Decree lets police roust gangs

For years, Ponderosa Park was both a stronghold of the neighborhood street gang and a magnet for its enemies. Rivals knew the park would be teeming with targets, so they came hunting.

Just yards from the Anaheim park’s playground, members of the Boys From the Hood gang -- which also calls itself BFTH or Varrio Boys -- were standing together after dark in February 2005 when a carload of rivals blasted a teenage member in the face with a shotgun.

That May, a gunman from another rival gang pumped a bullet point-blank into the chest of a Varrio Boy, even as dozens of children played nearby after school.

And the following January, a Varrio Boy rushed to retrieve a handgun hidden in the wheel well of a nearby van after still another rival gang opened fire.

No one died in the shootings, but they reinforced what had been obvious to people who had been visiting the Haster Street park for years: day or night, they might be caught in the war zone.

These days, the gang’s monikers still glare from the community center, scratched into the glass around the entrance.

But four months after a judge prohibited the gang from assembling anywhere in a 1.6-square-mile “safety zone” that includes the park and the Wakefield neighborhood, the tattooed young men who used to lurk here in packs are largely gone.

“It’s a little calmer,” said Elizabeth Ramon, 34, watching her three children play on the park’s jungle gym recently. She doesn’t know why the gangsters seem to have vanished, only that she feels better about coming.

Still, after living in the neighborhood for 11 years, it’s not easy to abandon her guard. Up there on the corner, she said, gangsters once robbed her cousin. “I still feel insecure.”

The park’s transformation reflects a wider shift in the neighborhood since November, when Anaheim police received a judge’s OK to slap about 90 members of Boys From the Hood with fat, 600-page civil injunctions prohibiting them from assembling in the zone, staying out past 10 p.m., drinking in public, or wearing gang attire. The gang favors Dallas Cowboys regalia.

With the injunction in effect, Anaheim police say that for the first two months of 2007, felony assaults are down 50% in the zone, compared to the same period the year before. Stolen vehicle cases dropped 73%, while reports of shots fired declined 75%.

Gang-related calls for service, however, have jumped 72% -- a sign, police and prosecutors say, of the neighborhood’s newly emboldened attitude toward gangs in their midst. Apartment owners and security guards have been trained to call if they see two or more gang-bangers together.

Serving the gang members with the injunctions has resulted in 15 arrests, and in some cases already, convictions.

Jesus Hernandez Salinas, who was already facing three felony probation violations, pleaded guilty to loitering with other gangsters in the safety zone and received 16 months in state prison.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas hails the plan as a success, at least so far.

Saturday, he joined Anaheim police and city leaders for a Family Festival Day at Ponderosa Park to celebrate wresting the park from the gang’s hands and returning it to the people. “This territory is ours,” he said, but added: “Gang members are very persistent. Every time you start lightening up the pressure, they start popping up again.”

Anaheim Police Chief John Welter spoke cautiously. “Today, it’s the safest park in the city. Next week, it’s still a question,” he said. “There will be a time when new gang members will fill the void.”

The 9-acre park is well-maintained, with a lighted baseball field, volleyball court and a large playground. It is, in many ways, the center of a neighborhood of close-packed, low-rent apartments and small houses where open public space is otherwise scarce.

“Right now there are a lot of babies, a lot of families coming,” said Rodolfo Salgado, 25, who carried his infant daughter at the park Saturday. Not long ago, he said, gangsters hung out here and drank beer. Fear kept him and his family confined to their apartment down the block.

“We didn’t go out,” he said.

Anaheim police say that in a city with some 20 gangs and 2,000 gang members, Boys From the Hood was the most active, extorting from food vendors, stealing cars, and terrorizing those who dared to testify against them. In February 2006, police say, a handful of members raped a woman in a motel bathroom, apparently in retaliation for her friend’s testimony against the gang. And last June, an innocent bystander, 22-year-old Wilman Arellano, came outside to buy a tamale and was killed when a rival gang tried to gun down a Varrio Boy.

The Wakefield neighborhood sits in the shadow of the Crystal Cathedral, whose tower can be seen over the rooftops.

