Gangs specialists speak at UCLA School of Public Affairs

Connie Rice didn’t find her specialty in civil rights law by any normal route. Rice’s career as a specialist in gang violence began while she was standing in a designer suit outside a trailer in South Los Angeles, negotiating with gang members.

Rice told her story to an audience of about 150 people Thursday afternoon, as the second speaker in the series: “GANGS: Strategies to Break the Cycle of Violence,” hosted by UCLA’s Department of Social Welfare.

Rice is the co-founder and co-director of Advancement Project Los Angeles, which is dedicated to improving the LA community, ensuring everyone is given an opportunity to receive an education, and working to protect communities from gang violence, according to the organization’s website.

This year, Los Angeles is approaching the 20th year of a youth gang homicide epidemic in which kids are killing one another on the streets of L.A., Rice said.

“Gang culture (has become) synonymous with youth culture,” she said.

Minne Ho, executive director of communications for the UCLA School of Public Affairs, said speakers of various specialties, including research practitioners and social workers with direct interaction with gangs, have come to UCLA to talk about this issue.

“The department wanted to respond to issues the students wanted to hear about,” Ho said, “Gang violence had been requested by the (Masters in Social Work) students to teach them to better interact with clients.”

Ho said many of the Masters in Social Work students are interested in corporations or programs, such as Homeboy Industries, that are focused on working with large youth populations, and part of that job description is keeping at-risk kids in school and out of gangs.

Jorja Leap, adjunct associate professor of the Department of Social Welfare, is the orchestrator of the lecture series. Leap, who has been involved with gang-related issues for 30 years, began her career working in the housing projects of South Los Angeles and is presently working with Homeboy Industries on a longitudinal study of gang intervention techniques and results.

Leap said she had wanted to address both local and national gang violence, and bring in speakers from different places with different perspectives who represent “a little bit of everything.”

By bringing speakers from Los Angeles and from as far out as the East Coast, Leap said she has met her goal of finding people from not only the community activism sector or religious sector, but also from the national circuit.

Masters in Social Work student Alberto Gutierrez said gang violence is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, and said he believes more research needs to be conducted to review this gang culture phenomenon and its affect on youth education.