SM company created ads for anti-violence project
SOUTH LA — Top law-enforcement officials and prosecutors are forging a new partnership to combat criminals with guns.
Called “Project Safe Neighborhoods,” the group is made up of federal agents, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and the LA Sheriff’s Department, and state and federal prosecutors, among others.
The plan calls for heightened patrols and more aggressive prosecution on the federal level, where prison sentences are harsher and must be served in federal prisons, usually taking criminals out of the area.
U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Thom Mrozek said the federal government is providing well over $1 million worth of grants for the program. In addition to police and prosecution, the grants are going to community-based organizations in LA that work with youth on violence prevention.
Santa Monica Police Department Chief James T. Butts Jr. said even though Santa Monica isn’t eligible for federal funding because the amount of violence here is far lower, local officials also employ a coordinated approach.
“On a local level, we have the same level of involvement, but it’s all been done with local funds and not grant funds,” he said.
Butts said Project Safe Neighborhoods is the type of project officials once called “weed and seed,” now an outdated term.
“The objective is, you take a neighborhood impacted by drugs and or violence, usually they come together, and you attempt to remove the most egregious violators and ensure they receive the longest possible sentence,” Butts said. “And the seed portion is that you provide federal dollars to support community-based operations that work with youth to help them, to prevent their involvement in gun violence, in gang violence.”
Butts, who created a community-based policing style that calls for a collaborative approach, said putting criminals in federal prisons sends a clear message to the offenders, and to their families and support networks.
“It supposedly has a greater psychological impact on not only you, but the people you run with, the people you’re associated with,” he said. “Now that you’re in jail (far away), nobody can visit you.”
Also a part of Project Safe Neighborhoods is a media campaign to raise awareness. In addition to press conferences with high-profile officials and an extensive public-relations effort, the group has tapped the resource of a Santa Monica business to create television commercials and a billboard design.
Doug Lay, head of production at V12, a commercial production and broadcast design company on Ocean Park Boulevard, said workers there spent several weeks creating a 30-second spot for Project Safe Neighborhoods.
The ad, which will be aired in both Spanish and English, features a close-up shot of people handling firearms, without any faces visible. The whole piece has a “MTV feel” that makes it look cool, Lay said. But at the end, this script appears on the screen: “So if you think it’s cool to carry an illegal gun or commit a crime with one, you’ve been watching to much TV.”
In addition to the ad, V12 created a billboard design that says, “No family, no freedom, no friends, no future” that will appear throughout South LA.
Lay said his staff of a dozen worked for weeks on the pro bono project and brought in dozens of freelancers to help out.
“We called in the favors that we could call in from people we’ve worked with in the film community,” he said. “It was a full-scale production.”
“We called in the favors that we could call in from people we’ve worked with in the film community. It was a full-scale production.” — – DOUG LAY Head of production, V12
Asked why his company decided to do the ad for free, Lay said, “I think it’s awareness more than anything. And it just, I think, helps people think about the community in a different way and to take the idea that guns used in that way is a serious thing... there are a lot of (guns) out there.”
A Thursday press conference to announce the group was held at the corner of 85th Street and Central Avenue, across the street from a restaurant where a gang-related shooting in August took the lives of two people.
U.S. Attorney and Santa Monica resident Debra Wang, LAPD Chief William Bratton, LASD Chief Michael Nagaoka, LA District Attorney Steve Cooley, LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, and officials from the FBI, DEA, ATF and LA County Probation Department attended the press conference.
“Fortunately, violent crimes have been on the downswing for over a decade,” Yang said in a prepared statement. “Today, the overall crime rate is at a 32-year low. But there is still too much killing, too much violence, too many criminals walking around with firearms.”
Other agencies participating in Project Safe Neighborhoods are the IRS’ Criminal Investigation department, the Small Business Administration’s Office of Inspector General, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General, the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General, the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement, and the Social Security Administration’s Office of Inspector General.
LA Mayor James Hahn also supports the project.
At the center of Project Safe Neighborhoods is a coordinated effort to aggressively investigate gun offenses and then determine the best forum for prosecution. Although there are lengthy sentences associated with federal gun offenses — for example, carrying a gun during a violent crime carries a mandatory five-year federal prison term that runs consecutively to the sentence for the underlying crime — California has strong gun laws, as well as the “three-strikes” law for some criminals, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
“Historically, the District Attorney’s Office prosecutes 60,000 felonies a year and 240,000 misdemeanors,” DA Steve Cooley said in a prepared statement. “Despite the incredible volume of cases, our office has done a solid job in aggressively prosecuting a wide variety of gun-related cases. We're grateful for the additional help, particularly in these stressful budgetary times and the loss of 10 percent of our prosecutors over the past two years.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 22, 2003. Read the original PDF.