$26 MILLION A YEAR FAILS TO KEEP L.A.'S KIDS OUT OF GANGS.

Byline: Dan Laidman Staff Writer

Los Angeles spends $26 million a year to keep kids out of gangs or get them to renounce their affiliation, but the program is such a failure that not a single youth has ever been released from a court-imposed gang injunction, officials said Friday.

City Councilman Tony Cardenas said he was ``flabbergasted'' by the information, delivered during a hearing of his Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development, which hopes to evaluate the effectiveness of city anti-gang programs.

``We've been wasting a lot of money in this city,'' Cardenas said. ``Because we have a lot of gang intervention and prevention programs to deal with these people and for us not to have success with one is just beyond me.''

The hearing comes as the city is re-evaluating its approach to fighting gang violence. Last week, the panel endorsed awarding a $465,000 contract to the nonprofit Advancement Project, run by prominent civil-rights lawyer Connie Rice, to develop a comprehensive anti-gang strategy.

While the plan could take a variety of shapes, one frequently floated idea is to create a new city department headed by a single ``gang czar'' to bring together all prevention and intervention efforts.

The programs are now spread among numerous departments, and the committee called representatives from all of them to appear Friday to explain how they evaluate their effectiveness.

After hearing presentations from the various agencies, the council members said there is much good work being done, but they echoed a common criticism that the programs overlap and communicate poorly.

``We're putting all these resources into it, but where's the interconnectivity?'' asked Councilman Ed Reyes. ``Everyone here is getting paid to do X, Y, Z, but where are the relationships?''

The disclosure about the gang injunctions caused particular concern for the council members. Los Angeles has obtained 26 gang injunctions, which restrict members from a variety of activities, including associating in public.

City Attorney's Office representatives touted the injunctions - which cover about 60 square miles of territory and 14,000 known gang members - as an effective crime-fighting tool. Injunctions exist in Canoga Park, Pacoima and Van Nuys, among other neighborhoods.

City lawyers said there is a very high bar for the ``renunciation'' provision of the injunctions, which require gang members to avoid police contact for three years and remain employed or in school for 18 months.

Cardenas said the fact that no one has taken advantage of the provision shows a problem with the city's anti-gang network, and he said he might introduce a new motion on the topic.

Among the other efforts discussed at the hearing, the largest is the 9-year-old L.A. Bridges program.

L.A. Bridges runs programs for 5,400 middle-school students, aimed at keeping them from joining gangs, and for 3,445 gang members, designed to get them out.

The program examines the performance of its contractors every six months, said director John Chavez, and it plans to start requiring contractors to track program graduates to determine effectiveness.

Among the many other programs discussed Friday were a Personnel Department effort to guide young people at risk of joining gangs into jobs, a counseling program for troubled high school girls run by the Commission on the Status of Women, and conflict management and mediation services provided by the Human Relations Commission.

Dan Laidman, [phone]

dan.laidman(at)dailynews.com