Disneyland lies only a few blocks away.

The neighborhood contains signs of the gang’s abiding presence, such as graffiti monikers scrawled on alley walls. But the gang members themselves, these days, are harder to spot.

“Originally, if we showed up, they’d just hang out, and we’d arrest them all,” said Anaheim Police Sgt. Michael Haggerty. Now, with the consequences of the injunction sinking in, they tend to bolt on first sight of police.

“They know they can’t hang out together,” Haggerty said. “You don’t allow them to associate, and they can’t be a gang.”

Patrolling the neighborhood on a recent afternoon, Haggerty and gang detective Bryan Janocha stopped a teenage gangster, who goes by the nickname Clumsy, as he was climbing into his mother’s Expedition. It was Clumsy that rival gangsters were aiming for, police said, when they gunned down the bystander last summer.

As police searched him, Clumsy pulled up his shirt to reveal the letters BFTH tattooed in giant outline on his back.

“When you gonna get that colored in?” Janocha asked.

“I dunno,” Clumsy said. “I don’t want to get violated.”

Police checked the cellphone he carried for gang-related pictures.

Possessing them would be a violation of the injunction. They found none and let him go.

It was a quiet afternoon in the safety zone. There were no other gangsters on the street, and none in the park. “It’s been like this for a while -- it’s nice,” Janocha said. “This neighborhood used to cause me a lot of work.”

The Anaheim injunction is the second of its kind in Orange County. Santa Ana made the first move, carving out its own “safety zone” of about two square miles and targeting 134 members of the Santa Nita gang with injunctions last summer. In the four months that followed, police say, the zone saw a 46% decrease in crime.

On Susan Street in the Santa Ana zone, Francisco Samano 33, a roofer, carried his 6-month-old daughter home from buying groceries at the food cart.

Three years ago, he said, a gang robbed him of $200 at knifepoint.

“Before, there were a lot of cholos. Now it’s very rare,” Samano said. “It’s better for everybody.”

So far, gang injunctions have withstood legal challenges, with the California Supreme Court in 1997 upholding their constitutionality. But critics say the injunctions cut too broadly.

“Associating with a gang is not a crime,” said defense attorney Constance Istratescu, who is representing an alleged Santa Nita member fighting the injunction.

“What this gang injunction does is it makes criminal, conduct that is not normally criminal,” she said.

“You could actually go to prison because you were talking to someone in front of your house in broad daylight.”

Istratescu acknowledges there is little public sympathy for gang members, and a widespread attitude of “Get ‘em off the streets.”

Because the injunctions are a civil matter, those targeted -- whom Istratescu calls “young men who have no sophistication and no money” -- are not entitled to free counsel. In most cases, the injunctions go uncontested.

Freddie Tellez, 28, who is named in the Santa Ana injunction along with his 31-year-old brother Frank, said he grew up on Santa Nita turf and was 12 or 13 when he joined the gang.

He now lives in Anaheim with his fiancee and their three children, and said he worked part-time on a demolition crew.

“It does keep you out of trouble, for the ones that want to stay out of trouble,” Tellez said of the gang injunction.

He’s seen longtime friends hauled off to jail for walking on the street. “I don’t want to be sitting in jail. How stupid is that? If I’m over there talking to a person, I’m going to jail. For what? Talking to a person.”

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christopher.goffard@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Safer

Crime has dropped in an area of Anaheim where police can file charges against suspected gang members for loitering, wearing gang attire or committing other infractions. The gang injunction area was created in November.

Comparing year-to-year activity

Calls to police over a 2-month period before and after creation of the area

*--* Reported 1/06- 1/07 Pct. Calls 2/06 2/07/chng. All calls 1,555 1,039 -33% for service Gang-related 25 43 +72 calls Assault and 9 5 -45 and battery Felony assault 4 2 -50 Shots heard 8 2 -75 Stolen vehicle/ 26 7 -73 recovered Man with gun 3 1 -66 or knife Robbery 8 4 -50

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Source: Anaheim Police Department