The architect of the city’s successful Summer Night Lights program was named Tuesday as the new anti-gang czar, tasked with overseeing the city’s gang prevention and intervention programs.

Guillermo Cespedes will take over the mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development, replacing the Rev. Jeff Carr, who will become Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s chief of staff effective Sept. 19.

“Today, I’m investing my full trust and confidence in Guillermo Cespedes to bring the success of Summer Night Lights to our broader gang-reduction efforts,” Villaraigosa said. “With Guillermo leading our gang-reduction efforts, L.A. will continue to pave a path of hope for communities that for too long have been left behind.”

Charged with overseeing programs to deal with about 400 gangs with 40,000 members, Cespedes said “I understand this is a tough, tough job, but I am up to the task.”

“I believe we have set the direction of this office in the last year and a half, so this is not really a transition period,” Cespedes said. “This is a way of continuing to implement the strategies that have been clearly designed and articulated. We’re in the second phase of that, which is the phase of program enhancement and program development.”

Cespedes is credited with developing the Summer Night Lights program, which began last year and was credited with helping the city record its safest summer since 1967 by keeping eight parks across the city open until midnight, providing at-risk youths with organized activities aimed at keeping them out of gangs.

City officials said communities around those parks experienced a 17 percent drop in violent gang crime, an 86 percent reduction in homicides, and a 23 percent decline in aggravated assaults, prompting U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to praise the program as an “innovative approach to crime fighting.”

Buoyed by that success, the mayor doubled the number of parks in the program to 16 this year. Next year, he wants to expand the program to 24 parks.

Among the organized activities offered by Summer Night Lights are basketball and soccer tournaments; workshops in acting, dance, hip-hop, fashion, T-shirt printing, music and makeup design; and film screenings.

The program ran for nine weeks — from Independence Day through Labor Day — at a cost of about $2.8 million this year. That breaks down to about $225,000 for each of the 16 parks that participated, Cespedes said, adding that half of the money came from private foundations.

Cespedes said a pilot program to continue a scaled-down version of Summer Night Lights during the school year may be in the works, if funding can be found.

Cespedes said he also plans to enhance the city’s gang intervention efforts.
“We’re fine-tuning what intervention really means since the rest of the country is now looking to us to make sense of what that is,” he said. “Of course, training — professional training — for our intervention workers is another major initiative.”

According to the mayor’s office, Cespedes’ career in community service spans three decades. During the 1970s, he worked with various agencies helping low-income families and disenfranchised youth in Connecticut. He moved to California in 1981, and over the years has worked with agencies such as Clinica de la Raza, Oakland Children’s Hospital, the East Bay Agency for Children and CalWorks.

In 2003, Cespedes served as the deputy director of the Summer of Success Baldwin Village, keeping Jim Gilliam Park busy with sports tournaments and family activities until 2 a.m. during the summer months. It became the model for the Summer Night Lights program.

From 2005 through 2007, Cespedes taught in the African Studies Department at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Cespedes has a bachelor of arts degree from Sacred Heart University and a master’s in social work from Columbia University. He also received post-graduate training from the Nathan Akerman Family Institute, Bronx State Hospital Family Studies Unit and Bristol Hospital Family Unit.

A native of Cuba, Cespedes has lived in South Los Angeles since 1999.