Public safety leaders from 13 cities around the state are in San Jose to learn how to reach people like former gang member Marie Gonzales.
The 29-year-old mother of two told an audience of law enforcement personnel, out-reach workers and city leaders today that she ran with violent gangs on San Jose’s east side because she didn’t know she had other options. After a rival gang targeted her home in a drive-by shooting, endangering her children, Gonzales said she reached out to groups that help young people turn their lives around.
Her story and others like it will likely be a centerpiece of the California Cities Gang Prevention Network’s two-day conference, which is focusing on how create a community-wide effort to fight gang violence. The conference concludes Friday.
“A city cannot do this alone,” said Clifford M. Johnson, director of National League of Cities’ Institute for Youth, Education and Families.
Programs that fight violence, deter gang membership and reform those already involved in violent groups must include social groups, church leaders and schools, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed said.
Those groups include Ujirani Family Resource Center, where Gonzales now works as a parent advocate, and the Clean Slate Tattoo Removal Program, where she and her husband went to get the symbols of their former gang life removed from their flesh.
To increase the outreach of such organizations, Reed said he will include a request for an additional $1 million to combat gangs as part of the redevelopment package the City Council is set to consider in August.
“We can never let up,” Reed said. “We can never be done, because there are always more kids out there.”
Johnson and Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue called San Jose’s Mayor’s Gang Prevention Task Force – which brings together education, non-profit and community leaders to fight against youth violence – a model that other cities are starting to follow.
The Gang Prevention Network credits the program with reducing violent youth crime by half, cutting the high school dropout rate and limiting the number of children put into the criminal justice system.
It’s task force programs such as Clean Slate that helped Gonzales turn her life around.
A gang member by the time she was 11, Gonzales said gangs were part of her family life and she wanted to strike back at rival gang members when they beat her brother, sending him home “full of blood” and pain.
By the time she was a 15-year-old mother, she had several gang tattoos. When, after she had a second child, gang members on bicycles shot into her home, she knew something had to change. But, with the tattoos it was hard for her and her husband, Sabian Gonzalez, to find work.
“It was so hard to get jobs because people would look at our tattoos and think we were useless,” she said.
She wanted to prove them wrong. After hooking up with Clean Slate, she landed a job with San Jose’s department of family and children’s services.
“I never thought that would happen,” she said, “given my background.”
Today she uses that background to reach kids caught up in the cycle of gang violence. She tells them they have worth and that their lives matter.
That’s just what young people need to hear, Pastor Tony Ortiz said.
“They are looking for options,” he said.
Leaders from the 13 cities attending the San Jose conference will swap strategies from providing children with those kinds of opportunities through Friday.
Contact Leslie Griffy at lgriffy@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5945.
