L.A. Gang Control: We’re Using Band-Aids to Stop Rivers of Blood

Leroy was a gang banger. Leroy is dead. He rode his bicycle out of Crip turf and was blown away, presumably by a Blood. The shooting occurred in South-Central Los Angeles, and you didn’t read about it. Seventeen-year-old gang murder victims don’t cause a blip in the daily media works in Los Angeles. And don’t worry about what “Blood” and “Crip” mean. It makes little sense.

Leads were slim. A woman heard shots. Someone saw a blue vehicle. A call for information on similar assaults netted seven reports: two people shot at and hit; five people shot at and missed. What vexes anyone who reads the reports is that all of the shootings took place during a 10-day period in an area covering two city blocks. The shooters were gang members exercising their “territorial prerogative.”

Occasionally the gangs square off in traditionally gang-free areas. Then when innocent people are killed the community and the media descend on the problem. This is what’s happening with the gang killing in Westwood.

This is not so much an indictment of the media as it is an awareness of our collective interests and appetites for news. The fact is that we wouldn’t watch if the news highlighted gang deaths of black or Latino gang members. Whether we want to admit it or not, death has different values. We don’t identify with gang members, and we don’t sympathize with their deaths. When an innocent young woman is gunned down in their madness, we sit up and take notice.

Leroy’s mother doesn’t understand this, and she is no less pained by his death because her son was a gang banger. And Leroy’s gang status probably had less to do with a decision to be a gang member than with a neighborhood evolution into gang status. There is little that his mother could have done to ward off that affiliation. It came about through thousands of contacts over the years with peers on street corners, in school, in cars and in jail. It was a sum of Leroy’s collective experience. Gang investigators and homicide detectives are not confused about why people join gangs. They spend too much time in the environment. They are not confused about how to deal with it, either.

Just before the Westwood shooting, the county Board of Supervisors, the media and the sheriff’s and police departments were on their yearly outcry about record-setting gang murders. If this sounded vaguely familiar to you, you’re right. We wrung our hands a few years ago when the earlier record was set and a few years before that, ad nauseam. So what can we do?

There are a few basic facts about gang murders that aren’t generally known. Having a grasp of them will help to suggest or accept a course of action.

First, gang murders are a pack-rat type of encounter. Three or four young males in a car spot a male or two walking or sitting on steps. As the car slowly passes, something is said, like “What’s up, Cuz?” or “Where you from?” The words are perfunctory. Shots ring out and another victim, usually a gang member, falls dead. These murders aren’t planned out; they are usually witnessed by rival gang members who reluctantly talk to cops, and when names do crop up they are something like “Snoopy,” “Spider” or “Loco.” A recent computer printout showed approximately 50 “Snoopys” in various gangs.

Second, the filing rate for gang murders can dampen the enthusiasm of any but the most committed detectives. To file a case you must have evidence, witnesses or suspects’ statements that are sufficient to convince a jury and, prior to that, sufficient to survive a defense challenge at the preliminary hearing. There is an expression used by homicide detectives: “Crummy cases have crummy witnesses.” What that means is that witnesses you may develop in your case won’t stand up to scrutiny by the defense. Would you tend to believe a friend of a dead gang banger who has a long history of gang-related offenses against the suspect’s gang? The bottom line is that most gang cases are not good prosecution cases. They are terribly hard to put together.

If things are bad now, they could have been disastrous. Contrary to the lambasting that the Los Angeles Police Department is taking from ill-informed City Council members and others, their CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit and the sheriff’s “Operation Safe Streets” and gang-homicide units and the district attorney’s hard-core gang section have done exemplary work in recent years that is largely unappreciated. What troubles them is that we are using Band-Aids on arterial flow. If we don’t stop the blood-letting, we will find that we cannot contain it. We could be at that point now. Traditional enforcement efforts are doomed to failure.

Many things should be done, including resolving the perpetual dead-end atmosphere of gang environments, but two things have to be done: An extensive, long- term educational program must be started at the elementary-school level and continue through high school. This will be costly, and could span two decades before we see the trend reversed. The reason you don’t see politicians pursuing this option is that they won’t be around for the results, and they don’t want to be the ones to say that we need the money--big money.

We must also nail current gang bangers. If significant additional human resources are pitted against the gangs, and a constant monitoring and enforcement program is undertaken, we can at least minimize the staggering number of murders. This effort must be multi-agency, totally coordinated and singly controlled. In short, we must get tough--very tough.

Getting tough with gangs can also be a problem, if you can believe that. Virtually all gang murders are committed by black and Latino youths. A handful of ministers and neighborhood people understand the problem. But we have political and civil-rights leaders who want the police to approach the problem as if they were negotiating a business contract rather than trying to apprehend criminals. Those voices are stilled now because of the spotlight on gangs caused by the Westwood shooting, but law enforcement won’t have the tools to deal with gangs as long as these people ignore the fact that mass murder is very much a part of the Los Angeles scene.

There are a few common denominators about the people who protest the most about police crackdowns on gang members: They don’t live in the gang areas, and they haven’t been touched yet by gang violence. It should clear their clouded vision to know that nearly all victims of gang violence are black and Latino also.

It seems perversely ironic: We have had more than 1,400 young people murdered by gangs in Los Angeles County in the past five years, yet the only people making significant noise about it are cops. They have been screaming for help and resources for years. It didn’t take a Westwood shooting to turn their heads.