by Jorja Leap
Carl breaks in and begins to talk about something I have noticed: The life on the street has changed.
“You guys know,” Carl begins, “the injunctions have stopped any general congregatin’—there are no meetings. Now we gotta take the next step. We gotta teach these youngsters to stop warrin’. You know what I’m sayin’. These same dudes that you hate so much are the same ones who’ve got your back in the yard. You know what I’m sayin’. My name used to be a household name in the streets, but now—I just got outta the pen and there are these dudes who don’t know who I am. You know what I’m sayin’.”
You know what I’m sayin’; I stop counting at twenty. But despite Carl’s speech tic, I listen closely.
“Things are changin’. Bangin’ is over. The things that individuals in the streets are doin’ have changed. The game is changin’. You know what I’m sayin’. I’m not sure anymore if we should deal with gangs. I’m wonderin’ if we should wait until they’re ready to embrace change.” His words stop me in my tracks. This is Greg Boyle with tattoos, just out of prison, raw. But he is on to something. Big Boo chimes in.
“These individuals who got caught up in the early ’90s need somewhere to go—rather than gettin’ out there servin’ the neighborhood. We need to find somethin’ for people gettin’ out of the pen to do. They need jobs. Otherwise they go back to bein’ soldiers.”
Andre speaks next. “I been shot thirteen times and I survived. And I deserve every bullet I got, y’know I was out there.” He brings a valuable outlook. “I don’t speak on the pen. I speak about life.” He is one of the individuals leading today’s training, along with Big Mike, Taco, and Kenny. These are men who have been working in the community for more than a decade, trying to bring about change. Many did this informally and without pay for years. Now, funded by the Mayor’s Office and by private foundations, they feel a sense of pride and status.
“Even though it shouldn’t take money to make these youngsters listen—it works.”
“Yeah, but we gotta do more than get them money. We gotta get them schools and jobs,” Kenny adds.
These men—whether experienced or just out of prison—know better than anyone that the communities need more than street intervention. The old ways of banging are gone. The large meetings William Dunn wrote about, those called by Eme and monitored by law enforcement, no longer take place. As a result of the injunctions and the gang-suppression units, gangs have gone underground, and negotiate in new and different ways.
As 2010 passes, I grow even more aware that something is going on with the men in the neighborhoods. I’m not exactly sure what it is. The feeling of change is reinforced when Mark and I take on a project evaluating a community-based antigang initiative led by Aquil Basheer. We are the weirdest trio imaginable—a retired LAPD deputy chief, a former political activist turned fire fighter, and me, the godmother of every gangbanger who crosses her path.
Aquil has set out to do nothing less than return a community to itself by training OGs and veteran gangbangers to serve as interventionists. No one is required to declare their neighborhood status—whether active or retired. All Aquil asks is that everyone attend training offered by the PCITI. Along with a tendency to occasionally mangle the English language, Aquil is wed to acronyms. The PCITI is the Professional Community Intervention and Training Institute, and it is his baby. He intends this training program to instruct these “community interventionists” in everything from CPR and self-defense to program evaluation. Julio Marcial has stepped up with funding from the California Wellness Foundation, and the project is off and running.
Along with Celeste Fremon, Mark and I attend orientation for the PCITI on an early-summer evening. The sky is still light, and the men who sit in carefully lined-up chairs are unaccustomed to being out before sundown. These are all OGs, and they look shy, withdrawn, uncertain of how to act. One man sits through the entire presentation wearing ear buds.
Aquil approaches the front of the room full of confidence and energy, his face shining brightly under the spotlights. He introduces himself and begins speaking about the institute and the training it will offer these individuals—the people Aquil refers to as “the fathers of the community.” Aquil treats each of these tatted-up, vicious-looking OGs with dignity. And respect. And expectation. He tells them they must apply to be in the class. When one man expresses anxiety and moans, “I can’t work a computer,” Aquil quietly responds, “It’ll be all right, brother.”
