In Los Angeles gangs, they call her “Little Mama”: the researcher tracing how teenagers slide into crime

In the May week when two young people were murdered by youth gangs and the SSQ gang made headlines, we approached Los Angeles gang researcher Dr. Jorja Leap to learn from her about youth crime. “I’m busy with a trial that carries the risk of a death sentence,” she told us then and asked to postpone the interview until later. ● Science Front | The researcher who suggests: start thinking about life at age 100 ● Science Front | “Let’s make bacteria produce oil”: the researcher who wants to turn Israel into a powerhouse of engineering and biology

Leap, a white woman who received the honorary title “Little Mama” from Los Angeles gangs, lives on the boundary between researcher and helper. In a way, she is already part of the community. She trained as a social worker, and today she is a doctor of anthropology at UCLA and a sought-after adviser to policymakers. She serves on committees, acts as an expert witness, and manages intervention programs. For her, therefore, a murder trial against a gang member is personal. She agreed to talk only after the verdict was delivered, the defendant would go to prison but would not be executed.

Dr. Jorja Leap, personal details: 71 years old, married to former police officer Mark Leap, mother of one daughter, raised in a Jewish family of Greek origin. Profession: lecturer and director of the Social Justice Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), principal investigator in the White House’s Community Violence Intervention Partnership, and activist in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Something else: she has published books about gangs and life in Watts, but her doctorate was written דווקא about Hollywood screenwriters

One city and 1,100 murders a year

The murder of Zelka in Petah Tikva, and a few days later that of Destaw Cekol in Beersheba, raised awareness of the existence of youth gangs in Israel. Around the same time, a planned attack by the SSQ gang was also exposed, a gang that, as far as is known, includes boys and girls, children of foreign workers and locals from the Shapira neighborhood of Tel Aviv. It is a gang that began with petty offenses and gradually developed ties with crime families. It seems that local youth gangs are importing to Israel at least some of the symbols and patterns of American gangs.

Leap’s research focuses on the Watts neighborhood in South Los Angeles. In the 1990s, the entire city saw 1,100 murders a year, and a large share of them were in that neighborhood. That decade was nicknamed The Decade of Death. Since then, the situation has improved, in part thanks to actions led by various bodies in the area. The number of murders a year has dropped to 300 in recent years.

How did you get into studying gangs?

“I worked as a social worker at Martin Luther King Hospital in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. I treated children who had been abused in the family, and the truth is that I couldn’t contain it. I started researching gangs because it was easier.”

Leap, who was born in 1955, grew up in her early years on a street near Watts, “which today is sometimes called ‘Murder Alley,’” in her words. It had once been a white working-class neighborhood, but when Leap was a child it underwent a demographic shift and became mostly Black. In the 1960s, riots took place there, and afterward the rise of gangs began. Leap no longer lived in the neighborhood then, but she returned there often to visit relatives. Her parents spoke openly with her about the reasons they left the area. “Today they would call it ‘social justice conversations,’” she once said. “But then, for them, they were simply trying to explain to me how the world works.”

Dr. Jorja Leap working alongside people from the Watts neighborhood, Los Angeles / Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Jorja Leap

“Don’t come to the neighborhood tonight”

When she finished her studies in social work, she knew she would return to Watts. She noticed that many of the children who had been abused were the ones who later joined gangs. “They acted tough to cover up what they had been through. The gang became their family.”

At the height of the violence in the neighborhood, she says, “I would talk to someone and the next day I’d come in and ask, ‘Where is John?’ and they would say, ‘Oh, he was murdered last night.’ It was really a war.” She left the neighborhood to become a researcher and later returned. She knew she wanted to work only in Watts, a neighborhood she saw as home. She did not live there in practice, but spent much of her time there.

How were you received by the gang members in the neighborhood?

“They tested me and saw that I was one of them. They would tell me false information or unimportant information, to see if I passed it on to my husband, a police officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. When they saw that the information stayed confidential, they began to trust me more.

“They saw that I came to the neighborhood with my daughter, of course not to dangerous areas. They understood that I probably trusted them if I brought her there. Then my husband left the police, and began to get to know the people in the neighborhood as human beings, and they got to know him that way too.

