LOS ANGELES — Mayor Eric Garcetti said today the city and police department are making a multi-pronged effort to respond to a spike in South Los Angeles gang crime, including the deployment of more officers, outreach efforts to area clergy expansion of gang-reduction and youth-development programs.

“As you’ve seen in recent days, we’ve seen a rise in violent crime after more than a decade of significantly lower levels of crime,” the mayor said. “We’re still near historic lows, its important to remember, but any trend up is always a disturbing one — I know for the chief, for this council and for me.

“There are no easy explanations but any loss of life on our streets I always take a pause every single day, whether it’s a crime victim who has been shot by somebody in the community, whether it’s an officer-involved shooting — these are painful things and a loss of life is something that we as human beings must pause and recognize whenever and however they happen.

“But the LAPD isn’t just sitting back on its hands,” he said. “We’re sending additional officers into the communities that need them most. “We’re sending gang-reduction and youth-development programs into communities for their first expansion in years to cover more than 70 percent of the areas where gangs operate in Los Angeles. We’re expanding our domestic violence programs, we’re looking at our lead officers — another platoon of which will be ready this week to go into the community and communities like our Central division and South Los Angeles who are seeing the highest spikes in crime.”

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said he met with commanders in the department’s South Bureau this week to review their plans for addressing the uptick in gang, such as staffing a command center and adjusting police resources while working with the community.

“Having said that, gang crime is violent crime in Los Angeles,” Beck said. “Over 55 percent of our homicides are traditionally gang-related, almost 25 percent of our violent crime. This is the issue that Los Angeles has to deal with most centrally to impact crime.

“Because of that, we have very, very strong strategies, but those strategies sometimes take time to work,” the chief said. “When you have young men that are determined to commit violence upon one another, sometimes it can be difficult to tamp it down, but we are working toward that and I have confidence in what we’re doing.”

Garcetti noted that attacking the spike in crime is not just a matter of flooding the area with officers, but building relationships with the community. He said he told new LAPD officers during a graduation ceremony this morning that they need to build a rapport with the areas they are assigned to protect.

“For every stop that you make on the street, stop into a store and introduce yourself,” he said. “For every person you put in jail, go to a high school class and teach a new generation about police and get to know them at the same time.”

He also said the city is assembling a “clergy task force” and “working with faith-based civic organizations to see what other resources in those communities that are hit by some of the crime spikes we’re seeing can be targeted and available.”

“This for me is a situation that underscores our need to be ever mindful of the true value of community and relationship based policing,” the mayor said. “We owe the people of Los Angeles nothing less.”