I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.
The highest hallmark of a civilized society is not the rapidity by which it exacts vengeance, but its ability to hold victim and victimizer in its compassionate heart.
Redemption is possible, and it is the measure of a civilized society.
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.
I wouldn't trade my life for anybody's.
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.
At its best, an injunction creates a kind of vigilant heat that moves kids toward the light.
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.
Reactive and proactive policing are both necessary. Still, we need to lower expectations that such efforts can ever be responsive to crime.
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.
I don't save people. God saves people. I can point them in the right direction. I can say, 'There's that door. I think if you walked through it, you'd be happier than you are.'
I want to be prophetic and take stands and stand with those on the margins, and I want to laugh as much as I can.
Our best selves tell us that 'there but for the grace of God... ' and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God's grief and heart for us all.
Metro police can't infuse hope into those for whom hope is foreign. The algorithm does not exist that can heal the traumatized. Data-driven predictions won't result in the delivery of mental health services.
The desire of God's heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure.
We need the disruption of categories that lead us to abandon the difficult, the disagreeable, and the least likely to go very far.
The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God's fingertips.
Gangs are born of a lethal absence of hope, and hope has an address: 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles, CA 90012.
I think not everything that works helps, and not everything that helps works.
I kinda don't do guilt. I gave it up for Lent years ago.