I sit in the audience, speechless. Even after thirty years of teaching, I know I could never do this. Aquil commands total respect—and he comes by his street cred honestly, from many sources. Part of his strength is encoded in his DNA. His father was the first African American to integrate the ranks of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Aquil works as an LA City firefighter and has now accumulated thirty years on the job. He shows no signs of stopping. At the end of his presentation, the OGs swarm Aquil. We all leave the orientation session inspired.
Mark observes every class session and is adopted by the OGs who clamor to include him in their graduation. At the ceremony, these former gangbangers all high-five Mark and embrace him while I watch. A week after graduation, we meet Aquil to discuss his outcomes—which are dazzling. He and Mark talk about their pensions and benefits, city employees swapping hints about retirement. But their easygoing banter belies Aquil’s appearance, which is pretty menacing. His head is always carefully shaven and when his mood grows heated, his eyes turn into impenetrable slits.
“I can be an angry black man, Jorja. I can do some real harm,” he tells me. But I have never seen any evidence of this. Instead, all I see is his passion for community organizing. I am also astonished at the depth of Aquil’s emotional tolerance. It allows him to embrace both Mark and me—even though we embody the white devils that his Black Muslim faith preaches against.
I do not think Aquil has ever claimed any neighborhood. Instead, the violence he acted out in his youth came in a more political form—he was peripherally associated with the Black Panther Party, although I doubt he was ever a member. His icons are not Tookie Williams and Raymond Washington. Once the evaluation is complete, I invite him to speak at UCLA. In my class, he talks about Bobby Seale and Angela Davis, ignoring the puzzled looks on the faces of students who have no idea who the fuck Bobby Seale is.
“I know they don’t know who the hell I’m talking about,” he laughs, “but we gotta teach these youngsters.” I think of how my students have no historical context—one undergraduate visited my UCLA office and recognized the photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, happily announcing, “I know who they are! Cheech and Chong, right?”
“I don’t care what it takes to reach these youngsters—we are gonna do it. You and me, Jorja—we are there, at the barricades.” But I have a different project for Aquil. I tell him about Kevin Williams and ask if he would be able to mentor this lost boy.
I make three separate appointments for Kevin to meet Aquil. I am convinced that Aquil can help—Kevin is, after all, the son of a Black Panther father. But he never shows up. I ask Elena what is going on, and she tells me she doesn’t know.
“Y’know Kevin is worried about the baby. He wants to make money. He says he wants to make sure he can support his child.”
“I think Aquil can help him.”
“Kevin says he wants to start a boxing business—he’ll train fighters and put them in the ring and then take part of their purse. He’s really getting serious now—and he has stopped being so crazy with me. Stopped.”
Elena’s eyes dance with pride. I feel frightened.
Meanwhile, Maniac has disappeared.
I call Aquil to confide my fears to him. These are two young, strong African American men—both capable but troubled. They are both “in the wind.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, my sister. They’re not ready to leave the neighborhood. We’ve gotta wait until they are.”
Aquil does not know this, but he is putting
forth the same argument as Greg Boyle. Is it any wonder that two weeks earlier, sitting on a committee to award the 2010 California Peace Prize, Greg and I both argued strongly that Aquil should be one of the honorees? Aquil believed you could not talk anyone into change—it had to come from within.
I want to know more about the change I am sensing. Aquil and I spend a great deal of time walking through different parts of South LA at night. The rumors fly. I get a call from a student intern in the Mayor’s Office who tells me, “Everyone here is talking about what you’re doing with Aquil at night in the projects. Are you planning a special program?” What I do with Aquil differs little from what I do with Big Mike. I am promiscuous. If someone wants to spend time with me in the streets, I am there.
One night we are out, and I share my suspicions with Aquil—that Kevin may be abusing Elena—and he immediately catches something.
“He’s in a lotta conflict over who he is, sister.”
“Why?”
