Board of Supervisors Response 2008-2009

1 There is no set of regional interagency goals or objectives to address gang reduction in Los Angeles County.

1 The Los Angeles Unified School District's budgetary commitment to targeted gang reduction is essentially limited to the more broadly defined Youth Relations Unit, the total cost of which is $1.3 million.

It provides regionalized and specialized support service for districts, educators and parents in a number of areas including school reform, school-community 2008-2009 Los Angeles County Civil Grand Jury Report partnerships, ROP, welfare-to-work and parenting programs, and the largest Head Start program in the nation. It is generally acknowledged that schools play critical roles in gang prevention and intervention. Because of the types of at-risk children in LACOE schools and facilities it would seem that LACOE would have an enhanced capability to provide gang reduction services to their at-risk students. Virtually all of the students in LACOE schools are at risk. Unfortunately, LACOE does not have a staff person dedicated solely to gang reduction efforts. Their efforts are limited to a single staff member, the Safety Coordinator within the Safe Schools Division. The Safety Coordinator provides several safety-related support services to schools on an as-requested or voluntary basis. These services include assistance in preparation of school safety plans (which contains gang risk intervention elements), one-time workshops on gang reduction, and other services related to school violence and youth relations issues. In addition, the Safety Coordinator provides mediation and violence suppression assistance in response to campus incidents. Campus Crime Records are Deficient The Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) is the police force within LAUSD. With a budget of approximately $50 million and a staff of approximately 340 officers, every high school in LAUSD is assigned at least one full time dedicated Police Officer and 37 campuses have two Officers. Approximately half of the middle schools are assigned a Police Officer, and the other half are assigned a uniformed school safety officer. LASPD works in concert with Youth Relations and the Crisis Response Team, as well as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), to respond to incidents on campus, though there is no specialized gang unit within LASPD. Department management reports that the data analysis unit is short-staffed with only four analysts, and that additional staff resources are needed to reduce the backlog in processing crime reports and data. Without a current database of crime reports, routine summary reports cannot be produced and management is hindered in its ability to make informed decisions about policy and operations. The only available routine reports summarize the "calls for service" which are entered into a database on a real-time basis. (Note that this problem was also addressed at length in a 2007 study18 of LAUSD safety and security.) Further, the State does not require that schools track campus crimes by whether such crimes are gang or non-gang related, and the District does not require that such data be compiled or reported either. Therefore, the LASPD is not able to report on the percentage of campus crimes that are gang-related. Further, it should be noted that, at the time of this report, the LASPD had a one-year backlog, or approximately 17,000 crime reports, waiting for data to be entered. 18 "A Study of Safety and Security in the Los Angeles Unified School District," December 17, 2007, Evergreen Solutions, LLC. Even if the data entry were up to date, however, summary reports would not offer any information related to gangs since that information is not captured on the reports. The fact that school leadership has not prioritized the collection of information related to campus crime and has not required that gang-specific information be tracked reflects a choice not to seriously prioritize gang reduction on campus. Without knowledge of the full scope of the problem, LASPD, academic staff, and student support staff cannot effectively strategize toward gang reduction. The Superintendent should require the LASPD to eliminate its data entry backlog and, if needed, redirect funding so that sufficient staff resources are available to continually manage data entry in the future. LASPD should develop and implement a policy to track campus gang incidents. GRYD Office Collaboration is Ad Hoc The GRYD office was established in 2008 as a strategy for centralizing gang reduction efforts and coordinating across City agencies. The Office was established partly in response to the City Controller's report of February 200819, which called for a major restructuring of gang reduction and youth development efforts in the City. As mentioned earlier in this section, the Controller's report included a focus on strong school involvement in the centralized approach. One mechanism the GRYD Office uses to coordinate across agencies is the GRYD Cabinet, a group of directors and leaders from gang- and youth-relevant departments in Los Angeles that has met monthly under the leadership of the GRYD Director since May