This past week, Q-line asked: “What suggestions do you have for law enforcement, parents, school administrators and community leaders in preventing gang violence?”
Here are your responses: ✆ “Cut off the source of new gang members by doing intervention at elementary and middle schools to keep the kids from going on the streets in the first place, and continue with counseling at the high school to keep them from falling back.” ✆ “Zero tolerance for graffiti in Santa Monica! All graffiti to be removed within 48 hours after its appearance, even if this means fining personal property owners if they leave graffiti on their building. Same goes for taking it off the city. They have to remove it within 48 hours. And put some teeth in the anti-graffiti law. Make it a community service of 100 hours if you are caught. Make it a fine... whatever you have to do. Get a police sting out there to catch a few of them and make them an example.” ✆ “Gang violence has been escalating for years, and now it’s at an all-time high in the Los Angeles area, including Santa Monica. There is gang graffiti all over the buildings and sidewalks of Santa Monica, and it grows and spreads daily. I sure hope the police are aware of this and tracking it down. How to stop it is a puzzle. It’s like an avalanche rushing down a hill. We just do not have enough police to stay on top of this and especially in this town with all the bums, vagrants and criminals hiding out. The police are spread way too thin.” ✆ “Controlling gang violence is entirely the responsibility of the judicial bureaucracy. The unfortunate truth is that uniformed police officers are in the business of regulating vehicular traffic known as traffic cops. These traffic cops generates a great deal of positive cash flow revenue to the local municipalities by writing citations for various forms of vehicular movement violations. On the other side of the municipal profit and loss statement is the arrest of criminals. These criminal arrests create an enormous negative loss of cash flow due to the cost of trials and imprisonment. Arresting a gang member is not good for city business. Other South Bay cities do not have gang violence simply because it is not tolerated. Santa Monica needs a tough anti-gang task force to move into gang-infested areas and spank gang members’ butts with whatever force is needed. Often, a good butt-spanking is a cure.” ✆ “I think when gang members are arrested,that they should be put into the Army,Navy or Air Force.If they want to kill people,it’s their perfect chance to do it. But I think that would be a good solution to a lot of problems. “ ✆ “I hold the police more accountable because they have not really been doing that much about it. I think gang members should be illegal and stripped of their rights. I mean, they shouldn’t even be around. If it was a business or any other person, they would be held accountable. Gangs should be tried and held accountable for the city of Santa Monica. (Police) Chief Bratton of Los Angeles should do something about Venice and really should take all the gang members and send them to Cuba and have Fidel Castro deal with them.” ✆ “There is a few things they could do to get rid of these gang members. Any time one of them is arrested and turns out to be an illegal alien, they should be immediately deported on the spot, no releasing them back into the community. Then, every time you arrest a gang member, stop releasing them back into the community. Stop bringing them out on bail to commit more crimes. Store them in jail for a few years and let them learn the lesson the hard way. You can set up a graffiti tag, have a nice wall painted white, have a few cops hiding out somewhere they can see them, and until some punk starts to spray paint, you swarm them and throw them in jail. Keep doing that a few times, until you get them all off the street. Otherwise, you just have to put the National Guard out there or grant hunting licenses to hunters and let them hunt the gang members and kill them. That’s the only thing that is going to stop them. Throw them in jail or kill them.” ✆ “I think the people of Santa Monica should buy a bra for the Santa Monica police chief and the council should stop laying down for developers and get to community affairs.” ✆ “Prior to the construction of the new police building, I tried to get the police to build a sub-station up on Pico Boulevard and 23rd Street and put their 9-1-1 call center there, and their motorcycle police so they could be police protection there. Because going back to when the rapist was there, there was no police protection. And another thing is I have been trying to do the National Night Out to come down to the Pico neighborhood because I thought it was a far step for National Night Out to walk down the Promenade where we have the least crime anywhere. Yet the police seem to be afraid to even go into the Pico neighborhood for something like this, so this an on going problem that has never been fixed and the police don’t even attempt to fix it, because I think they are afraid to be in that neighborhood. What we need is a sub-station there where people can go somewhere to get away from gang members that are chasing them. It’s ridiculous that you have to go all the way down to Fourth Street and Pico Boulevard. So people should not be getting killed in front of our new park that we spent millions of dollars on, and if we had some cameras by the parks, we would probably have gotten a picture of the kid.” ✆ “I believe there should be a foot patrol and a bicycle patrol from the high school to Centinela just for the Pico district. For our Santa Monica police officers believe the heightened awareness of them walking though the community talking to the business leaders, managers of the pizza and Subway joints and so forth, would really increase police presence and that our community is behind cleaning up Pico and getting rid of these gangsters and these thugs.” ✆ “Yes, I am just very distraught about the gang violence and how it affected Santa Monica High School, and thank God my son left after a year of being in that high school. I think the new superintendent has to work eradicating the gang violence in the schools, because that’s why my son loves where he is now. He goes to Palm Desert High School. This is very said because my friend went though Grant and John Adams and I believe in the school system.” ✆ “Gang violence is a response to other social elements. It’s natural for young men to rebel against an oppressive force that they view as unfair, ungestured, racist and corrupt such as law enforcement.Parents,if there are two in the same home, have no time, money, patience, strength or training to properly encourage good behavior. Their overtaxed by the system they work so hard to support, while at the same time fails to support them... What we need are more free activities that should include after school programs, before school programs, mentoring opportunities, jobs, sports and other events that entertain. While engaging these children we could keep them safe, introduce moral behavior, help them make better decisions and to be moral citizens by taking over their free time, teaching them right from wrong.The unacceptability in violent behavior and loving them unconditionally we can reduce crime and raise their self esteem. These examples should be practiced everyday by everyone including law enforcement personnel, parents, school administrators, community leaders and any person with compassion responsibility and a desire to be happy.” ✆ “My suggestion for preventing gang violence would deal with school administrators developing more vocational training after ninth grade for at-risk students, for community leaders... Poor people have few choices in life, starting with uneducated parents who provide no guidance, have too many children and are unable to cope with the everyday stresses of life may become single parents. Military service would bring minorities into greater contact with others of different backgrounds and a chance to see the bigger world view. Different cultures gain an education both culturally and academically but most of all, be part of an organization that requires discipline, responsibility, comradeship and sacrifice. This is worth a lot more than hanging out with their homies defending their turf at 17th and Michigan.” ✆ “How to prevent gang violence in the schools and the city? Stop overcrowding the schools with out-of-district students. Expel all gang members from the school. Evict the gang members from city housing and allow private landlords to do the same. Pursue nuisance abatement of private houses owned by gang members. The school board should stop coddling racial and gang violence instead of arguing over institutionalized racism. The school should concentrate on teaching good behavior, moral ethics and proper conduct.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 11, 2006. Read the original PDF.