“Over time a rumor spread in the neighborhood that this woman knew how to help. And someone would say, maybe you can connect me with a lawyer? Maybe you can help me see a doctor? And when I succeeded, there were people in the neighborhood who would tell others, ‘She’s okay, you can trust her.’ And to this day they vouch for me with others. Sometimes they would tell me, ‘Little Mama, don’t come to the neighborhood tonight. This time it’s better not to,’ and I would know that something dangerous was about to happen.”

“In the past there was openness to evidence-based policing, there has been a retreat”

“Historically, crime-related homicide rates in Israel are low,” says Israel Prize laureate Prof. David Weisburd, an Israeli-American criminologist, faculty member at the Hebrew University and the National Academy of Sciences. However, in recent times there has been an increase, mainly in Arab society but not only there. “We are still not sure whether this is a change in the crime trend in Israel, but it may be related to the overall rise in violence in society,” he says.

Weisburd is known for discovering that a significant portion of crimes are committed in very specific places in a city, a certain street or even a certain street corner, and if crime there is neutralized it does not necessarily move to nearby places. A similar principle was found regarding the offenders themselves. “Five percent of the teenagers in a troubled neighborhood will commit 50 percent of the youth crimes in the neighborhood. And violent crime is even more concentrated,” he says. “Even in a violent neighborhood, most people are not violent, and everyone knows who the violent ones are. Even the police usually know.”

Therefore the goal is to catch them before they slide into serious crimes. How does one do that?

“The police approach that person and say, ‘We know and we are watching you especially closely. If you act violently, we will come after you and convict you.’ At the same time, community clergy and mothers are also sent to them, and they say, we see you. You are destroying the community. Then they are offered something else to do with their lives.”

According to Weisburd, in neighborhoods where the method was implemented, crime was reduced in some cases by about 40 percent. He says that Prof. Buddy Hassisi of the Hebrew University, who studies its implementation in Israel, asked to work in coordination with the police, but “right now it seems they do not have the capacity. During the time of Roni Alsheikh as police commissioner, the Ministry of Public Security and the police were open to the idea of implementing evidence-based policing methods, but there has been a retreat on this issue.”

Weisburd argues that Israel’s electoral system incentivizes politicians to work to reduce policing in the sectors they represent, “but the right thing to do for them is דווקא more policing. Most of the public wants the problems solved.”

On 18.6, the Academy of Sciences will hold a panel on policing challenges, led by Hassisi and with the participation of former commissioners Alsheikh and Moshe Karadi. No current police officials are expected to take part in the discussion.

Read more: “To be Tupac Shakur but without dying”

Leap’s research yielded some unexpected insights. For example, she found that Black gangs in the United States are youth-based, and their makeup changes quickly. This is in contrast to Mexican gangs, where people are members for many years, even across generations, and they are sometimes linked to Mexican cartels. She also discovered that women are members of gangs, even though their male counterparts rape, traffic women and use violence against female relatives. Sometimes that violence is also directed at the female gang members themselves.

Why do teenagers join gangs?

“Two main reasons, poverty and trauma. Poverty, not at the level of, I don’t have money for a vacation this year, but at the level of no money for food, no money for the bus to school. And the trauma is prolonged trauma. Not something that happens once and breaks your worldview, but something that happens every day, over and over and over. Trauma in the family, trauma in the community.

“The schools are not good. They are crowded and do not have the resources for learning. These children have no horizon. They have no dreams. We say gangs are formed out of deadly hopelessness. And against that, the gang is a family. It will protect you, but it will exact a price. It will expect you to risk your life, it will expect you to be violent, to be ready to go to prison.”

Leap identified stages in gang recruitment. The first stage is characterized by rule-breaking out of boredom and a search for belonging. “These are the kids who ride skateboards, do graffiti and all sorts of things the police call ‘malicious mischief,’ like vandalism. Sometimes they do it in order to join a gang, and sometimes they are not thinking about it. In the process, they can also do positive silly things. For example, some of them are artists and they see their graffiti as art.”

In the next stage, these young people begin seeking a connection with the gang. “They wear the colors, use the language, wear jewelry identified with the gang but ordered online. Maybe they will buy and sell a little drugs, mainly for their image. They just want to be cool, to be Tupac Shakur but without dying.”

