Getting the Gangs : Police Unit in the Northeast Valley Builds Rapport on Streets to Ease the Crime Rate

The 17-year-old sat in a police cruiser in Pacoima on a recent Saturday, trying to convince two officers that his arrest for drug possession was a departure from his normal behavior.

“I ain’t no criminal,” the soft-spoken teen-ager insisted. “You guys are just messing with my mind.”

As it turned out, the youth had a string of arrests dating to 1980. His file noted arrests for glue sniffing, possession of PCP, carrying a concealed weapon and burglary. He had also been arrested twice for assault with a deadly weapon.

The file identified him as a member of the Pacas, the largest of a dozen active street gangs in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

The youth was arrested by a Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang unit called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH), which patrols the area with eight officers and also includes two detectives.

Cmdr. Lorne Kramer, who coordinates gang enforcement for the department, credits the aggressive work of the CRASH unit as a primary reason for the drop in gang-related crime in the area.

Police statistics for the northeast Valley show a 27% decrease in gang-related crime from 1983 to 1984 and another 16% drop from 1984 to 1985. Gang-related crime also is down 12% for the first three months of 1986 compared to the first quarter of last year.

Nine Kinds of Crime

The statistics are compiled in nine categories: murder, attempted murder, felony assault, drive-by shootings, battery on a police officer, rape, kidnaping, arson and robbery.

Citywide, gang-related crime has been increasing since 1984, including a 26% rise in the first three months of 1986 over the first quarter last year. The statistics “underscore how significant the problem is,” Kramer said.

Most arrests made by the unit, like that of the 17-year-old, result from relatively minor offenses such as drug use. Yet the CRASH team says its no-nonsense attitude toward street gangs has worked to curb more serious gang activity.

“The more gang members we put in jail, even (if) it’s only for a day or two, the less likely they’ll commit crimes,” Officer Robert Saurman, a six-year member of the CRASH unit, said. “We think we’ve got ‘em on the run.”

Police officials point out that the Valley has fewer low-income areas, thus is less likely to have as serious a gang problem as some other areas of Los Angeles, such as the Eastside and South-Central area.

“Obviously, in the Valley there are pockets of socially deprived areas,” Kramer said. “But there is not the incidence of unemployment, dropouts from school, one-parent families and the large amount of narcotics trafficking that there is in the South-Central Los Angeles area.”

CRASH teams, with a total of 150 officers, have been established in many parts of the city to monitor an estimated 180 gangs with more than 12,000 active members. But the Valley units stationed at the Foothill, Van Nuys, North Hollywood and West Valley divisions are the only ones assigned to police station houses. In other areas, CRASH officers operate from three large bureaus in South, West and Central Los Angeles.

Sgt. Tom Wilkinson, who supervises CRASH officers in the northeast Valley, favors the Valley’s way because it lets his officers work with the same gang members year after year.

Started Six Years Ago

The Police Department established a CRASH unit six years ago in the northeast Valley’s Foothill Division, where Latino gangs have survived since the early 1900s.

“Historically, the original Hispanic gangs saw themselves as soldiers and protectors of their community,” Kramer said. But in the 1930s and 1940s, the gangs evolved and began preying on the communities they once served, he said.

Of the estimated 2,800 active gang members in the area, a small percentage are white and there are some blacks, but most are Latino, Wilkinson said.

The oldest gang is the San Fers, which claims San Fernando as its base, although some members live in Pacoima and other communities, Wilkinson said. Other large gangs include Sol Trece and the Pacas, which are divided into three cliques called Paca Flats, Paca Trece and Latin Time Pacas, Wilkinson said.

Gang members, who are often referred to by police as “gangsters” or “gang-bangers,” rarely use their real names and instead adopt one or more street monikers such as Flaco, Loco, Gordo, Chito and Negro. Most gang members know each other only by their street names.

Today, police define gangs as groups whose sole purpose is to break the law or engage in other antisocial behavior.

“If they don’t commit crimes, they’re not a gang,” Saurman said. Wilkinson said his unit, which is averaging 50 arrests per month this year, has been successful because it treats gang members firmly but fairly as individuals.

“We get to know the players, and we deal with them on a one-to-one basis rather than treating them as a group,” Wilkinson said.

As a result, CRASH officers have developed a rapport with gang members that helps when the unit needs information to solve crimes or to quell unrest between rival gangs, Wilkinson said.

