Lefer: The crime rate in LA has gone down. The other day Chief Bratton said that with three thousand more police officers, he could reduce gang violence by 70 percent. Is that more suppression?

Rice: We’ve got an epidemic of violence, and containment suppression won’t work forever, because epidemics jump boundaries. Gangs have already spread into the suburbs. We’re seeing gang activity in other parts of the county and in neighboring counties, and Bratton knows it. He’s not talking about the fact that there will be another six thousand kids ready to join gangs; he’s talking only about his piece of it. Yes, with another three thousand cops he could reduce the drive-by shootings and the street crime in LA. But we can’t arrest our way out of the bigger problem. Having more police does nothing to alter the mind-set of the kids who are attracted to gangs. Bratton himself has said, “Suppression’s not enough.”

Lefer: The Advancement Project’s gang report calls for comprehensive prevention and intervention: saturating neighborhoods with mental-health services, creating jobs and opportunities. Is that too utopian?

Rice: It’s not pie in the sky. I brought together police, gang-intervention workers, sociologists, educators, demographers, and epidemiologists who study violence as a disease — a real dream team of experts on gangs. And that team told the city and the county what they had to do to end a youth-gang homicide epidemic that their policies had helped create. The city and the county did not want to hear that twenty-five years of containment suppression had produced twice as many gang members and six times as many gangs, with no end in sight. Since the report, the crime bills have at least put in token prevention measures, and the mayor just hired a “gang reduction and youth development director.” But it’s nowhere near enough.

Lefer: Gangs are entrenched in other major cities, and the violence is now spreading to smaller communities too. Have you found successful programs elsewhere in the U.S.?

Rice: The Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City is a good example of a community-saturation strategy: comprehensive services for an entire neighborhood. New York also has Beacon Centers, which are school-based community centers offering a wide range of activities and services. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire achieved remarkable success, drastically reducing youth-homicide rates and keeping them down for years. That was a collaboration among the police department, faith-based institutions, and the public-health community. Comprehensive services were made available for youths who wanted out of gangs. But when the leadership changed, the resources were pulled, and youth violence went up again. We saw the same thing here with the Summer of Success in 2003: comprehensive services made a difference, but when the program ended, so did the positive results. It seems like as soon as we see something works, we close it down. Providing services has to be the long-term position.

Lefer: You’ve talked about gang-intervention workers. Are they former gang members?

Rice: About 80 percent of them are, but they’ve all been clean for at least ten years. They’re the ones the police can call when there’s a shooting that looks like it might trip off a gang war in a neighborhood. They broker cease-fire agreements and try to calm people down. When somebody dangerous gets out of prison, they make sure the situation doesn’t explode. And this works in other cities, too. One of the major elements in CeaseFire Chicago, which reduced neighborhood violence, was the deployment of ex-offenders and former gang members.

But for our study, the most-important team members were the epidemiologists, because they had no history with the situation. Civil-rights lawyers have not come up with solutions; the cops are part of the problem; the gang-intervention workers used to be part of the problem. We all keep doing the same thing over and over. The medical community didn’t really have a horse in this race or a record to defend. To them a troubled community is a petri dish that fuels this virus called “violence.” You’ve got to understand where the virus comes from to be able to inoculate against it and stop transmission. In some neighborhoods you can find certain families who are the carriers for the disease. Right now there’s $1 billion in programs for kids, but it’s all wasted, because it’s not being used to reduce the violence. When a kid comes home from a juvenile camp, there’s no reentry team. All these government agencies don’t cooperate. Parole doesn’t talk to child services. So the reentry team ends up being the gang.

Lefer: When you delivered the gang report, did you think your plan would be put into practice?

Rice: No, because it means reinventing government, and the politicians don’t have the guts to do it. The government addresses issues one check at a time, one service at a time. It’s not aimed at solving problems. You simply service the problem. Our report says you have to transform government — and neighborhoods, and individuals.

When I said that county, state, and city agencies would need to work together, you’d have thought I’d grown a head out of my armpit. But it sounded nutty sixty years ago when people said the U.S. Army had to integrate. If you don’t say what has to happen, it will never happen. 

Lefer: You’ve said that some programs unintentionally validate the gang.

Rice: Anything that recognizes the gang as a legitimate entity validates it.

Lefer: But to broker any gang truce, you have to recognize the validity of the gangs, right?

Rice: No, you don’t. That’s where I messed up. When you sit down with the Bloods and the Crips as Bloods and Crips, you just reinforce the symbols and ethos and dynamics of the gang. You need to take them as individuals and talk about their leadership in the neighborhood, their roles as men in their community, and what they can do to reduce the violence. You get them to take on responsibility. Then you have them at the table as community leaders — not gang leaders. The gang doesn’t get mentioned.

When the lapd comes out and declares war on gangs, the gangs just get tighter. It makes their day: “We’re at war with the lapd!” They talk about who died in which battle as if it were the Civil War. The worst thing you can do is challenge the gangs head-on, call press conferences, declare war on them. When Bratton came out with his top-ten list of the worst LA gangs, it was a terrible mistake. The lapd put the Grape Street Crips on the list but not their rivals, the Bounty Hunter Bloods. Do you know who was on my phone the next morning? The Bounty Hunter Bloods asking, “How come Grape Street’s on there and we ain’t on there?” They were going to kill some people so they could get on the damn list.

Lefer: Does it validate the gangs when you offer programs for gang members and “at-risk” youth, while the kids who are trying to live peaceful lives get nothing?

Rice: Yes, that’s why you use a comprehensive public-health model, creating services for everyone. Most kids don’t go anywhere near a gang. But the 1 percent of kids who are in gangs create the epidemic of violence. It’s incredible how much violence a small number of youths with guns can cause. We are drowning in firearms. I’ve seen nine-year-olds with 9 mm Glock handguns. One gang member showed me a U-Haul full of machine guns in an alley within a stone’s throw of a housing project.

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