Her Gang of Anti-Gang Activists

It’s an issue that’s easy to flip past in the daily newspaper because it appears far removed from our own children, our daily routine. Gang violence. Not a topic typically found in the Palisadian-Post.   But Billie Weiss, a Palisades Highlands resident since 1986, has made changing the conditions that make gangs a way of life in many L.A. neighborhoods her life’s work.   Weiss’ home office has a wall adorned with citations and awards, and she recently received a $25,000 Peace Prize grant from the California Wellness Foundation in recognition of her pioneering research. Atop a bookshelf sits an award (crafted from the metal of melted-down handguns) she created for those working against youth violence. Advocating for the passage of municipal legislation in 2003 banning .50-caliber sniper rifles is one of the many ways Weiss has sought to mitigate the impact of street gangs.   This may seem an odd mission for an epidemiologist. In fact, when Weiss finished her master’s degree in public health at UCLA in the 1980s, the focus for graduates was on infectious diseases such as AIDS.   But Weiss, whose first job in public health was with Los Angeles County, learned that it wasn’t disease or traffic accidents killing 15-to 24-year-olds. It was homicides, and kids were the victims and perpetrators of violence.   So began her odyssey as academic, advocate and activist. Much of her work consists of identifying the causes of youth violence and correcting the problem. Weiss is an associate director of the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at UCLA, which studies damaging phenomena as varied as earthquakes, traumatic brain injuries and pediatric sudden death.   But Weiss doesn’t sit in an ivory tower. A petite woman with the body of a former dancer and pixie-ish face, she spends half her time in the field with gang interventionists and gang members.   Weiss founded the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles in 1991 to bring together anti-violence advocators, school representatives, police departments, anti-gun groups, private foundations and civil rights agencies.   ’Things are not changing fast enough,’ Weiss tell the Post. ‘We need everybody we can muster.’   Gang activity is an epidemic. Numbers vary, but law enforcement officials cite 400 individual gangs with nearly 40,000 members in Los Angeles. Although a ‘war on gangs’ was declared 25 years ago, gang membership has doubled.   ’Violence is the leading epidemic of our time and it impacts every segment of a healthy community,’ Weiss says. ‘Gun violence kills more young people in L.A. County under the age of 35 than anything else. It costs more public health dollars than any other epidemic, particularly in Los Angeles County.’ Key to an effective response to gang violence, Weiss believes, is a multi-disciplinary coordination of the efforts of public health, law enforcement and education with community needs. Of course, many do not intuitively view gangs as a public health issue. The focus is on arrests and suppression of existing gang-bangers rather than prevention. ‘But, it’s like measles,’ Weiss says, ‘if we don’t immunize, there will be another outbreak. If we don’t keep focusing on primary prevention, we can lock up all the gang members we want and in seven years, they’ll get out and it will happen all over again because we haven’t done the groundwork to change the conditions that breed these problems.’ She wants people to understand that young children in gang-infested neighborhoods are surrounded by violence, often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventually join gangs for protection or for surrogate families. People tend to see the toughened ‘gang banger,’ but they forget that he was once an engaging 8-year-old who could have taken a better path. The solution, Weiss believes, is obvious: communities with resources and services for children do not have a gang problem; communities without these resources do. ‘We’ve loaded them [public officials] with data,’ she says, citing detailed research by the Advancement Project, an ‘action tank’ focused on social justice: Weiss believes that the way to eliminate gangs is to get resources into communities in need. Even an easy-to-implement program like last summer’s ‘Summer Night Lights,’ when selected Los Angeles parks offered activities for the local youth, reduced violence in those neighborhoods. ‘It was successful, but they stopped the program before kids went back to school,’ says Weiss, noting a pattern of officials declaring victory, then eliminating the very programs that succeed. Even if the solution is straightforward, it requires not only funding but the will of communities that have resources to assist those that don’t. Weiss stresses that gangs are everyone’s problem, not just the concern of those communities ‘without,’ the ones that Weiss calls ‘hot zones.’ Sophisticated gangs participate in criminal activity like identity theft that can directly impact Angelinos far from gang centers. And, in this challenging economy, the cost of law enforcement, incarceration and medical treatment related to L.A. gangs eats up more than $1 billion a year in tax dollars. A recent FBI report notes a migration of gang membership into communities nationwide. And so, Weiss keeps fighting the good fight. Maybe she’ll retire someday and spend more time with her grown children and seven grandchildren, who range in age from two months to 29 years old. For now, she won’t stop’not until the war on gangs is won.