On a recent Saturday night, Saurman and his partner, Jim Jones, toured the Pierce Park and San Fernando Gardens housing projects, pointing out drug dealers, prostitutes and gang members who congregated in parking lots and alleys nicknamed Coyote Gulch and Sherm Alley.

As their police cruiser pulled into the parking lot of one housing project, lookouts standing at the entrance whistled warnings to the drug dealers.

“The first one to see us will start whistling,” Saurman explained. “For a long time, I thought they were whistling at us. “

Teen-age girls, many of them with their faces and eyes brightly painted in makeup, approached the unmarked cruiser to banter with the uniformed officers. Others, including black gang members from the Crips and Bloods, backed away into the shadows as the officers shined spotlights on trash Dumpsters or across walkways that separate rows of low-income apartments.

Drug dealers, some of them gang members, ply their illicit trade in the projects. To avoid arrest in the event of a narcotics raid or an undercover buy, some dealers have youngsters standing at their sides to carry the drugs.

Drug-Laced Cigarettes

The dealers sell Kool cigarettes dipped in liquid PCP, a powerful psychedelic drug once used as an animal tranquilizer. The stuff is called “whack,” said Officer Jay St. John of CRASH, “because once you take a hit--whack--you’re loaded.”

The dipped cigarettes are popular because of their price and wallop. Kools are the preferred brand because they hold together well when dunked in PCP, the officers explained. For $20, one dipped cigarette “will get 10 people bombed out of their minds,” Saurman said.

Dealers barter marijuana, LSD and tar heroin, a relatively cheap and potent form of heroin with a name that describes its appearance. A thin flake of rock cocaine, just one-fifth the size of a fingernail, costs $25.

Despite his many unpleasant experiences with the gang members, Saurman said he mostly enjoys talking and joking with them.

“We’ve got a lot of respect for these guys,” Saurman said. “They’re very much like policemen: They have rules, they have regulations, they have uniforms and they stick together.”

For all their faults, gang members generally take care of their own and are willing to admit wrongdoing and pay the consequences when they get caught, Saurman said.

In return, the CRASH officers do not belittle gang members in front of their girlfriends or get nasty with them after they are arrested, he said.

Information Obtained

Wilkinson said personal contact between officers and gang members pays off with accurate tips about pending fights or simmering feuds that may have started because someone dated a girlfriend of a rival gang member.

“That’s enough to get somebody killed,” St. John said.

Last year, information culled from gang members aided CRASH officers who investigated four gang-related murders, including two at Hansen Dam on July 4. All four were solved within 48 hours, Saurman said.

While Saurman and Jones were cruising Pacoima’s residential streets and talking about their experiences, Jones noticed that a youth standing 150 feet away had thrown something over his shoulder.

The officers pulled over and while Jones detained three teen-agers, Saurman swept the front lawn with his flashlight. After 10 minutes, he spotted the contraband: a half-ounce vial of liquid PCP, once yellow but now copper-colored from the stain of tobacco.

Removing the top of the vial, Saurman wrinkled his nose at the strong odor of ether, which is used as a base in liquid PCP. Two of the three youths standing at the curb appeared dazed and wild-eyed, but the officers arrested only the 17-year-old Paca member who tried to ditch the vial.

Once handcuffed in the back seat of the cruiser, the youth told the officers that he had “stayed clean” for seven months and could not understand why he had come back to the area carrying PCP that night.

Offer Congratulations

After congratulating him for staying out of trouble for a while, the officers took him to the Pacoima police station to complete a report on the arrest.

Inside the small, cramped CRASH office, a glass-framed collage hanging on one wall tells a grim story: graphic photographs have been pasted together showing bodies of area gang members who had been shot, bludgeoned or stabbed to death. Some of the bodies lay on autopsy tables. Others are pictured where they had fallen.

Stapled to a bulletin board on the opposite wall are more than 20 identification cards no longer needed for the unit’s gang files. Each of the cards identifies a gang member by his name, photograph and gang affiliation. The cards are stamped “DECEASED.”

Finishing their report, Saurman and Jones drove the youth to Sylmar Juvenile Hall, where he would be strip-searched and given a bed. On the way there, the slender youth, who wore a T-shirt, black pants, black loafers and a tattoo on his left arm, admitted that he’d thrown the PCP over his shoulder.

“Why should I lie?” he asked the officers.

As the Paca member was led into the facility, Saurman reminded him that he was lucky because of his age. Life after arrest will not be so easy once he turns 18, the officer said.