News

Coach Carroll and his efforts to positively impact the gang-ridden culture of the city

By Ben Malcolmson
USCripsit.com

 
Pete Carroll is not only making a better USC.
 
He’s making A Better LA.
 
Several of the city’s most prominent leaders, including Carroll, have joined hands aiming to reduce gang violence and “create a common language of hope” for the people of south and central Los Angeles through a peace-making nonprofit called A Better LA.

“There’s so much to be gained and so much to be accomplished here by this work that it’s absolutely imperative that we get this done as soon as possible,” Carroll said. “The sooner we get it done, the more lives will be saved.”
 
Carroll helped found A Better LA after a fateful week in 2002. While driving to campus each morning before the Notre Dame game, he heard of several gang shootings from each night before, adding up to 11 in one week.
 
Carroll and Lou Tice, a longtime friend and founder of the Pacific Institute, had always talked about “doing something worthwhile in the community,” Carroll said. With that one week’s heart-wrenching news, they were presented with the perfect opportunity.
 
“So I called him up on that Thursday morning and told him to figure out what we need to do,” Carroll said. “We need to get involved and do something to keep these kids from killing each other.”
 
Carroll and Tice, along with several others, then established A Better LA, a group purposing to effect change in the heart of gangs. The list of people in support of the effort is a who’s who of community activists from Los Angeles and around the country, including Bo Taylor of Unity One, Connie Rice of the Advancement Project, Sheriff Lee Baca and LAPD chief William Bratton.
 
Now, more than four years later, A Better LA has begun to change the culture of the city. Joining with Unity One’s intervention efforts, A Better LA has impacted the local communities, leaving lasting marks that have started to bring out the best in the people of the south and central Los Angeles. After all, Carroll says, many of the gang members are “charismatic, high-level thinking people that are running the construct of the gangs themselves. Those guys would do anything to change it if they could, but they’re just in survival mode.”
 
Through Unity One’s impact session training and mind-altering curriculum, a necessary component in helping individuals change their thinking and behavioral patterns from negative to positive, people are making better choices and becoming productive members of society, said Unity One’s Bo Taylor. Through this process, violence decreases, responsibility, accountability and productivity increase, and communities are much safer.
 
“We’ve focused our attention now that this has kind of synchronistically hit at the perfect time,” Carroll said. “What’s so synchronistic about this work is that in the last couple of months, the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department have recognized their work is almost fruitless in the community in terms of gang activity and all the violence that surrounds that.”
 
Recent changes have resulted in uniformed officers understanding how vital intervention is. Officers can’t make the same connection in the community as empowered former gang members, because they can’t relate as well as the intervention workers.
 
Officers, meanwhile, have resigned to merely trying to cover the bleeding instead of stopping it in terms of gang violence.
 
“There’s absolutely no hope,” said one LAPD sergeant, who wished to remain anonymous.
 
But with A Better LA, there is hope.
 
The main strategy behind the program is to train former gang members and then utilize them in intervention, because they can connect and relate to gang members and help produce positive outcomes.
 
“The leadership to redirect a community has to come from the inside out,” Carroll said. “It has to come from people in the community and of the community that are not going away. They can’t be bringing in programs and then taking off. They’ve got to stay there.”
 
The real change will come from the inside, Carroll said, and that sets the stage for everyone else being able to contribute by supporting the peace-keepers.
 
“The thing I’ve realized here is the unbelievable value that the guys in the communities have,” Carroll said. “Former members of gangs, guys who have been incarcerated are so valuable because they’re the only ones that can do the work. They need to be recognized and supported so that they can make this their profession and grow and spread their influence and also draw in more people from within the community to do great work.”

Carroll got a real-life taste for the gang activity in the heart of Los Angeles — and a touching reminder of why A Better LA is so needed — when he went into the community to see it first-hand recently.
 
“I’ve been fortunate enough to be in the communities in the middle of the night where I had an opportunity to meet a lot of the active people in the gangs and find out what’s going on there,” he said. “In essence, I’ve kind of been indoctrinated to understand what’s happened. I don’t have all the answers by any means, but I do have a very deep sense now for what’s going on.”
 
Taylor, of Unity One, said he’s never met anyone with Carroll’s status who “actually cared enough to come through at 2 a.m. in the inner city and who didn’t want any attention at all — no media, no nothing.”
 
“It was genuinely from his heart,” Taylor said.
 
Taylor then told of a story of an inner-city boy who walked up to the car he and Carroll were in, tapped on the window and asked Carroll if he could say something to the Los Angeles icon.
 
“He said, ‘Thank you, Coach Carroll, for coming, I really appreciate you being here to come and see about us,’” Taylor recounted. “To me, that was real special and that’s what really touched me about Pete’s relationship with the community.”
 
The work by A Better LA will revolutionize communities to the point where they are safe, secure and productive places — both for raising families and running businesses.
 
“Right now there’s almost too much danger in some regards for people to make their way through with business,” Carroll said. “A Better LA can provide an absolute win-win opportunity for the people of the communities that want their children to live in peace and have safe environments and have prosperous, productive, thriving communities.”
 
Carroll said one of the most welcoming signs in the whole effort is the desire from within the communities for positive change.
 
“The whole thing that’s obvious to me is the desire of the people in the community and even the members of the gangs themselves to turn this,” he said. “People do not realize how adamant they are and enthusiastic they are to change this. They’re tired of living in fear. They don’t want their children, their brothers and sisters to be involved in gangs.
 
“Until this gets shifted, it’s still the same. We know already what the future holds if we don’t change it.”
 
So what’s most needed now is funding to back the intervention and educational efforts, such as those led by Unity One, which has been going for 15 years but has lacked sufficient privatized money to professionalize the intervention and prevention work.
 
“I need to spread the word because we need people to sponsor these peace keepers,” Carroll said. “We need funding to directly fund the activity and the involvement of the peace keepers and for Unity One. There’s a bunch of guys already there but they’re just doing it out of the kindness of their hearts because they know it needs to be done.”
 
But funding along with training expands and sustains the work, which is high level maintenance.
 
Carroll, with urgency in his voice and emotion on his face, said people have already offered to help, and he couldn’t be more thankful. Even so, there’s so much more to do in order to help create A Better LA.
 
“There are many who have really stepped to the front,” Carroll said, “but we need more help.”
 
To contribute to A Better LA and make an impact on Los Angeles, contact Executive Director Brian Center at bcentercenter@yahoo.com.
 
• Ben Malcolmson is the Director of Online Media for USCRipsIt.com. You can contact him at Ben@USCRipsIt.com.