Gates Blames Drugs, Gangs for 4% Rise in L.A. Crime

After three years of decline, major crimes reported in Los Angeles rose by more than 4% this past year, much of it attributable to increases in narcotics trade and street gang violence, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said Wednesday.

In a videotaped year-end message played at roll-calls throughout the 7,000-member department, Gates also pointed out that traffic fatalities on city streets climbed by 24% this year and urged his officers to issue more tickets.

The chief repeated what has become an annual but so far unfulfilled promise: to obliterate gangs in the coming year. This time, he compared his officers to U.S. Marines and the gangs to a hostile, defending force.

“It’s like having the Marine Corps invade an area that is still having little pockets of resistance,” Gates said in the 44-minute message. “We can’t have it. . . . We’ve got to wipe them out.”

There have been at least 181 reported gang-related homicides in Los Angeles this year, nearly as many as the record number in 1980, when 192 gang members and their victims died. Last year, there were 144 such killings.

Drug Dealing Blamed

Authorities blame much of the increase on competitive drug dealing among the city’s approximately 160 gangs.

Apparently adopting a strategy long used by gang experts from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, police investigators this year concentrated much of their enforcement efforts on one particularly violent gang, the Rolling 60s of South-Central Los Angeles, and effectively shut it down, Gates noted.

He said other gangs may be similarly targeted in 1987. In the past, the Police Department’s anti-gang unit has attempted to control the problem by focusing its attention on many gangs simultaneously.

Final figures have yet to be tallied, but preliminary statistics detailing other major reported crimes committed this year in Los Angeles show an overall 4 to 4 1/2% increase in homicides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larcenies and vehicle thefts, Gates said. That compares to a projected 10% increase for the same crimes nationally, according to the chief.

Change in State Law

Locally, aggravated assaults jumped 57% in 1986, Gates said. However, he said nearly all of the increase resulted from to a procedural change in state law, which requires that police officers record even minor acts of domestic violence as felony assaults.

Until this year, the overall number of major crimes in Los Angeles had fallen gradually from 1981, when they peaked at 321,000 reported incidents, department records show. From 1981 to 1985, the crime rate fell 8.4%. Last year, there were 295,000 major crimes recorded in the city.

Gates said that his department’s narcotics seizures in 1986 outnumbered all of those in the last five years combined. Los Angeles police this year took more than $2.5 billion in narcotics off the streets, most of it cocaine.

Seizures of that drug were up 451% over 1985 while heroine seizures climbed 57%. The amount of methamphetamine confiscated jumped 106%; hashish seizures increased 82%.

Overall, investigators made 34,000 narcotics-related arrests--a 38% increase from 1985--seized about 1,400 firearms and confiscated more than $26 million in cash.

“This has become the new Miami, the West Coast Miami, unfortunately,” Gates said.

On the matter of traffic fatalities, Gates said urged the department’s 320 motorcycle officers to write more traffic tickets in 1987 to improve driving “discipline.”

“We used to have the most disciplined drivers you’d find anywhere in the world, but in the last few years, the discipline hasn’t been there and we’ve got a lot of unruly people out there,” Gates said. “Part of that comes from frustration, from the fact that (drivers) are tied up in horrible traffic jams.” There have been more than 375 traffic fatalities on city streets this year, including at least 118 pedestrians. In 1985, 287 people, including 82 pedestrians, died in traffic-related accidents.

Officers Praised

Gates complimented his officers for their hard work in 1986, calling it “a year of great accomplishment.” Among other units, he cited the nearly 50 investigators assigned to the so-called Southside Serial Killer task force. Its members, he said, have spent 117,000 man-hours stalking the “one, two or three” men believed responsible for the string of 17 unsolved slayings that has claimed mostly black prostitutes.

“There are some who have said that we have really put secondary emphasis on this because these are prostitutes by and large and that we really don’t care,” Gates said. “That’s nonsense. . . . We put forth a distinctive effort on everyone of our murders . . . .”

The chief said another department task force is equally hard at work trying to find an unknown suspect believed responsible for the shooting deaths of at least 10 men, many of them transients on Skid Row.