The Unseen Costs : Gang Rule: Living in Battle Zone

Kimberly Bates--eyes hard, jaw set, spirits sagging--was describing her introduction to Los Angeles. She had moved to Los Angeles from Palmdale with her four children, aged 4 to 14, to try to lick a drug problem. While she found a job and lived in a treatment center, the children stayed with her mother, the mother’s boyfriend and two of Bates’ brothers in a three-bedroom home in the city’s South-Central section.

One day Bates, 31, bought her 11-year-old son a blue sweater. He wore it to elementary school, where he was jumped and beaten up by some other children.

“The principal called and he told me blue was a gang-related color,” Bates told a counselor at a “help-line” that specializes in gang problems, still astonished that her ignorance could cause her boy such pain.

A Matter of Colors

With world-weary patience, the counselor explained the dominant rule of inner-city survival: Blue is the color of allegiance to scores of black street gangs, or “sets,” that call themselves Crips. Red is the color of a far smaller number of black sets that call themselves Bloods. Bloods hate Crips.

“Your son’s school is in a Blood neighborhood,” the counselor said.

The mother’s voice was shaking with defeat. Life was already so hard, and now this. This was crazy. In Palmdale you wore what you wanted.

“I try to teach my kids they don’t have to fight,” said Bates, whose name, like virtually all others in this story, has been changed because of their fears of gang retaliation. “I try to teach them that they can talk their way out of it. But it is not really that way here. Here you just have to fight, I guess.”

Freedom Throttled

Hundreds of people, many of them innocent victims, will lose their lives this year in the war between feuding gangs in Los Angeles County. Kimberly Bates’ family and hundreds of thousands of others who live in neighborhoods plagued by gang violence are losing something almost as precious. Their basic desires for the simplest freedoms--an untroubled bus ride, an evening stroll, a wardrobe of their choosing--are being throttled more and more tightly.

This is the unseen cost that gangs are extracting from neighborhoods that already have more than their share of the worst that life has to offer. From the big, well-trimmed homes of Southwest Los Angeles to the dirt-alley slums of Watts to the grimiest blocks of Compton, fear is draining life of spontaneity. The pervasiveness of drive-by shootings--the thought that no matter where you live, you might be next--has eroded dozens of little habits, mannerisms and reflexes that used to be taken for granted.

You see it when Virginia McKee chastises herself for forgetting another cardinal rule: Never ignore the sound of a car backfiring. Once, McKee closed the door of her second-floor apartment on 77th Street to get away from that noise. The noise turned out to be a drive-by shooting that wounded one of her son’s playmates.

You see it when Allen Smith, 16, back in school after a year in a county juvenile camp and determined to go straight, is tormented by gang members from his Hoover Street neighborhood who pick on anyone who carries a textbook. Allen solves the problem by doing all his studying at home. He will not be seen in public with a book.

You see it when Allen’s mother, Glenda Smith, pleads with her son to stop buying the very things a young man craves--fashionable clothes, a persona. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself, she says. Those Fila warm-up jackets and those Adidas sneakers and those gold-trimmed sunglasses are just what gang members love to take. “Why, once they held a gun to his head at a bus stop and stripped him down to his T-shirt!” she said, and then she does the only thing she can do. She laughs.

A Delicate Balance

You see it when Thomas Wells, the founder of a youth organization in the Exposition Park area, tries to delicately balance the allotment of city-funded summer jobs among Crips and Bloods. The recreation center Wells uses is in the turf of a Crips set. But just across a major street is Bloods territory. Everybody remembers that the first time Wells invited some Bloods into the jobs program, two of them were robbed--not just of their money, but their clothes--by Crips. “But we have to involve them, or else there will be problems,” Wells said.

You see it when Maxine Barker, a middle-aged woman who has lived for 19 years in a neat section of Denker Avenue near 50th Street, decides that she will stop going out to visit friends at night. No, she says, it isn’t because there are gangs hanging around her block, it’s the gunfire you hear every night a few blocks away--just crazy people firing in the air, mostly, she suspects.

