Gangbusters : An Award-Winning Team Makes Life Tough for Young Probationers Who Try to Slip Back Into the Old Ways

Dressed in jeans, jackets and sneakers, the three men roam the parks and alleys of central Orange County looking for gang kids who are supposed to be home.

The three are not police officers, but for some young people in the county, running into one of these fellows could be even worse. They are county probation officers, assigned solely to supervise gang members placed on probation by Juvenile Court.

The three--Michael S. Fleager, Robert C. Gates and James R. Riley--are all white and in their 30s, while their cases are mostly Latinos, Asians and blacks, none of them older than 19.

“When a kid calls you an (expletive), it carries no racial overtones,” said Riley, the oldest of the three at 39. “The kid only sees us as the power structure, so it really doesn’t matter that we’re all white.”

The work is intense--they tell stories of searching for one gang member at home and finding instead an array of shotguns, rifles and knives.

“You ask them, what do you do with all these guns?” said Fleager, who is 32. “They tell you, ‘For hunting.’ And they’re being truthful. The guns are for hunting (rival gangs)who come into their territory.”

The men work under a $198,000 state grant provided for intensive gang supervision. The grant is large enough to cover only three cities: Santa Ana, Westminster and Garden Grove.

The program’s first year of operation ends this month on a good note. The California Probation, Parole and Correction Assn. last week announced that the group will receive its annual award for team achievement.

One top official who is impressed with Orange County’s gang efforts is Gilbert S. Garcia, director of the California Youth Authority’s Gang Violence Reduction Project.

“A lot of times a kid hangs out with a gang because he doesn’t have an excuse not to,” Garcia said. “The probation officer can be the kid’s subconscious loophole for staying away from gang life. But if that supervision isn’t intense, you don’t have much of a chance.”

The county’s chief probation officer, Michael A. Schumacher, will ask the Board of Supervisors to add six more gang probation officers in fiscal 1988-89, to help his office blanket the whole county.

“We’ve hit these three cities first, because that’s where more than half the gangs are located,” explained Thomas G. Wright, supervisor for the three-man gang team. “But there isn’t a city in Orange County that hasn’t suffered from gang activity.

On a wall above Wright’s desk is a map of Orange County, with thick black lines depicting geographic sections known to have gang activity. So far, 83 gangs have been identified in Orange County, Wright said. The average age is 16.

“When we say gang member, we mean kids who are out in the community engaged in crime--narcotics, burglaries, auto thefts, even rape and assaults,” Wright said. “You have to take a different approach to have any effect on kids like that.”

Nobody goes on the caseload of the gang unit unless he is identified as a gang member, and known to pose a violent threat. A few have been girls, but the vast majority are boys.

Gang members may breathe a sigh of relief when a judge grants them probation instead of sending them to Juvenile Hall, or the California Youth Authority, for their crimes.

But the rules are strict for gang probationers:an 8 p.m. curfew, no association with other members of the gang, and staying away from known hangouts for the gang. School attendance is mandatory in most cases, and the gang members must report to the probation office every week, rather than one a month as is usual.

And the youngsters are told that the officers are going to be watching them--visits to their home without warning, surprise visits to the gang’s known hangouts.

“When we catch them in an off-limits park, they always have a good excuse,” said Gates, who is 35. “ ‘My mom sent me to the store, and I was just cutting through the park,’ that’s one they like to use.”

In some cases, the probationer receives a warning. But many times, it’s off to jail. The three men on the gang detail carry handcuffs and have arrest powers. Also, they are often accompanied by a police officer.

“We never go into these parks at night alone,” Fleager said. “We’re not that brave.”

It’s some of those police officers who are their biggest fans.

“There’s an area of southwest Santa Ana where the probation team helped us take out eight hard-core members of a gang;it really broke that gang up for awhile and made the neighborhood a lot safer,” said Santa Ana Police Cpl. Rick Reese, a supervisor in that department’s gang unit.

Sometimes the cooperation is in reverse. Reese recalls that Fleager told him about a gang member on his caseload who wasn’t home when he made an unannounced visit.

“Mike was convinced the guy was (hanging out with gangs)again, and when we found him, that’s what had happened,” Reese said.

Reese also related an incident that occurred last week in which Fleager and Riley helped his office catch a gang member wanted for attempted murder.

“We’d been searching for this guy and couldn’t find him. Fleager and Riley spotted him in a parking lot. He’d been on their caseload, and they remembered we were looking for him,” Reese said.

All three probation officers cover an array of ethnic groups. But Fleager specializes in skinheads, who are white. Gates is the Asian specialist. Riley is the expert on blacks. They refer to Wright, their supervisor, for expertise on Latino gangs.

The three say the effect of their work on their family lives has been dramatic.

“You never really put the job behind you,” Fleager said. “I used to drive to work in the morning listening to an oldies rock station. Now I’m constantly turning over my caseload in my head, trying to stay a jump ahead of some of these kids.”

How well do their statistics hold up?

It all depends on whose yardstick you use.

Only 20 youngsters out of 212 probationers assigned to this unit have successfully completed probation.

In another 221 incidents, the gang members were returned to Juvenile Hall, or sent to CYA, for probation violations. That number is higher than the original 212, Wright explains, because some of the probationers are repeat offenders, arrested for probation violations more than once.

But Wright and his three-man crew do not see these 221 cases as their failures.

“That’s 221 kids who are off the street and not out there breaking into your house,” Fleager said.

The three men call their job “gang suppression.”

“We are realistic enough to know that we aren’t going to eliminate a gang by what we do,” Riley explained. “But we can hurt a gang, and we can cut back its effectiveness by throwing some its leaders in jail.”

Some of the juveniles, the three say, need a Big Brother approach, someone to help influence them away from gang life. But they add that approach doesn’t work with many of the hard-core gang members.

“We’re half cop, half social worker,” Fleager said. “But we’ve got the deck stacked in our favor. We make the rules. They break ‘em, they go to jail.”