When the gang identifies such a youth, it will perform an “initiation ceremony” for him, and then he becomes part of it and starts receiving orders from its leaders. “They can give you instructions to hurt someone to protect territory. And if you sell drugs, the gang gets a cut. At this stage, the gang’s needs come before yours, like a soldier who enlisted in the army. And the justice system at this point changes its attitude toward your crimes. If you shot once, that is one crime. If you shot for a gang, the punishment is more severe.”

Each gang, Leap says, operates according to its own codes, but there is one thing common to all of them: “They do not tolerate informants. That is a cornerstone in their value system.”

How similar are the gangs to family organized crime, to the mafia?

“They model themselves on the mafia. All the senior people in the gangs have a poster of The Godfather or Scarface in the room. But they are not connected to organized crime, except for the Mexicans who are connected to cartels in Mexico.”

“With help, you can get them out of it”

Is there a way out of these street gangs?

“In their 20s, they begin to be too old for the gang. They say, ‘I’m tired.’ And if they already have some job and children and gradually keep a lower profile, the gang does not necessarily exert unbearable pressure on them to stay.”

That is provided they have not become informants, of course. That does not mean leaving a gang is easy. For many, it is the family they know.

“But if you meet them at that stage and give them help, not just one kind but a basket of services, you can get them out and help them build their lives. You can help them get education, a driver’s license, maybe vocational training, whatever will give them an economic horizon. Not riches, but stable employment. They will be able to be useful members of the community and even pay taxes, which of course is important in the United States, as we all know.”

The price, she says, is cheaper than keeping them in prison for life. “And nothing in prison life will make them detach from the gang.”

Still, some of them committed terrible crimes.

“Absolutely, and I believe they should go to prison for real crimes they committed, murder, violent assault. But not for possessing a gram of hashish. Some of the incarcerated people I meet really should not be there. And a bigger question is, what do they do when they get out, and not much is waiting for them.”

“People get excited about Big Mike”

In her research on fatherhood in the rough neighborhoods of Los Angeles, she found that the overwhelming majority of young people in gangs grow up without fathers, and that contrary to the perception that fathers can be a violent force or a factor pushing these children toward crime, in practice, on average, fathers have a positive influence, even if they are in prison or addicted to drugs.

If it is not possible to preserve the connection between fathers and their children, the programs Leap is involved in create father figures for young people from among community members, including gang members who have reformed. More broadly, Leap’s research shows the effectiveness of intervention programs in which people from the neighborhood, including those who were once gang members or even in prison, are given a leadership role in stopping violence.

For example, she worked alongside a former gang member named “Big Mike,” Mike Cummings, who used to accompany children in the neighborhood to school and protect them from older children, while searching their bags for weapons or drugs. As those children grew up, Mike served as their adviser. “I saw people who were very, for lack of a better word, scary-looking, break down in tears when Big Mike said he was proud of them,” Leap said in the past.

Cummings was also the one who gave Leap the legitimacy, backing and information she needed when she first began working in the neighborhood. For her, the goal is to promote people like him, to research and prove that what they do works.

One of the programs she is involved in is Homeboy Industries, “homeboy” is the name gang members call themselves, which is based on 400 employees and volunteers who help people released from prison obtain an economic horizon and a listening ear. She emphasizes the importance of this intervention being carried out by people from within the community. An outsider has no meaning unless he or she has deeply immersed themselves in it, like she has.

“We need programs to support schools, reduce overcrowding and pay teachers to attract good teachers, and programs that teach community members to intervene against violence without getting hurt,” she says. “These solutions have developed over many years. Police are also necessary, but alone they cannot do anything.”

You have said in the past that you argued a lot with your husband about the police and gangs. What exactly did you argue about?

“Not about his functioning in the police, because my husband is a very gentle person and did not fire even one shot in all 37 years of his service. One of the problems was that he thought everyone was like him, and he found it hard to see that not all police officers meet the same moral standards. We also argued about police funding. I told him the allocation did not make sense. If they took part of the police budget and gave it to community support groups, we would get much better results. The statistics do not lie, when you imprison people, they are replaced by other criminals, but if you heal communities, you see results.”

Is Watts safer today?

“The drop in violence has not led to a subjective feeling of safety. I think that is due to two reasons. One is that there has indeed been a drop in murders but not in sexual assaults. The second is that the whole country is at war and it seems that social and inter-racial gaps are widening. The general feeling of security in life and in the country is shaken, so people feel unsafe in their neighborhood too.”