You see it when Christopher Kimbrough, an RTD bus driver who remembers growing up in Los Angeles surrounded by gangs a generation ago, says he cannot fathom the arrogance of today’s gang members, who routinely use the back of his bus to initiate confrontations and fights. It infuriates him. He wants to do more than keep order. He wants to retaliate. He has to pray to hold himself in check. “There are lots of times I say, ‘Forget about this job, forget about their age.’ ”

You see it when Marvin Richmond, a gang member, is suddenly informed by security guards at Centennial High School in Compton that his life may be in jeopardy. A girl had been stabbed, and her friend had identified Marvin as a witness--even though Marvin had not gone to school that day. The trouble was, members of the gang that did the stabbing were not aware of the excuse.

Desperate Attempt

You see it when Edward Ramos, a Lynwood welder, drives his 16-year-old son Jesse up to Skid Row in a desperate attempt to frighten the boy so that he will stop carrying a shotgun and hanging around with a group of friends who declared themselves a gang last year. “I’m worried about these drive-bys, man,” he said. “These pay-backs are a mother. I want this phase of him to hurry up and just pass. I want him to go off on a different trip.”

You see it when Deborah Morrison, a high school student who says she has stopped associating with gang members in favor of singing with a gospel choir, is asked casually by a reporter, “Where do you live?” She doesn’t immediately say Normandie and 85th Street. Instead she says, “ETG,” shorthand for the local Crips gang, Eight-Tray Gangsters.

Not everyone cringes. Many, particularly younger people, are fatalistic. You can’t shut yourself away, they say. If gangs don’t get you, something else will. Most of the robberies and the beatings are not committed by gang members, anyway. You can’t act like you are in prison.

But in many ways, you are.

“The ghetto is now worse than when I grew up in Mississippi,” said John Dillard, a 53-year-old former county Probation Department gang worker who now teaches at Locke High School in Watts.

Segregation Was Easier

Growing up with segregation, “there were certain parks I couldn’t go to, things I couldn’t do. But it’s worse here. Kids can’t even go to their parks (because of fear of being attacked en route) to play basketball unless their mamas take them and pick them up,” he said.

“It puts a heck of a lot of pressure on them. If a kid gets in trouble at school and he has to be transferred to another school, whether he goes another day to school may depend on where he gets transferred to. If he’s coming from a Blood school and he gets transferred in here (a Crip neighborhood), and somebody puts a jacket (label) on him that he’s from a Blood neighborhood, he can’t hardly come to school.

“Nobody may be bothering the kid, but psychologically it’s like having snakes all around me. I may know only half those snakes are poisonous but it’ll be hard as hell for me to concentrate on my school work. He can’t even have any healthy arguments with anybody. It’s just an unnatural situation.”

The majority of black teen-agers are not gang members, and many more who are captivated by the thrill of shouting out the local gang’s name are nothing more than hangers-on. Yet even implied threats are taken seriously because virtually everybody knows someone who has been victimized by gangs. At Washington High School, for example, Principal George McKenna last year asked the student body to give him the name of any friend or family member who had died violently. The 2,800 children produced 600 names.

Reenact Violence

Psychologists now believe that children who witness violent acts, or are victims, can suffer from the same post-traumatic stress disorder as do men in combat. Some of these youngsters withdraw, some re-enact the violence as they play.

Charlene Tolliver, a single mother of two who lives near Athens Park, where the Harbor Freeway crosses El Segundo Boulevard, sees some of the turmoil reflected in her 16-year-old son, Charles, who is not a gang member but who has paid for his independence since he was 11. He has been beaten up by the local gang on one occasion and robbed three times by gangs from other neighborhoods.

“I see how he acts when he’s not with me,” she said. “He’s basically trying to act like he can handle himself. You see a rougher, tougher kind of person because he knows he’s got to be that way to make it out there.”

Charles often carries a hard-as-nails expression. His mother tries to empathize. “You just look like you’re mad at the world so someone don’t try you,” she said. “A lot of times that’s not really him, that’s his defense mechanism, his survival pack.”