“When a black man is with a Latino woman—there’s trouble—I hate to say it, I don’t want to say it, but it’s not good—not for her, not for him, not for anyone.”
A week earlier Carlos had talked with me about this identical issue after another homie reported that one of his Latina “sisters” had been seen getting into Kevin Williams’s car.
“That’s a wreck, Jorja,” Carlos told me. “You can’t have the Hispanic woman with the black man.”
A week later Big Mike and I hold the opening session of Project Fatherhood at Jordan Downs. This is a special effort, in partnership with the Children’s Institute, Inc., and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. With this project, Big Mike is finally getting some of his work funded, beyond the small stipend he receives from Jordan High. Every Wednesday night, for two hours, former gangbangers and fathers of all ages—from a seventeen-year-old expecting his first child to a forty-five-year-old with seven children, meet to talk about their dilemmas. Mike and I co-lead the group, but they are teaching one another. The older fathers attempt to mentor the youngsters. But the shadows in the room are the violence and poverty of the projects. After the first session, Big Mike walks me out to my car and tells me to lock the doors. It is dark in Jordan Downs.
“Be careful,” he tells me. “Go straight to the freeway.”
Ten minutes later, on Alameda, I count six LAPD cars speeding past me. Instead of turning onto the freeway on-ramp that will take me home to Santa Monica, I keep driving in the direction of the cop cars.
I call Mark to tell him what I am doing. “Be careful,” is all he says.
When I get to the yellow tape, Khalid Washington is there. A sixteen-year-old Latino lies facedown in a pool of blood. The LAPD blocks the scene and tells us to move away. While we backtrack toward our cars, Khalid is on his cell phone, dialing Vicky Lindsay, who runs Project Cry No More. Vicky’s nineteen-year-old son and her husband were both murdered in gang-related violence. To deal with her grief, she started a support group for mothers who lose their children to gang violence. “We are all trying to take back our community,” she has told me. Tonight, she and Khalid work to find someone who speaks Spanish.
Somehow, in the midst of this death, color doesn’t matter. Blacks and browns work together. “We gotta find someone to tell this boy’s mother her son is dead,” Khalid says. I give him Joanna’s number. Khalid calls her and she says she will meet us. I get on the phone.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” she reassures me. “I got it. We all gotta help. No one else is gonna be there for us. We all gotta take care of each other.”
Nineteen. Answers
Nothing stops a bullet like a job.
—Father Greg Boyle, SJ
Smiley has been shot in front of the Rampart MTA station at 7:30 a.m., getting ready to ride the bus into work at Homeboy. The LAPD possesses a security tape with film of the suspected shooter, and a gang detective has summoned Greg to see if he can identify the figure captured on tape. He can’t. Meanwhile, Smiley is on life support at County/USC Medical Center, waiting to be declared brain dead. I am too sad to cry. This nineteen-year-old homie, abandoning MS-13 in order to survive, had talked to me the day before about how badly the cast on his broken arm itched. I drew a heart on the plaster, flanking it with the words “I” and “Smiley.” And now he is gone.
It is summer. I am back from a Washington, DC, conference sponsored by the National Institute of Justice. Listening to the predictions of the FBI, NIJ, DOJ, and OJJDP (US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention), I lived through three days of criminal-justice alphabet soup on steroids. Now I am trying to detox. During the conference, a few people managed to break out of their East Coast chauvinism long enough to ask, “How are things out there in the Wild West?” wanting to know what was going on in LA. But most of the conference’s attention was riveted on David Kennedy, whose long hair and all-black attire had made it into the pages of Newsweek, the New Yorker, and the office of Attorney General Eric Holder. Accompanied by Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Kennedy told Holder that their team could eradicate gangs in the United States of America. All they needed was $50 million. They have the answer.
