A new National League of Cities toolkit, “Preventing Gang Violence and Building Communities Where Young People Thrive,” is now available to municipal leaders and their community partners.

 

Published by NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families (YEF Institute), the toolkit draws upon lessons learned over the past three years from the California Cities Gang Prevention Network. The YEF Institute formed this 13-city network in 2007 in collaboration with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and with support from the California Endowment, California Wellness Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, Richmond Children's Fund and East Bay Community Foundation, to identify strategies for reducing gang violence and victimization.

 

Network cities include Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Oxnard, Richmond, Sacramento, Salinas, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San José, Santa Rosa and Stockton. Nearly all cities have developed and are now implementing a comprehensive gang reduction plan that blends prevention, intervention and enforcement techniques.

 

The toolkit highlights a wide range of local practices from these and other cities in eight chapters, which are divided into three sections:

Grounded in concrete examples from cities across the country, each chapter provides an overview of the approach and its benefits, describes the scale and impact of the approach and identifies a series of action steps. The toolkit also contains samples of city documents used by the network to form local collaboratives (e.g., memoranda of understanding and joint powers agreements).

Anti-Gang Partnerships
The broad range of promising practices contained in the toolkit show that partnerships are fundamental to gang prevention work. For instance, the toolkit highlights San Bernardino’s neighborhood-level “street teams” composed of police and county agency representatives, including probation officers, district attorneys, public and behavioral health professionals and other social service providers. These teams have helped the city reduce crime by nearly 40 percent in a targeted neighborhood.

In Richmond, Calif., city-county partnerships link high-risk youth identified by the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety with community-based mental health services and a health liaison to help navigate the system.

 

Oxnard, Calif., leaders have engaged the faith community in a creating new opportunities for youth and participating in crisis response teams. In Los Angeles and San Diego, Safe Passage partnerships involve school districts, law enforcement officials and city transit authorities to prevent students from being targeted or recruited for gang activity on their way to and from school.

Creative Funding Strategies
The strong collaborations found in many of the network cities make it easier to blend and braid the multiple federal, state and local funding sources that can be used for gang prevention. For instance, San José’s Bringing Everyone’s Strengths Together (BEST) funding mechanism blends funding from state gang prevention grants; mental health and drug prevention grants; federal and state juvenile justice grants; community development and housing funds; and various city funding streams. These funds are then disbursed to community organizations in each police district in response to competitive applications and in accordance with a citywide strategic plan.

 

Cities such as Oakland rely on combinations of dedicated local sales taxes; private foundation grants; Community Development Block Grants; statewide gang prevention funds; Workforce Investment Act funds; state- and county-controlled funds for juvenile crime prevention and child abuse prevention; and an array of other resources. Municipal leaders’ creative efforts to draw upon a multitude of funding streams under severe budget constraints suggests the importance of making state and federal funding more flexible in support of comprehensive, citywide gang prevention action plans.