Who'll stop the gangs? (LAT)

[katty]

more: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten27feb27,0,3808378.column

Tim Rutten:
Who'll stop the gangs?

L.A.'s crime plague is a complex social ill that requires more than just beefed-up law enforcement.
February 27, 2008

Gang violence is to Los Angeles politics as the weather is to conversation: Everybody talks about it, and nobody ever does anything about it.

Policing occasionally provides a temporary surcease, as it did last week when a drive-by murder next to a grammar school playground and a subsequent shootout between heavily armed gunmen and Los Angeles Police Department officers paralyzed parts of two neighborhoods northeast of downtown for hours. Early Wednesday morning, a police sweep apprehended 19 alleged gang members and seized guns and drugs.

But though the department is willing to take on gang violence where it becomes particularly virulent, treating this solely as a policing issue is a bit like asking the overextended, understaffed LAPD to engage in an endless game of Whac-a-Mole. There were 200 officers involved in Wednesday's predawn sweep -- and anyone who knows just how few cops are on the city's streets at any given moment also knows what that kind of diversion of force means.

The problem's sheer scope makes it clear that it won't yield to a solution based entirely -- or even mainly -- on law enforcement. People who believe most of the statistics thrown around during debates over gangs usually are the sort who respond to e-mails from Nigeria with their banking information. Still, conservative analysts estimate that as many as 40,000 people belong to the 700 or so gangs in the city of L.A. Countywide, there may be as many as 1,200 gangs with 80,000 members. The material cost of their criminality may be as much as $2 billion a year; the human toll in lives lost or deformed defies calculation.

[Venecianlady]

1. adolescents should be educated

as to the dangers of gangs.