L.A.’s ‘Jeopardy Program’ : Police Seek to Reach Out to Young Before Gangs Do

Everything about him said it was no big deal: How he kicked back in his chair. How he tossed his blue gang-rag on the table in the interrogation room. Threatening to kill a woman--so what?

The woman was a sixth-grade teacher. The suspect, the case-hardened veteran sitting across from Detective Jeffrey Greer, was 11 years old.

“I thought that was, like, the worst,” Greer remembered thinking.

The worst came when officers brought in two kids, ages 3 and 6. Their year-old brother had been found toddling around on PCP. The kids didn’t know their names. They only knew their gang nicknames, something rhyming like Baby Boo and Baby Choo. They didn’t know their address, either. But they knew where their “set,” their territory, was.

And then they flashed the hand-signs.

“To see little 3- and 6-year-olds throw up gang signs,” Greer said, sighing, “it makes you wonder, what’s gonna happen to them?”

As far as police are concerned, there are three options: You quit the gang, you go to jail, or you die. The rootedness, the invasiveness of a gang presence that makes battle-scarred old hands of 11-year-olds has led Los Angeles police to try prying young “wanna-bes” away from gangs early.

In the last month, detectives and gang officers have been working on the “Jeopardy Program,” making phone calls or dinner-time visits to parents and sometimes kids to warn that they are flirting perilously with life--and of course death--in the “sets.”

Sometimes, the parents didn’t have a clue. Sometimes they already suspected. Once in a while, they didn’t care. A father in Northeast Division answered the door wearing his kid’s gang emblem on his hat.

Unhappily, such kids turn up everywhere: away from school when they should be in it, hanging around school when they shouldn’t be, on graffiti-bedizened street corners, any place “obvious gang members are present,” said Northeast Lt. David Doan--and there are as many as 70,000 of them to consort with.

‘Still Impressionable’

These kids have no “card” yet, no gang record. “We try to reach those kids who are not influenced so much by (gangs) yet, who are still impressionable enough for their parents to have an effect,” 77th Division Lt. Otis Dobine said.

In more than 250 contacts citywide, police say well above half the parents were glad to see them. Invariably they ask, “What can I do?” to frustrated officers who have little more to offer than pamphlets and advice. Unlike the other “Jeopardy” program, the TV quiz show, this one finds there are always more questions than answers.

To one kid, a budding Blood, Greer suggested that he try the programs at a Boys’ Club nearby. I can’t, he told Greer simply, with a logic as manifest to him as two-plus-two. I’d have to go through a Crip area to get there.

She was waiting on the porch in South Los Angeles, and she started talking before Greer and his 77th Division partner, Mike Avalos, even came up the walk, her words cascading out fast, as if they’d been pent up for a long time, like her worries.

Until two years ago, her 16-year-old son had been in junior ROTC, earning good grades. Now, he skipped more classes than he attended. And lately he’d taken to running around “like a red flag,” flaunting the color of the Bloods.

She led them into her sister’s house and perched on the arm of a pink love seat, snapping gum anxiously and hardly pausing for them to settle into the matching sofa.

Mother: “He’s really . . . I think he’s maybe more than gang-banging now. I have the suspicion that maybe he’s doing drugs now.”

Greer: “What makes you believe that?”

Mother: “Because he sneaks out of the house late at night when we go to sleep.”

Greer: “Does he have a bunch of money or anything like that?”

Mother: “Uh-huh. He bought some of those whatcha call them, those brown boots with the red strings in ‘em--he bought those.”

Greer: “Those hiking-type boots?”

Mother: “Yeah, he bought a pair of those. I burned the red strings up.”

She had moved down into the love seat, almost knee to knee with Greer. Her first boy had been in the life, too, till he got beat up for coming in short on a drug deal. He had taken himself off to Louisiana, and that had “made him.”

And now here it is, happening all over again.

Greer: “Does he carry a beeper by any chance?”

Mother: (snapping her fingers) “As a matter of fact I did see one.”

Greer: “How long has he been having a beeper?”

Mother: “About two weeks.”

Greer: “Two weeks?”

Mother: “Mm hmm. He claims it belongs to one of his friends.”

Avalos: “I hear many excuses for carrying a beeper. No one out there yet that’s a doctor.”

Mother: “I know. Or a lawyer. (Nodding slowly). He does have one.”

Moments later:

Greer: “Does he ever appear like he’s under the influence of anything?”

Mother: “Drunk. He loves to get drunk.”

Greer: “So he drinks.”