Planning for Survival

Charlene Tolliver’s survival pack is planning. She is a self-employed, college-educated woman in her mid-30s who had lived for years in more peaceful quarters near Ladera Heights but was forced to move back to the Athens area with her mother four years ago when Tolliver became too ill to care for herself. Like everyone else, she has bars on her windows and metal screens on her doors. She has watched other neighbors buy burglar alarms and car alarms and watchdogs and guns.

“Then you say you’ve still done all of that and we still haven’t gotten any relief, so you set curfews,” she said, her words rushing out. “Then you say you don’t go in certain areas. You know if you’re going to do your grocery shopping, be in the store and out by a certain time. Try to park as close to the front door as you can. Try to have somebody go with you; maybe you can do your shopping together.

“You don’t do anything like you used to. Everything is preplanned. Where I used to just get in the car and say, “I think I’ll just go ride along the coast and when I get in I’ll get in. . . . ‘ No more. You are on a schedule.”

She paused, pondering the litany. “It’s too much. It’s pressure. There’s a street slogan that says pressure will burst pipes, so you know what pressure will do to a human being.

“Just in the last year I can see drastic changes. They have security guards in the churches. The church! Because people will come in and rob the church while Sunday services are going on. I didn’t think it would happen in mine, but it did. I guess next year they’ll have metal detectors in the churches. No place is sacred.”

Street Is a Battleground

To live on a street that becomes a battleground for warring camps of teen-agers, many carrying guns and devoted to a perverse notion that “defending the neighborhood” means riding into someone else’s neighborhood and shooting at anybody who happens to be standing on the street, is to live in perpetual chaos. Much of black street slang is rooted in poetic exaggeration, but the word commonly used to describe the daily insanity wrought by gangs is an exacting understatement: “confusion.”

Like this:

“You go to the gas station,” Tolliver said, “and most of them have a public phone, and you have a lot of people loitering, either people making drug contacts, carrying their beepers, then you got kids trying to rob the phones or rob the people using the phones, or people showing off when they leave burning rubber, and you just know the order: burning rubber first, shooting second. You never think that it’s just a fool trying to show off the power of his engine. You never think of those things any more. You just think: burning rubber, shooting, hit the deck. It’s like you’re in training for war. You have no pride about hitting the deck. You just know it’s survival.”

It is a confusion some cannot escape.

David Overstreet, 19, a bright, pudgy young man who lives near Compton, tried to escape by switching schools.

School Full of Gangs

Drew Junior High in South Los Angeles was full of gangs that feuded, and to get along you had to take sides, David said. If you were concerned for your safety, you picked up on the slang and the nickname of the gang in your neighborhood, you learned the hand sign, you were careful about your colors. If you were out for a good time, or wanted to be with the “top people,” you ignored your counselors’ warnings about hanging out with the wrong crowd because the wrong crowd was the fun crowd, and so what if some of those guys were reputed to have shot some people? So what if they dealt drugs?

What it came down to, Overstreet remembers thinking, was: “If I stop doing this, I won’t have any friends. I won’t have anywhere to go on Friday nights.”

After he graduated from Drew, however, he decided to clean up his life and go to a magnet school instead of the high school that he would normally have attended. He presumed that the magnet school, which emphasized business courses, would be free of gangs.

The first problem was that he had to take the bus there. He had to ride it through three Crips neighborhoods, where Crips sets were feuding among themselves. You could set your watch by the eruptions. Whoever gets on, somebody else is looking for trouble: “What set you from?” There was never a correct answer.

While there were no gang members at the business magnet, there were still people who called them friends. One of them, Overstreet said, was an attractive girl who asked some gang members to settle an argument with a boy. The gang members went overboard. Several carloads of them came to school and there was a stabbing.

No Way to Get Away

“There’s no way you can get away from it,” Overstreet said.” It’s like the air around you.”

