Urine Luck, L.A. Gangs!

Piddling programs — like teaching kids to install urinals — dominate Antonio’s plan to save the city’s youth

Comments (0) By David Zahniser Wednesday, May 2 2007

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The problem with the $168 million is that, even as a catch-all description of youth programs, it makes little sense. For example, Villaraigosa’s public-safety team threw in $2.5 million in expanded library hours. But library hours were expanded last year, not this year.

Should last year’s budget triumph be repackaged as a victory this year? And if so, why not count all the other library hours?

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Forty percent of Villaraigosa’s anti-gang initiative will go toward the LAPD. And out of that total, $6.6 million represents police Chief William Bratton’s request for additional police overtime. But by lumping LAPD overtime in with city youth programs, Villaraigosa raised a red flag for Connie Rice, the civil rights attorney who urged council members to reject the LAPD’s request for extra overtime after meeting with Villaraigosa’s team. “I love Chief Bratton, but he should not get that money,” Rice told the council’s gang committee.

Rice released her own plan for addressing gangs earlier this year, calling for city officials to invest as much as $1 billion in “wrap-around” services for children in high-poverty neighborhoods. Villaraigosa echoed Rice’s report in his State of the City Address, by promising to team up with other law-enforcement agencies to focus on eight gang hot spots.

In reality, five of those eight partnerships were established between 1996 and 2003. What’s new is that the mayor’s budget will spread $3 million for prevention, intervention and re-entry programs across four of the eight hot spots.

So now Rice is in a bind. Team Villaraigosa artfully lifted the verbiage of her report — embracing the notion of intervention programs — while providing only the tiniest fraction of funding that she had sought. So in public, Rice alternates between praising Villaraigosa as a man who will one day be our nation’s president and criticizing elements of his gang plan, arguing that the new money is being spread too thinly to produce tangible results. Last week, for example, Rice said $3 million isn’t even enough for one gang hot spot, let alone four.

Of course, Rice always has another card to play — not as a city contractor, but as a lawyer. Speaking to the Police Commission in March, Rice pointed out that she could always bring another lawsuit against the city, one that demands that the city provide equal protection for low-income neighborhoods ravaged by gangs.

If successful, such a lawsuit could place yet another municipal program under court supervision. And at that point, that $168 million — phony or not — will look like peanuts.