Variations on their particular approach are being tried throughout the country. In Los Angeles, the Mayor’s Office has devoted $20 million to a combination of community-based prevention and street intervention. The crime rate hovers at a thirty-year low and the mayor proclaims his success. He has the answer. The trouble is, too many people suspect him of political grandstanding. While his Summer Night Lights antigang program is a huge success, there are still problems in other city-funded efforts. Celeste Fremon and Matt Fleischer complete an investigative piece on these city programs, which reveals that some of the mayor’s efforts are of dubious value. They report that it’s nearly impossible to show the specific impact of street intervention. On top of this, their investigation exposes flaws in the city prevention program. Still, the mayor’s office struggles with a problem confronting most antigang programs. Money.
Despite David Kennedy’s showmanship, Eric Holder does not pony up the $50 million. In the end the government commits a whopping $12 million nationwide to fight gang violence. The message is clear: the gang problem is taking a backseat to other criminal justice issues.
“Law enforcement can’t do it alone,” Holder insists, and he invokes what is becoming a shopworn mantra. “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem. We need to make demands that our enforcement efforts are complemented by strong prevention, education, and intervention initiatives. Putting gangs out of business will take . . . unprecedented, community-wide cooperation.”
One week later, Homeboy Industries—the largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program in America—is faced with a lack of funding that will force Greg Boyle to lay off 330 workers. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declares that he will not “cut one single cop from the budget of the City of Los Angeles” despite the fact that there are estimates the city is facing a budget shortfall of half a billion dollars. No one wants to talk about gangs and no one wants to fund help for people attempting to exit them.
At Homeboy Industries, the staff gathers in the lobby. Greg is telling everyone that there is no money left, everyone is “laid off.” He pauses to compose himself. “We should collect unemployment, all of us. I am going to apply and, y’know, that should be interesting.” He then talks about Homeboy and what it means to “our community.” It is clear who this community is: the homies who are present and those in prison—all who hope for redemption. Greg asks Ronny to pray, and he does so, eloquently, pleading, “We organized for our hoods, now we gotta organize for Homeboy—all the things we did for our neighborhoods we gotta do for Homeboy.” The meeting is followed by a groundswell of activity. Homies keep coming in to tell Greg how much they love him. Within hours, the media descends; reporters and cameras take up their posts outside the building. Marcos, whose tattoos are in various stages of removal, comes in to tell
G he will work without pay. The CNN reporter interviewing Greg, practically in tears herself, asks, “What will happen to Homeboy?”
Throughout its history, Homeboy has been dependent on private financial support—foundations and donations—because there is no substantial federal or state funding directed toward long-term gang intervention. Instead, the State of California chooses to spend roughly $50,000 a year to keep an individual incarcerated—at either the juvenile or adult level. Greg is telling the CNN reporter that it costs as much to send a kid to Harvard as it does to maintain a kid in juvenile detention. He continues to explain that it costs about $20,000 per client to provide services at Homeboy—less than half the annual cost of incarceration.
Once the news is out, donations flow into Homeboy. Within two weeks, the doors open again, but it is a temporary fix. The dilemma of securing long-term funding has not been solved. As the weeks pass, I alternate between two major projects: helping Shannon apply to college and evaluating Homeboy’s efforts.
When Shannon shows me her list of extracurricular activities, I think about Smiley. His CV would have listed the probation camps and detention centers he had frequented. Instead, here was my daughter, talking about schools that emphasized social justice and how they might regard her work in South Los Angeles, tutoring at-risk children who couldn’t read. Shannon is talking about pursuing a career in education and working on social policy. She looks forward to the future with great excitement. This hopeful anticipation is something few gang members will ever experience. I am thrilled for her, but my chest hurts. I try not to cry.
I think again about the lack of hope the following Saturday, while I stand at Smiley’s gravesite. His mother is weeping and repeating the words “Mijo, mijo”—My son, my son—over and over again. Carol Biondi places a linen handkerchief in the weeping woman’s hands. Smiley’s mother tries to give it back; it is beautiful—a family memento—but Carol insists, “Take it.” Greg Boyle is praying. Smiley is the 174th gang member he has buried.