Virginia McKee, a divorced mother with a 14-year-old son, tried to escape by moving. She had left an area at Avalon Boulevard and 40th Place that was riddled with drugs for a place at Western Avenue and 65th Street that was riddled with more drugs--and ruthless violence. One day two years ago, standing in her living room window, she saw a man get out of a car and empty a gun into another man.

“I thought: Does my baby have to come home from school to this ? I thought, my parents didn’t raise me in an environment like this. I realize we stayed in a two-bedroom house with seven kids (in South Los Angeles) but it wasn’t anything like this.”

She moved again, this time to a shabby but seemingly quiet, government-subsidized apartment on 77th Street just west of the Harbor Freeway, where her rent was only $86 a month. But now her son’s problems intensified. Ralph, a tall, quiet boy, was off the street as soon as the street lights came on, at his mother’s insistence, and he did not associate with gangs. But members of one gang at his junior high school wanted to fight him anyway.

Their logic was based on a mixture of guilt by kinship and guilt by association. The uncles of two of Ralph’s friends on the block had been in the neighborhood gang. To the rival gang, the nephews were fair game--and so was Ralph. There were frequent fights, and on several occasions his mother had to drive to school to pick him up. It worried her so that she quit her job for a while so she could be more active in school affairs.

‘I’m Worried’

Economic necessity forced her to go back to work as a medical bookkeeper, and she still frets. “I’m worried, because he’s at an age where he can be easily influenced,” she said.

The theme seems to echo down every block: young single mothers trying to raise “good” teen-age boys, pressured to make ends meet and yet keep a firm hand on their children, afraid that no matter how much they do, the gangs will undo it and somehow entice their sons to stray. Or kill them.

Charlene Tolliver, the Athens-area mother, feels the strain as soon as her son leaves for high school.

“It is so hard,” she said. “I’m under so much pressure because he’s on public transportation. Most of the time I join hands with him and pray with him before he leaves the house. That’s how tough it is. Even when he’s out of the house, a backfire means more. I know all the shooting you hear is not necessarily at anybody, sometimes in the air, but you know the bullets are going somewhere.

“Then once he’s on the bus, you say, ‘He’s on the bus, he’s off the street.’ But then you don’t know if somebody’s going to get on the bus with a gun or somebody’s gonna drop by the bus and shoot the bus, so you worry about that. So you’re watching the clock and you’re saying, ‘He left here at 7 o’clock, by 8:15 he should be where he’s got to be.’ Then the worry starts all over again because you know there are problems in school, too.

‘Rather Have Him Home’

“It becomes so blurred. Parents were once encouraging their kid to go to school; now I’d rather have him home.

“This is what happens every day. And when it gets overbearing, that’s when you shut down and finally say, ‘Look what’s gonna happen is going to happen. You can’t stay hyped no more.’ ”

Long before a young woman from Long Beach was shot to death in the middle of Westwood last January when she inadvertently stood between two feuding gang members, these kinds of fears were a way of life in poor minority communities. Now the entire metropolitan area is on guard against street gangs. Charlene Tolliver is glad to see this. Maybe it will do some good. But it carries with it a flip side that drives her up a wall.

It happened a few weeks ago. Her son and a pal wanted to go to a movie. She wanted to drive them somewhere safe--but not Westwood. It was clear to her that blacks were being hassled there by police in the wake of the gang shooting. She chose a six-theater complex in Marina del Rey. After dropping them off, she waited in the car, just to make sure that they were not refused entry. She saw them buy their tickets and begin to window shop. Then she pulled away . . . and in her rear-view mirror saw a patrol car drive up. The officers got out and approached the boys. She backed up her car and assured the officers that the boys were no threat. Later, she simmered about it.

‘You’re Under Stress’

“It makes you angry, but it also makes you very tired, because you’re always under some type of stress,” she said. “You’re under stress in your community and you come out of the community you’re under stress for different reasons, for the paint job you were born with.”

As if she needed another reason to resent the ways that gangs had indirectly but insidiously torn her life apart, here it was.

“There are already areas I’m not welcomed in, jobs I can’t get, places I can’t live peacefully in. The gangs have just made it harder,” she said.