L.A. summit is urged on racial gang violence

Community activists Friday joined mothers of children killed by gangs in urging Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other Latino leaders to take a stronger stance against racial gang violence.

“Their silence has been deafening on this issue,” said Najee Ali, director of Project Islamic Hope, who has publicized gang hate crimes between blacks and Latinos.

He urged Villaraigosa and others to organize a citywide summit to discuss ways to end the violence.

The mayor could not be reached for comment. But Villaraigosa took an active role earlier this year in condemning two cases involving racial gang violence in Harbor Gateway and South Los Angeles.

On Tuesday, the U.S. attorney’s office announced a sweeping indictment of Florencia 13, accusing the Latino gang of waging a “cleansing” campaign to rid the Florence-Firestone neighborhood of African American rivals.

Florencia 13 and the East Coast Crips, a black street gang, have been fighting for years over control of the area’s drug trade.

Prosecutors allege that Florencia’s actions stem from a 2004 order issued by a member of the Mexican Mafia prison gang, which has warred with blacks inside the prisons for decades.

In 2005, there were 41 homicides in the working-class community north of Watts, authorities said. Last year, homicides dropped to 19, but the level of violence remains high; many victims have had no gang affiliation.

“I wish there was more outrage,” said Luisa Prudhomme, who was among those who joined Ali at a news conference at City Hall to decry racial gang violence. Her son, Anthony, was killed by Latino gang members in Highland Park in 2000.

Politically, racial gang violence can be a sensitive issue, said Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney who has studied gangs and policing. “If you touch it,” she said, “you could do irreparable damage to you politically and to the communities you represent.”

In recent years, several Southern California neighborhoods where blacks and Latinos live together have erupted in violence that mixes motives of gang feuds, race and control of the drug business.

In some areas -- Azusa, Harbor Gateway, Hawaiian Gardens, Highland Park, Pacoima and elsewhere -- violence mostly has been committed by Latino gang members against blacks with no gang affiliation, police said.

Gang-related hate crimes come amid dramatic demographic changes in some areas of Los Angeles.

But in some areas the trends have changed.

There was a time, for example, when Mexican immigrants living in predominantly black South Los Angeles often were preyed on by black gangs, said Randy Jurado-Ertll, director of Pasadena-based El Centro de Accion Social.

He said his mother’s video store was the lone Latino-owned business in his former neighborhood. Latinos under attack by black gangs, he said, often found refuge in her store.

Even today, in housing projects such as Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens, black gangs victimize vulnerable Mexican immigrants, Jurado-Ertll said.

“It’s sad,” he said. “We shouldn’t be preying on each other.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca agreed.

“One cannot justify [this] from the past,” he said. “There is no justification for murdering people. When you go after someone racially, you don’t target gang members, you target innocent families.”

Rice said Latino gang violence perpetrated on blacks clouds an even touchier issue in each community: that most killers of blacks and Latinos are members of their own race.

“It bothers me,” she said, “that the loudest protest in the black community about gang violence is when it’s Latino gangs who do it.”

sam.quinones@latimes.com