Santa Rosa police recovered 194 ghost guns in early 2026
Alejandro Elizarraraz, an 18-year-old from Santa Rosa, stood in a grassy field with a saw, cutting back brush and branches on a hillside overlooking the forests of northern California to help prevent wildfires. He grew up in Santa Rosa, nearly 60 miles north of San Francisco, a city best known for wine, redwoods and rugged coastline that also has high levels of gang activity. Santa Rosa has been touted for its innovative youth violence prevention work, and it is now pioneering programs that use the region’s natural beauty to mitigate gun violence.
Working with the city, LandPaths takes at-risk youth out of their concrete, urban environments and into the natural one, where they hike, camp and explore Sonoma County’s natural wonders, offering many of them their first encounters with the land. Organizers say the change of scenery helps many students realize that there is more to life than gangs and violence.
The Ocean Song/Meyers preserve, a coastal prairie and oak woodland where LandPaths hosts some of its programming, is a 45-minute drive from the neighborhood where Elizarraraz grew up. But the high schooler, who joined the program last year, said he had never spent time outdoors before starting to work with the group. “I never had a personal connection with nature,” he said. Most Saturdays he would stay inside and watch TV. Now, he said, things are different. “Like, damn,” Elizarraraz said. “I feel amazed when I see all of this.”
Danny Chaparro, who grew up in Roseland, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Santa Rosa with a long history of gang violence, has worked in youth violence prevention for more than a decade. He has the letters R-O-S-E-L-A-N-D tattooed on his knuckles. As LandPaths’ new audiences manager, he oversees programs that bring underserved communities out into nature. Chaparro previously worked at the Boys and Girls Club in Roseland, and said giving youth something to do and getting them into a different space redirects their attention away from trouble — even more effectively, he said, when the space is green where all they have known is concrete.
“I’ve seen some of those same youths now through my time at LandPaths show up to a preserve and start running and climbing a tree and just being a kid,” Chaparro said.
Some students were so enthusiastic that after graduating from the program, Chaparro hired them for another initiative that teaches environmental stewardship skills. Elizarraraz was one. The Young Stewards program is a part-time outdoor program that has teens work on trail building, habitat restoration and land-stewardship projects in Sonoma County. Out of more than two-dozen Saturday sessions, Elizarraraz has never missed a day.
Chaparro said he knows the struggles many young Latino kids are navigating outside the programs: the lack of a stable income, the influence of gangs, a parent who is always working, easy access to guns. “You have more opportunities to be out in places that you shouldn’t be and past times that you should be in,” he said. At a camp-out one night, he recalled setting the students a challenge: two minutes, no talking, just staring up at the stars. Two minutes passed, then three, four, five, and Chaparro stopped the timer and let the silence expand. In a reflection circle later, many told him “they’ve never felt that much peace.”
The approach reflects a shift in how California cities have responded to gang violence. In the late 1990s, the default response was more law enforcement. By the early 2000s, cities across California began looking into the underlying factors — trauma, poverty, lack of social activities — behind the violence. That shift led to the creation of Santa Rosa’s Violence Prevention Partnership, a network of schools, nonprofits, city agencies and community groups that can refer youth into services, including environmental programs like LandPaths.
Ernesto Olivares, a retired Santa Rosa police lieutenant and former mayor, said that to get a handle on gang violence, the entire Santa Rosa community needs to understand the cycles that perpetuate it. “This kid didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m gonna go out there and start gang banging,’” Olivares said. “There was an evolution to that.”
Early research suggests the approach can work. A pilot evaluation of a California Conservation Corps program for young adults found that its largely Latino participants self-reported significant decreases in antisocial behavior and gang involvement while taking part in paid environmental conservation work.
Santa Rosa police chief John Cregan said a main goal of environmental programs like LandPaths is to put tools in students’ hands before they reach for guns — especially important now, he said, as ghost guns have been flooding the streets. Santa Rosa police seized 10 ghost guns in 2019; that number climbed to 124 by 2024 and to 194 in the first four months of 2026. Cregan, who previously oversaw the police department’s Gang Crimes Team, said young people now have easier access to firearms than at any point in his 27-year law enforcement career. Nat Garcia, a high school student also in the Young Stewards program, described what that looks like in her life: “I feel like if someone says ‘I have a gun,’ it’s most likely they do.’”
Chaparro said that even as access to guns keeps getting easier for young people, the small but budding prevention pipeline rooted in the outdoors and northern California’s environmental identity is starting to show promise — but he worries it may not get the chance to grow as Santa Rosa faces a $17.5m budget deficit. While advocates like Chaparro and Olivares celebrate the wins, they worry that as violence declines and graduation rates go up, Santa Rosa may become a victim of its own success. “Unfortunately we are now considered too safe to get funding,” Olivares said.
There is a predictable cycle, Olivares said: violence rises, funders pay attention, programs like Stand for the Land get resources, violence drops, funding pulls back, and the cycle begins again. Prevention should never stop, he said. Despite the funding uncertainty, employees who oversee the LandPaths programs say they are adamant that they will find a way to continue combatting gang violence with access to fresh air.
The teenagers don’t think about budget cuts or donor dollars as they hike through the preserve after lunch, laughing and slipping through the muddy trails. When an old tire swing appears, the teens glance at each other, and Elizarraraz grins and steps up. “Yeah. I’ll do it,” he said. “Can you give me a push?”