The Informant

Ali Winston

Clockwise: Santa Rosa Mayor Ernesto Olivares, Oxnard Mayor Thomas Holden, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan at a gang prevention conference on Sept. 19, 2011.

Looking out across the San Francisco Bay from the top of the Downtown Oakland Marriott, dozens of California law enforcement officers and public officials kicked off a two-day conference on gang prevention strategies during an era of shrinking budgets and police departments.

The adage “do more with less” was invoked time and time again, particularly by Attorney General Kamala Harris in her keynote address. A combination of budget cuts to the state Department of Justice, as well as realignment – or the shifting responsibility for thousands of offenders to county jails and probation departments – mean that cities across the state will experience a significant influx of probationers and parolees into their streets and jails, taxing police, corrections and social services. The state, Harris said is “on the verge of bankruptcy” and is not in a position to provide sufficient fiscal or institutional support for countries.

California law enforcement’s ability to combat gang violence will be severely curtailed by $71 million in budget cuts to the state Department of Justice. The cuts will put an end to 48 anti-gang task forces run by the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, a law enforcement arm of the Attorney General’s office that has existed since 1927. BNE, the oldest narcotics enforcement bureau in the United States, will also shut down in December as a result of budget cuts.

Meanwhile, gang prevention and intervention strategies such as the San Francisco programs like the Truancy Reduction Initiative Harris helped start while she was District Attorney, as well as Oakland’s call-in strategy will take on more importance. These programs are the main focus of the two-day conference, organized by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Four years ago, the NCCD, the National League of Cities and the Institute for Youth, Education and Families pulled together thirteen California cities to form the California Cities Gang Prevention Network, which focuses on promoting and promulgating successful crime reduction strategies that do not fit the traditional prisons-first model. The participating cities are: Fresno, Oakland, Oxnard, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Salinas, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton and Richmond.

The conference also offered a platform for mayors to tout their own approaches to gang-related crime.  “If we build strong neighborhoods, that will contribute greatly in reducing recruitment of youth into gangs,” said San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, who credited the city’s 46 percent decrease in homicides from 2009 to 2010 in part to the truancy and felony diversion programs started by Harris and continued by her successor George Gascon.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has faced considerable pressure to adopt drastic measures to tamp down Oakland’s violen((ce))T crime rate. However, she took this morning’s conference as a chance to tout the success of her administration’s combination of suppression and non-confrontational tactics.

“If you’re going to attack the issue of gangs, you can’t use just police, you have to use intervention and prevention,” said Mayor Quan. In recent months, Oakland has secured the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the California Highway Patrol in cracking down on gun violence and arms trafficking into Oakland from Nevada and other states.

Mayor Quan also claimed that recent Oakland Police Department crime suppression operations are starting to have an impact on the violence that has engulfed the city this year. “In the last month, [crime rates] started to come down to last year’s rates,” Quan said.

Now, Attorney General Harris said realignment and the budget crisis offer the chance to re-evaluate institutionalized approaches to combating gang activity and violence, from non-profits and church groups, to police and social service agencies.

“It’s an opportunity to evaluate everybody to determine whether they’re producing the outcomes they’re contracted to produce,” Harris said.