Gang Intervention Quotes

I do believe in lessons learned. I have learned that you work with gang members and not with gangs; otherwise, you enforce the cohesion of gangs and supply them oxygen.

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'

If you do nothing, that just empowers the gangs.

You prevent kids from joining gangs by offering after-school programs, sports, mentoring, and positive engagement with adults. You intervene with gang members by offering alternatives and employment to help redirect their lives. You deal with areas of high gang crime activity with real community policing. We know what works.

The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.

I work with gang members, and I feel a kind of affinity and gift, even. But who would've thunk it, you know? I mean, I didn't anticipate it.

I've written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental.

We will not rest until being a gang member is a miserable, undesirable life.

My father had been in the military and he was a weapons specialist, so he had an affinity for weapons but also for the discipline of it. He taught us how to shoot when we were young. He opened up karate schools in the worst parts of the city, on purpose, and then he would systematically clean out a three-block radius, all of the gang-bangers and drug dealers and everybody of nefarious character.

In my barrio, jobs work and money saves lives. When I have had the funds to place a gang member on a job site and pay his salary, I've seen him stop banging. When, on the rarest of occasions, an employer has offered a job to one of these youth, I've witnessed kids suddenly have a reason to get up in the morning.

In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma.

Unfortunately, my district like many others across the country has a problem with gangs, which is why I introduced this amendment.

Three thousand jurisdictions across the U.S. are estimated to have had gang activity in 2001. In 2002, 32% of cities with a population of 25 to 50 thousand reported a gang-related homicide.

Also, I preached to gangs on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx - and miracles began to happen.

I was a hoodlum. I was a gang member, and art saved my life.