Voiceover: 00.00 This is the Beat - a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation Deborah Spence: 00.08 Hello and welcome. My name is Deborah Spence, and on behalf of the COPS Office, I would like to introduce you to Father Greg Boyle. Father Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries and the author of Tattoos on the Heart. And he’s here to talk with us today about working with at-risk and former gang-involved youth. Father Boyle, can you tell us about your work with at-risk and former gang-involved youth? What you do, how you do it, and what Homeboy Industries is all about? Father Greg Boyle: 00.31 Homeboy Industries is the largest gang intervention rehab and re-entry program in the country. And so we get about 15,000 folks a year walk through our doors from all over L.A. County, a place of 1,100 gangs and 86,000 to 100,000 gang members. So we offer all these comprehensive services from tattoo removal to job placement. We run five businesses, mental health counseling, case management, lots of curricular things from anger management to parenting. You name just about anything that would be helpful for this population to redirect their lives, and we do it. Spence: 01.10 Why does the community need a place like Homeboy Industries, and why did you feel compelled to start this organization? Boyle: 01.15 Well, it began 23 years ago when I was a pastor of a very poor parish, and I was starting to bury kids, and so we started to do things: A school first, and then that led to a job placement program, and then each thing that we added was a response to the concrete needs that were being expressed by this population. So it’s like—where I come from we have freeways, so you know, you have to have an exit ramp—so there has to be someplace where this population, when they’re tired of being tired and they no longer want to engage in criminality, there has to be a place for them to go. And so, Homeboy Industries has become it, I think in the County of Los Angeles. Spence: 02.00 Why is Homeboy Industries an important component of community policing, do you think? How is law enforcement impacted by the work that you do? Boyle: 02.06 Well I think that the healthiest kind of dynamic that you can find in most cities is where you have kind of a combination of heat and light. You know, where law enforcement provides a certain kind of clear and compelling heat. Where they communicate and speak for the community, and say, “We won’t accept this violence.” And so once they provide that heat, the hope is that gang members—95 percent of them anyway—will start to walk towards light. If there is no light to walk towards, then that’s a problem. So it’s important in terms of public safety and helping law enforcement and community policing in particular to do their jobs, there has to be a place for this population to move once enough heat has been applied either through injunctions or whatever—just the normal kind of routine vigilance that gang members need to kind of disperse and go somewhere. And the hope is that they’d go to a place that would infuse them with a sense of hope, especially, by and large when they are finding hope somewhat foreign. Spence: 03.13 How can community leaders and law enforcement learn more about Homeboy Industries? What type of resources are out there to help communities who are interested in working with at-risk and former gang-involved youth? Boyle: 03.23 Well, we’ve been around a long time, and we offer a lot of technical assistance. We’ve been asked to kind of franchise all over the place, but we’ve decided not to do that. Instead we encourage communities to sort of grow things from below, much the same way that Homeboy Industries has grown. And so then it has integrity, and then it can sustain itself if it has the community support. So we offer the kind of assistance—and we’ve done it in anywhere from 10 to 15 cities—where they’ve come to visit us and we’ve gone to visit them, and to help them kind of set up a similar outreach and place where gang members can choose to redirect. Spence: 04.04 So there’s a way for somebody to come and observe and learn from your model? Boyle: 04.07 Yeah, and we were asked a lot in the last five years to come and set it up. And we chose not to become the McDonald’s of gang intervention programs, you know? “Over five billion gang members served.” So we’ve decided to just offer an opportunity for people to come—and from other countries, a great many countries have come—and they just hunker down from almost to five days long and they just observe everything. And then they pick and choose; they take the things that will translate to their own city and then leave behind the stuff that’s kind of a particular L.A. thing, probably. Spence: 04.44 So it’s a—you probably believe that there’s a local component to the solutions. Boyle: 04.48 Yeah everything is different. Wichita came and studied quite a bit, and then they went and set up a—mainly what they often set up are kind of economic ventures where they can employ this population and then also have revenue to kind of continue to support their outreach. Spence: 05.07 Well I’d like to thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today. It’s been very interesting. Boyle: 05.09 My pleasure. Thank you. Voiceover: 05.10 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation's communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships and solving problems.