Local leaders explore solutions to gang violence

By CARLOS VILLATORO
Register Staff Writer

Jose Uribe’s life looks a lot different than it did seven years ago.

Uribe, then 14, got involved in gangs and set out on a destructive path that landed him in juvenile hall. But, Uribe decided to leave his gang and turn his life around. Today he is a student at Napa Valley College, pursuing a degree in criminal justice and has been accepted to Sacramento State University.

On Tuesday evening at Napa’s historic courthouse, Uribe was on an expert panel with Napa County District Attorney Gary Lieberstein, Napa County Sheriff Doug Koford and Napa Police Chief Rich Melton. He spoke of his life as a gang member.

About 55 members of the Napa County Hispanic Network, educators, law enforcement professionals and members of the community came together to talk about the recent rash of gang violence in Napa.

“In seventh-grade, I was just a normal kid,” Uribe said. “By eighth-grade, I started hanging out with some friends (in gangs) ... I’d see guys and how they were dressed and how girls wanted to be with them. The whole respect thing got to me a lot.”

As he entered high school, Uribe’s involvement with the gang escalated. Although Uribe was never jumped into the gang — a ritual in which gang members initiate others by beating them up — he was considered a gang member by both his friends and law enforcement.

Uribe’s first brush with the law was on his 15th birthday when he took his mother’s car without permission and she called the police, he said.

The officer was going to let Uribe off with a warning, but “I started giving him attitude,” Uribe said. “That was the dumbest thing I did.”

Uribe kept getting in trouble. It wasn’t until a 2004 arrest for hanging out with gang members, a violation of his probation, that Uribe took a hard look at his life and asked himself “Is this what I want to do?” he said.

Uribe said he knew the gang life was getting him nowhere and left the gang to focus on his studies. With the help of his probation officer, Uribe got a If Given A Chance scholarship; the scholarship allowed him to attend college.

Beating the gang life wasn’t easy for Uribe, but he learned to lean on community resources such as the now-defunct Nuestra Esperanza’s CLARO Program. The program offered counseling and alternatives to the gang life.

At Tuesday’s gang forum, several people took the opportunity to ask Uribe questions.

Vicka Llamas, Napa County Office of Education’s teen pregnancy prevention coordinator, asked what causes children to join gangs.

“My parents split up when I was younger,” he said. “So I didn’t have role models.”

He said that culture also was a strong factor in joining the gang.

“I considered myself Mexican and all my friends were all Mexican,” he said during a telephone interview. “They told me it’s all about La Raza and it’s about brown pride. Cultural identity was very important.”

He said it wasn’t until he started at Napa Valley College that he found out what his culture was truly about.

Uribe’s frank testimony opened the discussion to solutions for the gang problem in Napa. School Board Member Jose Hurtado recalled how parents living along the U.S.-Mexican border started up a program on cultural pride. Hurtado said he would like to see something similar start up in Napa.

Uribe said one of the things that really deterred him from going further into the gang life was a Scared Straight program that put him in some of the state’s most dangerous prisons, such as San Quentin, to talk to inmates and get a first-hand perspective of what life was like in prison.

Al Bahn, Napa High School dean of students, urged the crowd to explore ways to have someone coordinate gang programs as well as volunteers.

“There are people in the community that will step up to help kids,” he said.

Participants also spoke about the lack of funds for gang diversion programs. For the past few years, law enforcement has relied on state gang grants that are set to expire this year. The City of Napa is in the process of attaining another grant of $448,253, that they plan to use to hire two additional school resource officers, and add a bilingual community liaison that will assist in improving students’ school attendance.

The Napa County Hispanic Network sponsored Tuesday’s gang forum. According to NCHN President Jose Hernandez the mission of the Network is to empower the Latino community through education. It’s a mission that falls directly in line with preventing gangs in Napa, he said.

“Our mission is to be a voice for the Latino community,” said Alicia Jaramillo, NCHN board member and an investigator with the Bureau of Investigations at the Napa County District Attorney’s Office. “We are also very interested in education and unfortunately the gang issue in the community affects education as a whole.”

At the end of the meeting Uribe pledged to do whatever he could to help keep kids away from gangs. He said he hopes to work as a parole or probation officer after graduating from college.

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