L.A. police aggressively target hard-core gangs

"Yo, White Man," Spidey replies.

Then the Los Angeles Police Department officer, Ryan Whiteman, turns down an alley where a gray-haired man in a maroon velour tracksuit is standing in a carport.

"Rudy, I know you don't live here," he says. "Why are you over here?"

Whiteman opens his door and hears the clink-clink of glass on asphalt. He drops his head. "Rudy, I know the sound of a crack pipe dropping. Give me that pipe!"

Rudy sheepishly walks it over. Whiteman shakes his head. "I just wanted to talk to you," the officer says.

He scribbles out a citation as he wheedles information out of the man.

Whiteman is in the vanguard of a push to target hard-core gangs, not with sweeping paramilitary force but with aggressive, targeted enforcement by officers who know the players in the hood.

The mayor's office and the LAPD are promising to consolidate thinly scattered anti-gang resources and pour them into 12 beleaguered neighborhoods -- gang reduction zones -- where intense suppression would be coupled with gang intervention and prevention programs.

That coupling reflects an epiphany of sorts, with law enforcement now voicing a refrain that has long been the lonely cry of civil libertarians and community activists: Street gangs are a social phenomenon that cannot simply be bludgeoned out of existence.

"What we've really had in the past is a mass incarceration strategy," said Jeff Carr, L.A.'s deputy mayor for gang reduction and youth development. "We've locked a lot of people up and we still have this epidemic problem."

In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that gang reduction zones would be the linchpin of his plan to overhaul the city's anti-gang efforts. The goal is to build a network of agencies and nonprofits to lock up hard-core gangbangers, break cycles of retaliatory violence and keep troubled kids off the precipice.

So far eight of the zones are running, with only the law enforcement part in place. The prevention and intervention side of the equation has been in disarray for years, with programs dispersed through different departments and never evaluated to see if they worked.

The mayor is vowing to change that. His staff hopes to have prevention programs rolling in July at six of the gang reduction zones and intervention workers under contract after that. Each zone will receive $1 million for prevention, enough to target about 200 kids, and $500,000 for intervention. Full evaluation of the programs will not be feasible until 2010 at the earliest, Carr said.

The Jungle, roughly between La Brea Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard, south of Rodeo Road and north of Santo Tomas Drive in Southwest Los Angeles, was named a gang reduction zone in November.

The area's name came from the lush plantings of the pool apartments but has come to signify the gang warfare that emerged from the tropical facades. Although city officials re-christened it Baldwin Village years ago, many residents still call it the Jungle -- P. Stone Jungle, as it has been ruled by the Black P. Stones, a sect of the Bloods, for more than three decades.

The gated courtyards and carports of some 560 apartment buildings present a maze into which gangbangers can slip, and the area has some of the highest crime in the city. For years, the P. Stones have been at war with the Latino 18th Street gang to the north.

As casualties mounted, LAPD assigned Whiteman and two other gang-detail officers to the area in 2004. The next year, the FBI and LAPD swept through the area with federal drug indictments for 16 P. Stone leaders. And the year after that, the city attorney filed a gang injunction against the P. Stones, prohibiting them from congregating in public.

Police said the P. Stones had been involved in 1,500 aggravated assaults and 28 murders between 2000 and 2005.