Families Urged to Help Fight Gang Crime

It was a meeting that could have been subtitled “Gang Member Identification 101,” but this was no dispassionate, anthropological discourse on a deviant culture conducted for visiting scholars.

About 350 counselors, teachers and other staffers from the Los Angeles Unified School District--people working with gang members who routinely engage in robberies, assaults and full-fledged shoot-outs were learning to distinguish the high signs of gang membership. They were briefed on the perilous implications of red (or blue)shoelaces, handkerchiefs and rags that dangle conspicuously from pockets and assorted symbols inscribed on notebooks or tattooed on bodies.

Why the sudden effort to be aware of gang markings and who’s wearing them?

As LAPD Officer Camerino Sanchez explained in this update on local gang activities, many parents have absolutely no idea that their children have become gang members--until it’s far too late.

Sanchez, who works in the South Bureau’s CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit, recalled a recent, tragic case in point. He had escorted a gang member home after complaints had been received about his gang creating a nuisance in the area. When the officer explained to the boy’s mother that her son was affiliated with a certain gang, the woman insisted Sanchez was mistaken.

Even when Sanchez pointed out that her boy was wearing obvious gang regalia and called him by his gang nickname, the mother refused to believe her son was associated with hoodlums.

“Unfortunately, two or three weeks later, this gang member was killed in a gang-related shooting. The next time I saw the mother was at the funeral,” Sanchez said, adding that CRASH officers monitor all gang funerals so they can be on hand in the event of further violence and also gather information on who is active in which gangs.

‘Looking for Attention’ “Gang members are looking for the attention they don’t get in school or from their families,” the officer continued. “When they get shot, they get the ultimate attention. They get buried--with the media there, with all their gang members there and with their whole families crying.”

The point that Sanchez and other speakers repeatedly made at the school district’s “staff development” luncheon is that parent involvement is critical if the gang problem in Los Angeles is to be solved or even improved. While the L.A. school district has no figures on how many gang members are in its schools, it is estimated that there are about 40,000 gang members in Los Angeles County. However, observers note that the influence of gangs negatively affects the social development of even larger numbers of other youngsters who live in the gangs’ neighborhoods and who must attend school with them.

Teachers and police officers cannot tackle this problem alone, Sanchez said; they do not have the authority or influence in students’ lives that parents do.

Sanchez specifically suggested that when teachers or counselors observe that students are starting to sport gang attire (or otherwise notice that the students are associating with gangs), they should relay this information to parents, much as they would report to them on the students’ attendance or academic records.

And the sooner the better.

“We get them too late,” Sanchez said. “It takes a minor miracle to deter a high school gang member who’s been one for several years. We need to get to them when they’re ‘Wanna Be’s,’ when they’re 8, 9 or 10 years old and they’re starting to copy the dress of gang members and they’re just hanging around with them. They’re not involved with any criminal activity at that point. They’ve made the decision they want to be a gang member but haven’t made the commitment.”

(Sanchez should know. Currently a La Habra resident, he grew up in East Los Angeles and Pico Rivera and was pressured by gang members to join them. However, his father was adamant that Sanchez not hang out with the gangs. Despite a few minor fistfights with bullying gang members, Sanchez said, he was able to hold his own and survive in his neighborhood without joining.)

The need for early intervention--when a child is considering gang membership--was also stressed by Wes Mitchell, a supervising officer with the Los Angeles school district who deals with police matters.

“Parents don’t know in most cases that their child is a member of the gang until the child is well involved in the gang,” he said, noting that even when they do know about their child’s gang membership, many parents will continue to deny it “because it represents failure on their part.”

“The quickest way in the world to get a parent’s denial is to say their kid is a member of a gang,” Mitchell went on. “So when I talk to a parent I say the child is associating with gang members or being influenced by them. Then you can begin to show them the gang marks on the child’s clothes and schoolbooks . . . when we see a child drifting into a behavior that can be detrimental to him, I feel we have a moral obligation to inform the parent of what we see.”

Mitchell warned, however, that teachers or counselors must also be sure to communicate positive findings with regard to these students whenever possible; school representatives should not call parents “only when something’s wrong.” In such cases, he said, only the negative will be reinforced, whereas “the more frequently the good is communicated, the more frequently parents can reinforce that.”

Mitchell also cited two major areas in which schools could do more in the arena of deterring criminal activity among young people. He suggested that classes in parenting be taught in the schools (“It’s tragic that we educate students to drive who will then not have the opportunity to drive because they’ve been killed by a child who is the son or daughter of someone who didn’t know how to raise them”). And he observed that school counselors clearly need more time to actually counsel students.

A Free Source “We have a critical lack of counseling in our schools,” Mitchell emphasized. “The caseloads of the typical L.A. city school counselors are far too heavy. There are youngsters with tremendous problems who need the aid of counseling. The counselors I talk to say they have very little time to do counseling because the majority of their time is spent in programming, in doing things like making sure that class sizes are balanced and other administrative duties.”

While there’s been some improvement in this area--a recent state mandate increasing counseling for 10th graders--Mitchell pointed out that a similar mandate is needed for students at the seventh-grade level, when they are far more likely to be considering gang membership or not yet deeply involved in criminal activity.

That the counseling come from some source where it is free, such as the schools, is imperative, Mitchell added, because free is the only “reasonable cost” to families in low-income neighborhoods where gangs thrive.

One such community source of free counseling, for members of Korean gangs and other Korean youths, is the Korean Youth Center in Los Angeles. Jane Kim, the center’s director, informed the group of school counselors, psychologists, teachers and other personnel that most of the criminal activities in the Korean gangs are money-oriented.

“Korean gangs were formed initially as social groups by kids who had language and culture barriers,” Kim said. “In the beginning, they were more like support groups. They protected each other from people who picked on them because they were small or didn’t know the language. But now, since 1970 or so, the activities have changed. There’s a lot of physical fighting, and the gangs are involved in burglaries and robberies. They’re more money-oriented rather than support-oriented.” (The last murder that was related to a Korean gang activity occurred seven years ago, she said.)

Kim also cautioned the school staffers that Korean gang members do not wear the identifying symbols that other gang members do, although at one time some Korean gang members were identifiable by the cigarette burns on their bodies.

Kim, whose center provides free counseling, tutoring and parenting seminars as well as youth employment and placement services, agreed with other panelists that parental involvement is critical if the gang problem is to improve.

“For our programs, parents are the key,” she said. “In the Korean culture, we’re more group-oriented than individual-oriented. We involve parents from the beginning in the counseling process. The kid is influenced so much at home that it doesn’t make much sense to provide hours of counseling and then send the kid back into the same home environment.” After the meeting concluded, Charles Espalin, director of counseling and guidance services for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said he was in complete agreement with the suggestions that school representatives increase their efforts to work more closely with the parents of gang members.

“I think the meeting was more than worthwhile,” he said. “Many of the people there know about gangs. They read about them. They know there are tough kids they have to deal with. But (until the meeting) they didn’t really understand the symbology and the meanings of the gangs.”

Cautioning that there are no simple solutions to gang problems, Espalin offered evidence of some progress on the part of the school district in working more closely with parents and in improving student-counselor ratios.

“We are seeing some changes,” he said. “I have one member on my staff who spends time with Hispanic parents--parents who come from other countries with different cultures--and offers them counseling and parenting skills. And our counseling-pupil ratio has improved dramatically since the old days . . . but then again, the counselors are up against more things and there are more problems they’re expected to solve.”