2007: Groundbreaking report by The Advancement Project Transforms the Discussion Around Gang Violence

At the beginning of the century, even as Advancement Project California’s work helped lower crowding in urban schools, a much more insidious problem, out-of-control gang violence, engulfed Los Angeles. 

The city was home to 720 individual gangs and some 40,000 active members; in the county, those figures climbed to 1,100 and 86,000, respectively. During the previous three years, city paramedic and rescue crews had responded to 7,500 “shots fired” calls, often arriving before police. And the county was where nearly three-quarters of all youth gang homicides in California occurred.  

“You can’t just arrest your way out of the problem,” Bill Bratton, LA’s then-police chief, liked to tell reporters. “It’s going to require a lot of intervention and prevention strategies and techniques.” 

Since 1977, Los Angeles County had been fighting a punishment-focused “war on gangs” that cost more than $25 billion. The result: six times as many gangs and twice as many gang members as before. 

Meanwhile, the city government distributed gang intervention/prevention dollars evenly across districts, regardless of where the problem was most severe—an outdated formula. In 2006, the Los Angeles City Council asked Advancement Project California to come up with a new approach. 

On January 17, 2007, through our Urban Peace program, we released A Call to Action: A Case for a Comprehensive Solution to L.A.’s Gang Violence Epidemic, a thick report that treated gang violence as a public health epidemic and advanced more than 100 wrap-around recommendations from 45 subject matter experts. It showed the problem hit harder in certain areas—and the city should focus its resources there. 

The report called for “a Marshall Plan to end gang violence,” invoking the massive post-WWII recovery effort for Europe. Among the conclusions: constantly arresting and re-arresting people was counterproductive and may have contributed to the growth of gangs. 

“They keep doing the same thing over, and over, and over again,” Connie Rice, founding co-director of Advancement Project, told NPR. “They keep reacting to a high-profile shooting. They douse it with law enforcement. They do the surge, and they purge. And then, they wait for the next shooting.” 

What the region needed was a community safety model that combined strategic suppression efforts with prevention/intervention programs and community participation—and a single, centralized office to coordinate 23 separate programs that cost the city $82 million each year but addressed less than 5 percent of the problem. 

The report also looked beyond the officers and the gang members to those caught in the crossfire, including 850,000 children living in the most affected areas who sorely needed safety and stability. Those children became a focus for action. 

“You have to organize the neighborhoods, organize the kids, organize the schools,” Rice said. “You have to have the faith-based sector, everybody working to create a safety net, so that the children are safe 24/7—on the way to school, in school, out of school, after school. You have to secure the parks. You have to have police working with community activists to organize that neighborhood with the local leadership to keep every kid safe. It's called comprehensive prevention and intervention.” 

Initially, the response to the report seemed confused. A contentious hearing produced a variety of complaints but no consensus, and just over a month later, no city council member had endorsed the report’s conclusions. Some council members actively opposed it, and then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa launched his own separate enforcement campaign. In the meantime, new numbers showed a 43 percent increase in gang crime in the San Fernando Valley over the previous year. 

And yet, by June, with Bratton’s full-throated support, Villaraigosa had named Jeff Carr, an evangelical minister with a proven record of creating youth programs in low-income neighborhoods, as gang czar to head a new Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) office, which the report had recommended. 

Over time, and with careful coordination, the strategy began to show results. By 2011, gang-related crime dropped by more than 15 percent, and 35 percent fewer gang-related killings occurred in neighborhoods served by GRYD. 

It wasn’t the end of Advancement Project California’s work on this issue. In fact, this was the beginning of an initiative that would, among other things, spin off Urban Peace as a separate institute. But that would come a few years later.