Solutions

Anyone who's reported on gangs and violence has heard this before. It may even be true.
But being a protective mother or father is no substitute for knowledge. Or action.
The DOJ's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) has created a quick reference guide on the common signs your child may be involved in a gang.
Some are pretty obvious: your child admits to hanging with gang members, uses unsual hand signals to communicate with friends, draws gang symbols on school books, clothes or walls, has a gang tattoo or even carries a weapon.
It may just be a pose. It may not.
Good parenting is a key to prevention. COPS suggests spending time with your child and get involved with their school's activities.
Know you child's friends and their families. Teach your child how to handle peer pressure.
Be honest. Talk with them about the dangers of gang involvement. Let them know you don't want them to end up injured, in jail or dead.
It's a battle worth fighting, and you don't have to do it alone. Get involved early, and ask school officials, law enforcement, church leaders for help.
For much more information on what you can do to keep your child safe and out of gangs, check out the COPS link at http://safestate.org.

Posted by Mark Petix at 1:22 PM | Permalink

There are times when even the experts who know gangs best seem ready to throw up their hands. Gangs heve been killing for years. People become numb to violence. If it's not your neighborhood, not your city, it's one more sad story - if it even registers at all.
Inside the neighborhood it can be worse. I remember a man who had lived in Riverside's most notorious gang neighborhood for decades. A young man had been killed in his driveway, shot point blank with a hunting rifle.
It wasn't the first body that landed in his yard.
"What can you do about the gangs?" he said.
Indeed.
Forty days after 3-year-old Ethan Esparza was gunned down outside his grandmother's Pomona home, after the vigils and the calls for the killers to come forward, Ethan's life seems dangerously close to becoming a "what can you do?" moment.
That's where you come in. We want you to be honest, open, clever, thoughtful, practical, impractical, even angry (to a point). Tell us what we can do to prevent another innocent - and even not so innocent - person from dying in gang violence.
A lot of kids are killed, I was told recently. Why focus so much on Ethan?
Then he gave me the answer.
Ethan was murdered at his 4th birthday party. He was killed because too many people said "what can we do?"
Let's make him the face we remember.
Let's talk about solutions
- Mark Petix

Posted by Mark Petix at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Gang violence continues to plague communities throughout the Inland Valley, most recently in Pomona, where 3-year-old Ethan Esparza was killed on the front lawn of his grandparents' home, the victim of a drive-by shooting. What can Inland Valley residents do to end the scourge of violence?

Posted by at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)