Originally, the group met every other Sunday to coordinate cease-fires, resulting in a decrease in homicides of nearly 50% in the first six months of the programme. This meeting, in tandem with President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, led to the launch of Compton Empowered a gang reduction intervention composed of numerous ex-gang members and fixtures of the community. Notably, in 2014, Mayor Brown met with 75 local gang leaders and members to discuss how they could work together to create a more peaceful Compton. Through policy reform and strategic partnerships she has championed several initiatives to reduce crime, eliminate human trafficking, and put a stop to gang violence. Though crime ebbed and flowed in Compton throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, when Aja Brown took office in 2013 she inherited a city with an infamous reputation, the violence of which was immortalized in albums, books, articles, and movies as well as a $43 million deficit, an unemployment rate triple the national average, a school district with only a 57% graduation rate, and a spiking murder rate (with 2005 the deadliest year in recorded history).įocused on 12-key principles centered on quality of life, economic development, and infrastructural growth Aja Brown’s 2013 New Vision for Compton, was the jumping off point for her mission to rehabilitate her city. Exacerbated by the memory of the murder of Black ninth-grader Latasha Harlins by Korean shopkeeper Soon Ja Du, the riots disproportionately affected LA’s Koreatown and when they were over 63 people had been killed and over 12,000 had been arrested, while the reputation of Compton was solidified as a place of unrest and violence. ![]() In 1992 when four officers in the Los Angeles Police Department were acquitted after a recording of their use of excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King was widely viewed across the country, riots broke out throughout Los Angeles and Compton. The mainstream media leaned into this identity, and the city became known for the turf war between the Bloods and Crips. which made the city famous with their iconic album Straight Outta Compton. Groups such as Compton’s Most Wanted and N.W.A. In the late 1980s Compton’s violent reputation reached national audiences when the failed ‘War on Drugs’ met the rise of local gangsta rap. She immediately set to work on her ambitious New Vision for Compton revitalization strategy, seeking to paint a new picture of the city that has become notorious for gang violence and crime. In 2013, at the age of 31, Aja Brown (born Aja Lena Clinkscale) made history when she was elected as the youngest mayor in the history of the City of Compton.
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