMPLEMENT DATA SYSTEMS AND FUND RESEARCH THAT INFORMS AND INSPIRES PRACTICE.

The combination of the right research partners coupled with the experience of the community and the ground level expertise of the staff at the CBO’s is powerful.

From the initial community needs assessments that guided the launch of GRYD through to GRYD’s work today, the comprehensive strategy is reflective of an on-going dialogue with the communities most impacted by violence. Creating a data infrastructure while simultaneously building strength-based programming has helped capture accurate and relevant data sets that now inform practice.

GRYD CBOs are contractually required to input data into a GRYD database. These data facilitate research to practice a feedback loop, so that CBO staff in partnership with university-based researchers, can review what’s been done in order to inform the work and improve service provision.

The feedback loop is integrated into a robust training curriculum (in-person and online) and monthly technical assistance ensures continuous improvement and innovation in this work.

After several longer evaluation reports that looked globally at the GRYD components, our approach has pivoted to short and focused evaluation briefs on the various components of the GRYD comprehensive strategy.

The commitment to producing informative, action-oriented research is illustrated in the city’s investment in university-based researchers who use quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the effectiveness of the GRYD comprehensive strategy.

Their work provides real-time and accessible information that will both calibrate our efforts on a regular basis, inspire practitioners in their work with youth and families and allow us to share more broadly what our city has learned over the last 12 years.

In January 2020, the GRYD Research and Evaluation Team will launch the brief series to provide targeted summaries of lessons learned from GRYD programming.

The scale and scope of the challenges we face here in Los Angeles may not be the same in other cities, but our approach and the lessons we’ve learned over the last decade are relevant to other jurisdictions.

All GRYD partners, including CBO staff, researchers and law enforcement, regularly join the Mayor’s Office in sharing our policies and practices with national and international visitors to Los Angeles. Components of our GRYD comprehensive strategy have been implemented in other cities in ways that work for that local context.

Although Los Angeles continues to experience violent crime reductions year over year, our job is not done yet. GRYD’s data-driven comprehensive strategy requires further institutionalisation of our policies and procedures.

Like many public safety partnerships, obstacles such as staff turnover and law enforcement transfers must not prevent us from deepening our collaborative efforts while always listening to the voices of the too-often marginalised communities who experience gang violence. — Anne Tremblay

Read more about the GRYD and our models of service here.

(Picture credit: ATOMIC hot links/Flickr)