With more than 400 street gangs and 40,000 gang members - resulting in some of the nation's worst youth-on-youth violence - the City of the Angels has the dubious distinction of being the gang capital of the U.S.A.

Through the police department, Los Angeles has long tried to arrest and suppress its way out of this deadly urban dilemma, with the remnant of that anti-crime strategy being the injunctions covering 66 gangs and more than 11,000 Angelenos today.

During the last decade, the city's anti-gang initiatives were funneled through L.A. Bridges, a controversial program that doled out millions of dollars to what one critic called a "ramshackle network" of mostly youth mentoring and after-school programs along with some spotty street-level interventions.

The effort, spread across 27 middle schools, still reached less than 1 percent of the 300,000 children in Los Angeles who live in gang-infested neighborhoods, according to a 2007 report by Connie Rice of the Advancement Project, a public policy group. The civil rights attorney called for a total overhaul of the city's approach towards gangs, including a "Marshall Plan" to lessen gang violence.

A year later, after then-Los Angeles controller Laura Chick also lambasted the city for its potpourri of ineffective anti-gang programs under more than a dozen departments, the services were consolidated and funded through a "gang czar" in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office. In a 40-minute speech at LAPD headquarters, the mayor promised to carry out a reinvention of the city's anti-gang programs. That reinvention - Gang Reduction and Youth Development, or GRYD - was quickly endorsed by Chief William Bratton and Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

The new program, which replaces L.A. Bridges, focuses on a dozen "gang-reduction zones," neighborhoods where gang violence is at least four times the citywide average. The locales include Cypress Park, Pacoima, Florence, Ramona Gardens, Boyle Heights and Watts. In each zone, the city contracts with agencies to provide gang interventionists, case managers and a supervisor through an initial six-month $500,000 grant. Gang members and their families are also provided with "wraparound" social services.

A major criticism of L.A. Bridges was that there was little or no evaluation of whether its programs actually quelled gang violence and kept kids out of gangs. GRYD will receive full evaluation, but not before 2010.

"It's going to be a couple years before the results are in," Deputy Mayor Jeff Carr, the city's gang czar, told the Los Angeles Times. "And really, it will be beyond that. Because we're setting something new in motion."

So the bottom-line question of whether Los Angeles' new efforts against gangs work any better than L.A. Bridges' still lingers. And the stakes couldn't be higher, according to UCLA adjunct professor Joria Leap, who contributed to Laura Chick's report. "This is it," she observed. "If they blow this, it's over."

Stopping retaliation killings
LAPD Capt. Mark Olvera - a classical Flamenco guitarist who, with wife Sylvia and sons Garrett, 17, and Joseph, 15, comprise the music ministry for the Saturday vigil Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Lincoln Heights - is on the front lines of the city's new anti-gang strategy.

The outwardly calm commander of what is euphemistically called "Shootin' Newton," part of which has been designated a gang-reduction GRYD zone, is sitting at a round table in his back office of the grey stone station on Central Avenue at 34th Street, right across from St. Patrick Church.

Three paintings hang from the back wall, including an expensive Japanese water color. On top of a glass-front bookcase, an army of knick-knacks stand guard. An acoustic guitar rests nearby in a corner.

The 52-year-old policeman born and raised in East L.A. explains that his wife, who decorated his office, wanted to make it as comfortable as possible if he was going to spend so much time there working - often 12-hour days that stretch from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Most Saturdays, after the evening Mass, he comes in to catch up on paper work.

"It's probably not written down anywhere, but the main thing with GRYD and its gang interventionists is to stop the retaliations. Once there's a shooting, stop pay-backs by being on the scene. That's the first goal," Capt. Olvera explains. "The second goal is to let us know where there are hot spots so we can deploy for them.

"But at the same time, the interventionists should be working to: 'OK, let's be preventive. Let's make sure there is no shooting to begin with.' And that's where Father Stan Bosch [GRYD supervisor for both the Newton and 77th division areas, who is a Trinitarian priest as well as a trained psychotherapist] comes in with his counseling and wraparound services. He deals with the healing part at the scene and then after counseling families and gang members.

"There's also a reentry part - Who's coming out of the probation camps?" he adds. "We can work with probation and then connect the youths to services and Father Stan right away to get them out of harm's way."

New kind of suppression
The LAPD's role remains "suppression," according to Newton's commander. But it's a whole different way of looking at suppression, he stresses, which is based on a medical model of first diagnosing the patient (gang member), then treating and training him back to health.

Laws are still enforced by police, probation and parole officers. But the idea is to bring in and work with people who have different expertise from the Department of Children and Family Services, mental health, education, parenting, job development, recreation and other social services. The Newton area, one of the poorest communities in Los Angeles, offers even fewer activities for youths today than Watts.

"When a violent crime among gangs happens, I'm calling the interventionists, I'm calling Father Stan," Olvera reports. "And then we go out to the scene in real time, usually within an hour. The idea is rumor control - to stop rumors about what gang is responsible for doing a shooting or causing an incident.

"Because one shooting has resulted in 10 retaliation shootings. And if we have a gang interventionist on the scene, we probably can stop all that. Because it's all mistaken identity or showing that the person who got shot, that bullet was never intended for that person. But yet before you know it, other family members who are in the gang will go out there and retaliate."

The 28-year LAPD veteran, who is on the advisory board of the Los Angeles Archdiocese's Office of Restorative Justice, admits the medical model and case management approach to gangs - along with using counseling and even psychotherapy to treat hardcore gangbangers - has been a hard sell to some of the 250 sworn officers under his watch. Especially tricky has been involving interventionists as an integral part of the GRYD team.

But Olvera also points out that the LAPD and other police departments across the country have been using former gang members and ex-cons as liaisons to gangs for decades. The only difference with GRYD is these "sub-rosa" street workers have become much more professionalized, with job descriptions, regular paychecks and health benefits.

"Some of my officers, quite frankly, didn't get it," Olvera says. "They didn't get where we wanted to go with this, so we found them another job. Even some supervisors haven't been willing to work with the community in this way. But it's always been what we're supposed to do. And that's smart police work.

"The resistance that was there last year was definitely harder," he notes. "But now that they're seeing it, they understand what it is and are getting it. With the interventionists, at this point we're still developing a relationship. But they're doing what they're supposed to be doing - they're responding to crime scenes, homicide scenes and letting us know about hot situations out on the street. So they're stopping retaliation killings."

Work in progress
Still, Olvera admits that GRYD, which has only been in operation in the Newton area since April 1, is a work in progress. He and his staff are examining different ways of doing things and making changes based on what works.

There's one factor, however, that has really helped the team makes inroads with certain gangs so far - Father Bosch's connection with gang members through a shared Catholic faith. "The power of the symbolism of a Catholic priest working with these kids really means a lot," he says. "I think we can really do things with that in terms of dealing with the violence.

"Also, it's a matter of tolerance," the LAPD commander adds. To those who think it's OK for a gang member to be killed, he replies, "That's not the Christian way. None of these killings is OK. And that's what we have to change. I think with GRYD we're on the verge of changing that attitude."

Editor's note: This is the first part of a series on GRYD (Gang Reduction and Youth Development), Los Angeles' new anti-gang program.