Dinner Visits to Warn Recruits’ Members’ Parents : Police Plan New Tactic to Curb Gangs

The Los Angeles Police Department is planning to discourage gang membership by “dropping around at the dinner hour” to warn parents that their children have been identified as new gang members or prospective recruits, Assistant Police Chief Robert Vernon said Friday.

The program will use information that in the past was kept within the department as gang intelligence, Vernon said.

“We’re going to kick off a program of notifying parents of at-risk young people in a very supportive way, not going to their houses to threaten them,” Vernon said in an interview.

“We’ll be dropping around at the dinner hour to say, ‘Hey, a week ago Tuesday, your son was seen with these gangbangers.’ ”

Vernon said the plan began when he was involved in the stopping of a truck near Griffith Park several months ago.

“There were six kids in the truck, including two hard-core gang members. One was wanted on a warrant for armed robbery and the other was in possession of drugs.”

The other four had no criminal records and were not wanted for anything, Vernon said, “but they all had the (gang identification) bandannas on and were clearly ‘wannabees,’ ” slang for prospects who “want to be” members.

The four were turned loose, he said, but information on the identities of associates of known gang members is commonly kept within the department as part of the intelligence effort to identify and track gang members.

“I asked myself, ‘Do their parents know where they are and who they’re with?’ In the past, the information just stayed within the department, but we think the parents need to know these things.”

“If it was my son, I would want that,” Vernon said.

Vernon said the department was trying to set up a system so the job would not add greatly to officers’ workloads. The department is also looking into the possibility of having clerks send out information to parents by mail if officers are unavailable to go in person, he said.