Gang Prevention Toolkit Now Available to City Leaders

Published by NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families (YEF Institute), the toolkit draws upon lessons learned over the past three years from the California Cities Gang Prevention Network. The YEF Institute formed this 13-city network in 2007 in collaboration with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and with support from the California Endowment, California Wellness Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, Richmond Children's Fund and East Bay Community Foundation, to identify strategies for reducing gang violence and victimization. 

Network cities include Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Oxnard, Richmond, Sacramento, Salinas, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San José, Santa Rosa and Stockton. Nearly all cities have developed and are now implementing a comprehensive gang reduction plan that blends prevention, intervention and enforcement techniques.

The toolkit highlights a wide range of local practices from these and other cities in eight chapters, which are divided into three sections:

• Marshalling resources to fund anti-gang strategies;
• Forming strategic partnerships within the criminal justice system, and with county agencies, schools, neighborhoods and the faith community; and
• Targeted approaches, including using street outreach workers to intervene with high-risk youth and facilitating the reentry of youth and adults from detention facilities.

Grounded in concrete examples from cities across the country, each chapter provides an overview of the approach and its benefits, describes the scale and impact of the approach and identifies a series of action steps. The toolkit also contains samples of city documents used by the network to form local collaboratives (e.g., memoranda of understanding and joint powers agreements).

Anti-Gang Partnerships

The broad range of promising practices contained in the toolkit show that partnerships are fundamental to gang prevention work. For instance, the toolkit highlights San Bernardino’s neighborhood-level “street teams” composed of police and county agency representatives, including probation officers, district attorneys, public and behavioral health professionals and other social service providers. These teams have helped the city reduce crime by nearly 40 percent in a targeted neighborhood.

In Richmond, Calif., city-county partnerships link high-risk youth identified by the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety with community-based mental health services and a health liaison to help navigate the system.

Oxnard, Calif., leaders have engaged the faith community in a creating new opportunities for youth and participating in crisis response teams. In Los Angeles and San Diego, Safe Passage partnerships involve school districts, law enforcement officials and city transit authorities to prevent students from being targeted or recruited for gang activity on their way to and from school.

Creative Funding Strategies

The strong collaborations found in many of the network cities make it easier to blend and braid the multiple federal, state and local funding sources that can be used for gang prevention. For instance, San José’s Bringing Everyone’s Strengths Together (BEST) funding mechanism blends funding from state gang prevention grants; mental health and drug prevention grants; federal and state juvenile justice grants; community development and housing funds; and various city funding streams. These funds are then disbursed to community organizations in each police district in response to competitive applications and in accordance with a citywide strategic plan. 

Cities such as Oakland rely on combinations of dedicated local sales taxes; private foundation grants; Community Development Block Grants; statewide gang prevention funds; Workforce Investment Act funds; state- and county-controlled funds for juvenile crime prevention and child abuse prevention; and an array of other resources. Municipal leaders’ creative efforts to draw upon a multitude of funding streams under severe budget constraints suggests the importance of making state and federal funding more flexible in support of comprehensive, citywide gang prevention action plans.

Details: To order a copy of the toolkit, visit www.nlc.org/iyef. For more information about the California Cities Gang Prevention Network, visit www.ccgpn.org or contact Andrew Moore at (215) 848-6910 or moore@nlc.org.

Six Core Principles for Effective Gang Prevention Efforts

The network has found that adherence to six core principles significantly enhances the efficacy of local gang prevention work:

• First, the mayor and chief of police must be together, leading. This leadership combines the moral (“gang violence will not be tolerated…”), the conceptual (a plan), and the bureaucratic (city business will be done in a different way).

• Second, law enforcement and social services must not be seen as antithetical concepts. They are wedded. As parents, we set limits and we nurture. To reduce gang violence, we must convey both certainty of consequences and certainty of help. Police must enforce the law, but most police leaders assert that “we cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”

• Third, a comprehensive, citywide strategy must be developed. This is difficult. Many feel that a program here and there will save a city. This is not only not strategic but unrealistic.

• Fourth, an entity must be designated or created to track the work once the plan is developed, to hold people accountable for implementation, and alter the plan as needed. Consistent tracking and accountability are more important than a complex system; outcome measures should be part of the strategic plan.

• Fifth, municipal officials must forge an excellent working and policy relationship with the county. Cities directly confront most of the pain caused by violence, but counties sit atop most of the resources. Those cities that have forged excellent working relationships with key county agencies such as child welfare, probation and public health fare better than those cities that are disconnected from county policies.

• Sixth, the effort and the people conducting it must get close to young people in the community. Gang members are lured into gangs by those who seem to engage in their lives, care about them and tell them, “I’ve got your back.” The community, especially police and social services agencies, must get close enough to know the names of and reclaim gang-involved youth and those at risk of gang affiliation.