Turmoil and truce in the city

You might think police and politicians weary of gang violence and endless police crackdowns would welcome efforts by current and former gang members to negotiate truces and rein in the carnage. You might think that, but Tom Hayden says you’d be dead wrong.

The former state legislator and Vietnam-era activist contends that civic and law enforcement leaders in Los Angeles, New York and other major cities have gone to great lengths to sabotage, not support, such promising grass-roots efforts, and at times have harmed the very quest for public safety they claim to pursue.

In his new book “Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence,” Hayden all but howls in outrage at such senseless squandering of opportunities to avert bloodshed, the official marginalization of heroic figures such as Father Gregory Boyle -- the “gang priest” whom Hayden calls “a living alternative to the war on gangs” -- and the seeming lack of public concern about the 25,000 young lives claimed by gang violence in America since 1980. He argues that policymakers and the general public bear a large measure of blame for this death toll because of their narrow, 20-year focus on futile attempts to arrest and punish gangs out of existence, ignoring the broken homes, broken schools and joblessness that make gang membership so attractive to some kids.

“If twenty-five thousand white people killed each other in ethnic wars, you can be sure that Americans would pay attention,” he writes in a caustic introduction titled “These Dead Don’t Count.” But gang members generally are not white, they are no one’s constituency, and current thinking on combating gang crime remains so entrenched and dogmatic that, as Hayden sees it, any attempt by gang leaders to forge truces or pursue law-abiding activities (jobs, entrepreneurship, sports, education) are viewed either as ruses or threats.

In one of the book’s most disturbing passages, Hayden writes of the time a phalanx of Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang officers invaded a peaceful legislative task-force meeting. Hayden, then a state senator, had convened the gathering at a local church to discuss a job-training program to lure kids from gangster life. Officers materialized, blocking doorways and, as soon as the meeting ended, frisked and arrested the gang members and other youths who had been invited by the state of California -- and who had just finished testifying about, among other things, the sort of police harassment that goggle-eyed task-force members were witnessing firsthand. Hayden writes of hustling his star witness out a back door to keep him from jail.

Hayden also tells of facilitating a truce in a deadly shooting war between Santa Monica and Mar Vista gangs. He recounts negotiating safe passage from police for Pee Wee, a gang member critical to the negotiations who had violated his parole by moving to Riverside and failing to report to his parole officer. Hayden writes that Santa Monica’s police chief promised to let Pee Wee come to town without fear of arrest -- the only way the parolee would come out of hiding. With Pee Wee’s help, Hayden says, a cease-fire was locked into place in his office in Santa Monica, a city that had seen four gang killings in two weeks. A headline in The Times announced, “Gang Truce Could Stop Killing.”

The next morning, Santa Monica police officers arrested Pee Wee for parole violations and his wife for harboring a fugitive, which Hayden views as a broken promise. “Were the police and state agents trying to wreck the fragile peace? Send a message that taking risks for peace would get you no leniency?” he writes. “Or, simply, as I suspected, reasserting the image of absolute control in circumstances where the killings were stopped without them? Certainly their word was no good. The peace was destabilized. It would be a long time before another person like Pee Wee would be willing to assist a truce.”

Though the anecdote as offered certainly illustrates Hayden’s theme, it should be noted that Santa Monica Police Chief James T. Butts Jr. says it never happened. Butts told me that he offered no promise of safe passage to Pee Wee and that he spoke to Hayden only after the arrest, when the state senator called him, sounding “like a wild man,” to demand Pee Wee’s release. Butts termed Hayden’s recollection of events “insane,” asserting that vigorous police work rather than gang truces stopped the killing and pointing out that Pee Wee later was arrested and convicted of murder -- a detail Hayden glosses over, portraying him as a victim of a police vendetta.

It’s a shame that Hayden downplays the criminality of gang members and paints as harsh a portrait as possible of law enforcement. Such absolutism detracts from his argument for supporting gang peacemakers and his otherwise damning portrait of official reluctance to go beyond the lock-’em-all-up approach and entrenched law-enforcement dogma that a gang must never get official recognition -- even for doing good.

