Kuehl Exhorts Locals to Combat Gang Violence

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

March 17 -- Using her favorite metaphor from the Wizard of the Oz, State Senator Sheila Kuehl warned Santa Monicans that there are no magic solutions to gang violence.

“I think the community needs to recognize that you can’t just go to a wizard and ask for what you need, because there is no wizard,” Kuehl said Wednesday, “and it’s really only the community that can design this response.”

It’s been a year since Kuehl organized the first two of a series of gang violence workshops, and she’ll be back in Santa Monica when the community takes part in the next one this Saturday at John Adams Middle School.

In an interview with The Lookout in her Sacramento office, Kuehl said she understands that many of the city’s parents feel “bewildered” by events like the recent murder of Eddie Lopez and the shooting of Police Officer Walter Ramirez in the Pico neighborhood.

Still, she feels the City, the School District and community groups have made progress since last spring, and she cited the job fair at Virginia Avenue Park and after school programs as examples.

But it’s hard to measure progress when the problem is “so intractable in virtually every city in this country.

“I don’t know whether you could ever identify progress as ‘significant,’” she said, adding that she expects Saturday’s workshop will be “difficult.”

Kuehl thinks some people who come to the meeting will be “concerned that (while) we’ve taken these necessary actions, what’s going on here?

“It’s a difficult road to walk with people,” Kuehl said. She pointed out that it’s good for the community to come together to save its children, “but it will never save every child.

“The gangs are not limited to Santa Monica,” she said. “We don’t have a fence around the city that says ‘This is our gang problem, and we’re taking care of it.’”

While acknowledging that much of the problem is out of the community’s control, she exhorted the citizenry to take control where it can.

A proponent of strategies that call for offering young people alternatives to gangs, Kuehl downplayed the role of the State as an enforcer.

“It seems to me the community was not saying we need more police crackdowns or stiffer penalties or the kinds of things that are amenable to State legislation,” she said.

Kuehl recently introduced a bill that would have prohibited police from interrogating students on school grounds without notifying their parents. But the bill died on the Assembly floor as a result of aggressive lobbying by law enforcement organizations, she said.

“Parents want their children to be understood, protected, helped, encouraged,” Kuehl said. “From law enforcement’s point of view, they feel that you have to be strong, you have to crack down, you have to have all the tools at your fingertips.”

So if the community wants to “rescue (its) young people from falling into gang life,” it will be better off creating its own plan, she advised.

Santa Monica citizens will get a chance to do just that at the Community Forum on Gang Violence Saturday, March 18, from 10 a.m. to noon at John Adams Middle School. For more information, go to the City website.