City Attorney to Ask Tight Restrictions on Crips Gang

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office plans to go to court today to seek broad restrictions against the activities of a violent, 200-plus-member Westside street gang.

The office, which recently filed a lawsuit against the Playboy Gangster Crips, will ask today for a temporary restraining order under the theory that the gang is an unincorporated association whose individual members are liable for the actions of the entire group.

In the lawsuit, City Atty. James K. Hahn alleges that the Playboy Gangster Crips have been destroying private property, breaking into cars, spray-painting gang slogans on walls, dealing in illegal narcotics in public view and endangering the public by shooting off guns, United Press International reported.

Under the restrictions Hahn proposes in the suit, the wire service said, gang members would be barred from leaving their homes between 7 p.m and 7 a.m., would not be allowed in public parks or on streets for more than five minutes at a time, could not attend “loud, boisterous parties” and could not engage in conversations with occupants of cars.

Members of the gang also would not be allowed within a 26-block area in which the gang is headquartered without a signed letter from an employer in the area or a letter stating that they reside in the neighborhood.

Notices of the hearing have been posted in an area bordered by La Cienega and Robertson boulevards, 18th Street and Cadillac Avenue. Police were also attempting Wednesday to serve legal papers on specific members of the gang.

Law enforcement sources said the street gang is regularly involved in rock house drug sales and killings.

“They are very strong and they’ve grown rapidly in the past few years,” said V. G. Guinses, executive director of SEY YES, Inc., a state-funded gang diversion agency. “They are a very educated group because that’s a middle-class neighborhood.”

Last November, two Los Angeles gang members were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the killing of a 17-year-old girl in an effort to gain acceptance into the tougher Playboy Gangster Crips. Glenn Martell, 20, and Jederick Bond, 19, had been members of a lesser-known gang when they killed Erica Johnson, 17, authorities said.

Although the city attorney’s office is labeling its legal action “the nation’s first comprehensive abatement action against a street gang,” similar lawsuits have been filed in the past to counteract specific actions of gangs.

In 1981, the district attorney’s hard-core gang division won temporary restraining orders prohibiting gangs from gathering at certain homes in Pomona and West Covina. And in 1982, then-City Atty. Ira Reiner won a court order demanding that members of three Los Angeles street gangs remove their graffiti from private walls or face jail terms.