Warring Gangs: A Grieving City Seeks an Answer

Black-sweatered teen-agers filled the pews of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Wednesday for the funeral of Enrique Arceo, a seventh-grader at Sierra Intermediate School killed in the latest wave of Santa Ana gang shootings.

Father Paul Goni told about 100 Latino youths, most of whom were Arceo’s schoolmates, that not he, but Enrique, “the one in that box,” needed to speak to them that day.

“The echo of his voice is saying, ‘What you are, I was. What I am, you will be,’ ” Goni said.

Arceo, who was 13, was not a hard-core gang member. Like many Latino youths, he lived on the fringes of one of several gangs that have been part of the social fabric of Santa Ana for several years.

His death and other recent gang shootings have outraged residents and city officials. They wonder what, if anything, they can do to end the violence before the priest’s deadly prophecy is fulfilled.

“The Hispanic community is paying a horrible price for this carnage,” said Santa Ana resident John Raya at the City Council meeting this week. “It’s time to take the gloves off” and get tough with the gangs, even at the price of alienating some Latinos, he said.

Friday night Arceo and Jesus M. Perez Jr., 17, were killed by rifle fire from a passing car on Lacy Street as they rode their bicycles home from a church carnival. About 20 minutes before the killings, a 27-year-old Santa Ana man was shot and wounded as he returned from a wake for another shooting victim.

The two gang-related shootings last weekend and two more the previous week--two killed and three wounded, all told--do not yet add up to the kind of escalated gang wars that terrorized the city in 1986. In a six-week span that year, from May 26 to July 7, police counted 14 gang-related shootings. One man died and 18 people were injured.

So far this year, there have been six gang-related murders and four gang-related attempted murders in Santa Ana, just about on a pace that would match the corresponding figures for 1986 of seven and five, Santa Ana Police Lt. Robert Chavez said.

In another statistical category, gang-related assaults with deadly weapons, the numbers are actually down this year.

But city officials are especially concerned about the recent shootings because they come at a time when Santa Ana is desperately trying to shed its image as the crime capital of Orange County.

The city has pumped millions of dollars into redevelopment, and it has lured major corporations and developers into the city. City Manager David N. Ream called the recent opening of MainPlace, a gleaming, up-scale shopping mall, a “monumental event” in the city’s history.

Suddenly, the shootings and the newspaper headlines that followed have hammered home a sobering point: No matter how much shiny glass and steel goes up in the city, continued gang violence will reinforce Santa Ana’s image, deserved or not, as a rough town that is no place for the uninitiated on a Saturday night.

“We want to keep the image of the city going in a positive direction,” said Councilman John Acosta. “All of our expenditures downtown, McDonnell Douglas, Hutton Centre--those are all pluses for the city. But we’ve got to deal with the problem of drive-by shootings. . . . The city deserves better publicity than it got the other day.”

Acosta, one of two council members on the city’s Public Safety Committee, said the committee would discuss the problem at its meeting next week. “I don’t know yet specifically what we’ll talk about,” he said. “Maybe we’re going to have to touch these gangs, go out in the community and meet these people.”

More Than Image Involved

Councilman Miguel Pulido, who is also on the safety committee, said city improvements on sidewalks, trees and streets were not just for image.

“If you have bad streets and the trees aren’t trimmed, you end up surrendering territory,” Pulido said. “You make it easier for them to sell drugs and spray graffiti. . . . If we’re going to get it back, it has to be incremental.”

Pulido said he might suggest that the city hold public hearings on the gang problem with hopes of “developing an agenda to address this at the root.”

Belonging to a gang, Pulido said, serves purposes: “Loyalty, brotherhood, companionship, territory.” Educating youth at a very young age that there are alternatives to joining gangs is necessary to combat them, he said.

“Part of the root is vision,” Pulido said. “Ask an 8-year-old what he wants to be when he grows up--a Harvard Law School student or the king of his neighborhood? . . . There is a burden on the people in this city to get out more often and talk to kids.”

Maria Thompson, a longtime Santa Ana resident who works at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in the Logan-Lacy neighborhood, said she used to get furious when she would hear from her children that gang members were harassing them.

“Just let me catch one,” she said in the church office. “It makes for a lousy community; you see them passing drugs, the kids talk about it in school. You feel helpless. Even the little ones know about them.”

The Police Department’s six-member gang unit has been working overtime on the four shootings, Chavez said, and patrols have been stepped up in the eastern and southeastern neighborhoods where gang activity has been high. Four uniformed officers were recently assigned to the gang detail for “directed patrol” of particularly troublesome areas.

Acosta says the department may have to do more than that.

“I think that our Police Department needs to be looked at in a very, very serious manner in the deployment of manpower. . . . I don’t know what’s lacking, but . . . one of the first questions I’m going to ask newly appointed Police Chief Clyde Cronkhite is, what is he going to do to rectify these problems in the community.”

Said Councilman Ron May, “We’re concerned, not only about our image, but about the safety of our community.”