Mother: “Mm hmm. Matter of fact . . . the sheriff brought him home, he was intoxicated, so I thought it’d be a good idea, I told them take him, book him, you know. Take him on to jail. Let him experience it . . . they said he was with this other boy and they knew that this other guy was a gangbanger, so they brought him home. So I told them, matter of fact, I told them to take him ‘round the corner and beat the hell out of him, maybe it do him some good.”

Avalos: “So he gives you the impression that he glorifies gangs, he looks up to ‘em, it’s an excitement and a thrill?”

Mother: “Mm hmm.”

Avalos: “Has he ever told you, God, I wanna go down being shot in the streets or anything like that?”

Mother: “Not yet, but . . . you wanna know something? I have seen him dead. I have foreseen him dying. I have already prepared myself with God if something happens to him.”

“Different neighborhoods call for different solutions,” was Assistant Chief Bob Vernon’s judgment, so each division styles the program to what it knows of the people who live there.

Harbor-area parents got letters inviting them in for a chat, assuming “people interested enough to come to the station are the people we’ll have the most success with,” Sgt. Pete Durham said.

Northeast officers simply knocked on doors at dinner time; 10 of the 14 parents didn’t know their kids had problems. In Southeast, officers who picked up “wanna-bes” phoned parents to collect their kids, and talked to them all when they came in.

‘The Lights Go On’

“He can’t flimflam us like he has his parents,” Greer said. “They see the little indicators and they’re kind of naive, they let it go by.” But when the cops connect the dots for them, “the lights go on.”

When they started this, Avalos figured each visit would take a few minutes. They rarely finish in under half an hour. Tell me what to do, the parents plead. Listen to my problem.

Like the mother they are seeing this Wednesday night--she talks about her youngest son, who has told her, Mama, you don’t have to worry, I’m not gonna drop out of school.

She takes a snapshot off the shelves, where her sister’s family trophies for sports and perfect school attendance sit reproachfully. The picture is of a baby. Her 16-year-old son, the maybe-gangbanger, has a year-old daughter. “Isn’t it sad?” she says, chuckling, her laugh warm and full of rue as she hands the picture around. “Poor little thing.”

Mother: “This is his fantasy. Even with the kids that he sees getting killed every day, with the gangs, it really hasn’t dawned on him. As a matter of fact, there was a boy 17, 18, named Gerald that just got killed in Compton Friday night. Now he was trying to get in a clique with him. And Gerald’s a big-time dope-pusher at 17 but he’s dead now. Seems like that would soak in but it doesn’t. (Pauses). We go to church every Sunday, I have to fight with him every Sunday.”

Greer: “Still goes?”

Mother: “Yeah, he has to go. He has to go. (Sighs). I don’t know. I know he needs help. I needs help, you know, because I’m a single parent. His father calls, I tell him he should talk to him, but his feeling is how if he pays me a certain amount of money, that’s his obligation.”

Avalos: “How does his father feel about him, what he’s being involved in?”

Mother: “I’ve told him. He don’t really care--I’m not saying he don’t care but he don’t have to deal with it.”

When it comes down to it, there is little more they can do than bring the bad news. “That was a big complaint,” Durham said. “The officers said the parents want more from us than notification--they want some help.”

They can suggest a clergyman, a school counselor, the local youth clubs. And that pretty much runs the string.

Soon, Vernon plans to put Drug Abuse Resistance Education officers in station houses a couple of nights a week for families to talk to, because social service agencies “are geared at a problem already there,” he noted. “We’re looking at a problem that hasn’t emerged yet and we’re trying to prevent from coming out.”

Mother: “Do they have any kind of, uh, program where they can keep regular tabs on him or do they have to wait until he kinda commit a crime?”

Avalos: “Monitor? No, there’s a lot of programs offered but the thing about it is he has to make a commitment, he has to want to go. . . . It’s a matter of him committing himself, of someone pushing him like yourself, obviously you’re very concerned about him.”

Greer: “I really wish he was here, I’d sit down, talk to him, put him on front street, because see a lot of kids will pull the wool over your eyes but we deal with it on a daily basis, we know what’s going on . . . that’s what we’re trying to do, just get him to open his eyes a little bit and realize that’s not the proper road to take. Because he’s choppin’ some years off his life.”

Mother: “He is.”

The next morning, the boy’s mom dropped him off at the station, where Greer was waiting.

In 45 minutes, his chips dropped off; he went from sullen to defensive to remorseful--even if the remorse only lasted until he got outside.

“He got upset with me, saying he wasn’t hard core, why was I coming down on him and not these other guys? I explained that was the whole purpose of it--so he wouldn’t end up like those other guys.

“I pointed out he has a young daughter, what gangbangers do to girls. I said think about that being done to your daughter.”