Although most of the gang and police incidents recounted in “Street Wars” have been reported piecemeal elsewhere, Hayden pulls them into a cogent narrative with an undeniable point: Fighting gangs with one-sided, warfare-style policing is not working. He rails convincingly against the demonization of all gang members, noting that there were 350 gang-related homicides in L.A. in 2002 -- a grievously large number, but hardly justification for condemning all 200,000 local gang members as cold-blooded killers. That means most gang members did not kill anyone. (Indeed, only a small portion of gang members -- as little as 5%, according to LAPD statistics -- are responsible each year for gang crimes of all kinds.) Hayden deserves credit for championing a constituency for whom few politicians are willing to vouch and most are happy to vilify. The passion and insight he brings to these parts make it worthwhile reading.

Unfortunately, this narrative represents only about a third of “Street Wars.” The rest is something of a disappointment, a recycling of familiar arguments and research that fails to deliver fully on its central promise: to explore Hayden’s alternative to current approaches to gang crime, what he calls the gang peacemaking process and “transformation.” That this one truly original part of the book should fall flat is particularly puzzling given that the author had a ringside seat during several pivotal moments in recent L.A. gang history.

At the outset, Hayden informs the reader that he intends to focus on gang peacemakers; by the end, the book has spent surprisingly few pages on this central subject, failing to fully explain the process, how to augment traditional law-enforcement strategies, or even to render convincing portraits of people like Pee Wee, who risk liberty and perhaps life to negotiate with rivals and (possibly) transform themselves from gangbangers into more productive members of society. Typical is Hayden’s passage on the triumphant moment when he brought rival gang leaders together in his Senate office in Santa Monica to negotiate an armistice:

“Undoubtedly, it was the first time these homeboys ever felt welcomed into a government office. My title of El Senador perhaps lent a sense of promise to the negotiations at hand. Since the matters to be discussed were not my business, I shook their hands, left the room, and closed the door.”

Not my business? That may have been a noble and facilitating sentiment to express at the time, but Hayden has written a book about this peacemaking process. To leave the reader in the dark about how mortal enemies managed to set aside their hostilities and turn to peace makes for a deeply unsatisfying read.

There is also a confused tone to “Street Wars,” which somewhat eccentrically blames today’s gang violence on the Vietnam War and the failure of civil rights activists in the ‘60s (such as Hayden) and their social agenda to prevail. It reads at times like a personal, somewhat stiff memoir and at others like an academic treatise, a selective history on gangs and anti-gang policing strategies. It morphs into a classic liberal condemnation of conservative approaches to crime and delinquency: too much punishment, too little prevention and rehabilitation.

Hayden also inveighs against long-discredited conservative theories, such as the rise of so-called super-predators predicted a decade ago. The mythical juvenile predator was Pete Wilson’s favorite bit of crime propaganda, but that was two governors ago. Hayden’s criticism of the sometimes heavy-handed and counterproductive tactics of some in the LAPD’s now-disbanded CRASH anti-gang units, whose officers were linked to the Rampart Division corruption scandal, is well founded. But this, too, is old news that he uses to demonize pretty much every law enforcement effort targeting gangs. This is as unfair as the police vilification of gang members he so vigorously decries, and it can close the minds of the very readers he hopes to reach.

Truth is, many police and probation officers in L.A. have reached out to gang members, counseling them, helping them find work, cutting them slack and holding them accountable when necessary. I once watched a probation officer school a reformed gangbanger in the proper dress for a job interview, how to shake hands with a prospective boss, how to groom and clean himself -- how to go to a drugstore to buy a clipper and file to get the dirt from under his fingernails. He was 19. No adult had cared enough to teach him these basic skills until this remarkable officer entered his life. The young man wasn’t embarrassed or resentful. He was grateful and hungry for more.

Hayden does a disservice to such honorable efforts -- and to his own cause -- by failing to acknowledge that many in law enforcement believe very much in his laudable message of prevention and rehabilitation and are trying to fill the holes in young people’s lives rather than simply fill our prisons with them. *