City Officials talk dutifully of a solution to ‘the gang problem,’ and then move on to the next agenda item: gang-style cops in our own LBPD

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

A 17-year-old was shot up pretty badly last week during a midday gang-style altercation on the west side of the First District. It was about an hour before the Long Beach City Council was to hold its Special Study Session on Anti-Gang Initiatives. Ironically, this was not ironic. Not anymore. Cruelly poetic juxtapositions like this, which used to shock and motivate, these days barely penetrate. They almost seem like clichés.

So it was business as usual in the council chambers, where the schedule allotted one hour for the special study session, and where one minute of that was already gone.

“We don’t have a quorum,” Mayor Bob Foster noted at 3:31 p.m. from his center seat on the panel, surveying the empty chairs on either side of him.

Council members present: Dee Andrews, Patrick O’Donnell and Tonia Reyes Uranga.

But Foster opened the Special Study Session on Anti-Gang Initiatives, anyway. “We don’t need a quorum,” he explained, “if we’re not going to vote.”

The mayor was right—well, correct, at least—even if it didn’t feel that way, not with a bullet-holed kid fighting for his life at St. Mary Medical Center a few blocks away. Eventually, he pulled through.

But the mayor and most city council members didn’t know about the shooting when they got to city hall. The news had just arrived in council chambers on the troubled faces of a few residents who knew the boy’s mother—a woman who, like many of them, had attended meetings of the volunteer Youth and Gang Violence Prevention Task Force that had assisted city staff in compiling its report for this session. One time, in fact, the mother had brought her son to a task force meeting. Word of the tragedy rippled through the small audience in little waves of whispers, gasps and sadly shaking heads, but nothing like disbelief. The news never quite lapped over the rail to reach the elected officials.

“That probably reflects the extent to which the council is connected to the issue of youth violence,” allows Lydia A. Hollie, who’s been leading the volunteer task force. “But it probably also has something to do with how frequently it happens.”

The relentlessness of the problem and the ever-unspanned gap to effective solutions were weirdly magnified by the tone of the special study session, beginning with the fact that squeezing it into an hour in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon didn’t seem all that special. Council members continued to trickle in for 15 minutes—as part-time public servants, most of them have other jobs—and untold numbers of citizens likely couldn’t attend at all for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the mayor kept urging everyone to hurry so that the council could get to its next appointment—an important closed session on the so-called Lobstergate case. Eventually, he imposed a one-minute limit on citizen comment, down from the usual three.

More discouraging, however, is that nobody missed much. The staff report was titled “Anti-Gang Initiatives in Long Beach: Youth & Gang Violence Prevention, Intervention, Suppression and Re-entry.” It lived down to every officious syllable, a bunch of studies, statistics, trends, models and buzzwords crammed into a PowerPoint program and transmitted onto a big screen, where Deputy City Manager Reginald Harrison read them in a monotone.

The only real energy was in the audience, where people reacted to all the numerology and verbiage as though they really cared about the problems—and with body language that mostly indicated that they really didn’t care very much for what were being passed off as solutions.

“The presentation was so vague that it was hard to take seriously,” said Jerlene Tatum, 32, an activist who lives with her husband and two young children about three blocks from where the teenager was shot—and next door to where she grew up. “But what really had me twitching is that I’ve heard it all before. I’ve been going to city council meetings for years, and every time they address this issue they make the same findings and say the same things. All they do is pat each other’s backs.”

Typical was a stretch in which Harrison recited a list of carefully parsed and unattributed statistics—including truancy rates, juvenile arrests/citations and dropout rates—that suggested great success by the local police and school district.

When he asserted that “the one-year dropout rate for seniors [in 2006-2007] was 4.6 percent and is declining,” Councilwoman Reyes Uranga had had enough.

“The dropout rate for seniors? That’s a useless statistic,” she scoffed. “By the time the kids are seniors, I’m happy. Most drop out in the eighth or ninth grade—and the overall dropout rate is extremely high, estimated between 40 and 60 percent. If we’re not going to honestly acknowledge the problem with our dropout rate, we’re not going to solve it.”

The presentation was much more straightforward the next night, when Long Beach Police Department Comdr. Robert Luman Jr. convened an emergency community meeting at the West Division Station. Luman provided details about the shooting—turns out, it was retaliation for a previous incident—and entertained suggestions for ending the cycle there.

“I could stop it,” Luman said at one point, smiling but sincere, “but I’d go to jail.”

Everyone rededicated himself to look for something less drastic.

The problem, almost everyone seems to agree, boils down to the area’s quality of life—unemployment, poverty, single-parent families—and the resources to improve it. That, in turn, depends on the quality of the area’s political constituency. Young people can’t vote—neither can adults with felonies on their records—and the poor don’t contribute to campaigns. It’s difficult to get the attention of politicians, especially at budget time.

But perhaps it’s worth remembering that gang-style behavior—the ethos of an unwritten code and retribution for breaking it—isn’t limited to the ghetto or barrio or any neighborhood. Maybe council members remembered that when they closed their Special Study Session on Anti-Gang Initiatives and headed for their closed session regarding the Lobstergate case.

Ah, yes, Lobstergate. That’s the popular name for the recent lawsuit in which a jury unanimously ruled that the Long Beach Police Department was guilty of retaliating against three officers (puncturing tires, stealing a flashlight, taking bullets out of an official handgun, smearing a locker room towel with shit—and passing them over for promotions) after they reported that their colleagues were diving for lobsters instead of patrolling the harbor for terrorist threats. It’s going to cost the city $4.1 million in damages.

“There is a thin blue line, and it’s not talked about openly,” said Craig Patterson, one of the victims of the police retaliation, during his testimony. “This is a fraternity. It’s the ultimate fraternity. And you do not betray the trust of your other officers.”

The homies on the street would be down with that.

Tags: city council, gangs, lbpd, Long Beach, violence