Calvin Hodges insists he is not angry at the men who shot him.

Gang worker wounded in the body but not in his heart
Shot and partially paralyzed while protecting an at-risk youth, Calvin Hodges has only one objective: restoring peace to Nickerson Gardens.

By Scott Gold and Joel Rubin

February 5, 2010


Calvin Hodges insists he is not angry at the men who shot him.

"I'm angry at the mind-set," Hodges said on a recent afternoon in Nickerson Gardens, the Watts public housing complex where he grew up, and nearly died.

At 35, he's seen it from all sides now during a journey that has taken him from repeated run-ins with the police to being praised by them as a hero.

In the three months since Hodges was shot, leaving him partly paralyzed, he has become an emblem of all that is risky about the city's campaign to interlace traditional policing with gang intervention and street outreach. And if the authorities' suspicions are right -- that a deadly wave of violence followed Hodges' shooting because he was in the hospital, unavailable to keep the peace -- he will become an emblem, too, of why City Hall believes that risk is worth it.

Within weeks of Hodges' shooting, Nickerson Gardens degenerated into a terrible spiral of violence after several years of relative calm. At least five men have been shot to death in the area since Nov. 22; police believe the killings are linked to a dispute within the Bounty Hunters, Nickerson's dominant gang.
read more here
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hodges5-2010feb05,0,18294.story