2 Women Face Gang Problem Head-On

At 2 in the morning one day three years ago, Barbara McFalls marched up to the door of a crack house and demanded her daughter.

If McFalls thought she’d left gangs and drugs behind when she moved from East Los Angeles 14 years before, the horrible truth came home that night. The daughter, now a successful career woman, never returned to that scene, but the mother did--picketing crack houses, lecturing gang members and trying to save the children of people who didn’t care enough to do it themselves.

“We’ve got the L.A. connection, and it’s bad,” said McFalls, who lives in the Meadowview neighborhood on Sacramento’s south side.

No Intention of Running

“For Sale” signs line her street, but McFalls has no intention of running. Instead, she breaks up fights, corrals gang members to help register voters and urges witnesses to gang violence to testify. She persuaded two gang members wanted for crimes to surrender, driving one to juvenile hall herself, and baked sweet potato pies at the request of another who was being shipped to the California Youth Authority.

“I get out there face to face with them. That’s the only way you can deal with them. And they respect you for it too,” said McFalls, who walks amid the Bloods’ red and the Crips’ blue with her own colors, the black and yellow of the Meadowview Improvement Committee.

“You just can’t be scared. You have to leave your fear tucked away somewhere. If you let them know you don’t like what’s going on in your neighborhood, they’ll move.”

About 550 miles north on Interstate 5, Irine Tate never stops letting them know how she feels. One day last winter, she painted “NO DRUG PARKING” in white block letters down the middle of her Portland, Ore., street, on all four corners, along her retaining wall and on her neighbor’s garage door.

“They said: ‘We live around here. We pay rent.’ I said: ‘You don’t pay no damn rent around here! So get the hell off my block!’ ”

The gang members didn’t like the dead-honest, drug-hating Tate, but they had to respect her. She’d sit on her porch and watch their comings and goings, listen to their deals and learn all she could. Then she’d call the police, something her neighbors were afraid to do.

Tate and McFalls realize the risks they take in opposing the lucrative drug trade. McFalls has a “panic box” in her home: push the button and police surround her block within two minutes.

Tate owns a bullet-proof vest. One day a gang member told her it wouldn’t do any good. “We’ve got armor-piercing bullets,” he said. “If we want you bad enough, we’ll get you.”

So far, the gangs haven’t wanted to hurt either woman, both of whom temper fear with faith. “If God wants you to die, then you die,” Tate said. “If God wants me to die with them shooting me, then I’m going to die with them shooting me.”

Offered $10,000 for Silence

One Crip tried to buy her silence for $10,000, but she wasn’t selling.

“I could have paid my bills off and been sitting pretty if I’d taken that money,” she said over the drone of a TV soap opera. “And whose life would I have ruined?

“I’d lose my own self-respect. I’d lose my dignity, my pride in myself. And what would the kids think of me?”

The kids see all, hear all. They know who’s cooking, who’s selling and how much they’re asking. Kids as young as 6 have become lookouts and shills who steer crack customers to one gang’s house and away from a rival’s.

The answer, say McFalls and Ed Elmore, another member of the Meadowview Improvement Committee, is to give kids guidance and alternatives. Give them jobs in the summer and places to go besides the streets. Put back into the community the money and hope that crack dealers take out.

A year ago, McFalls’ street was crowded with gang members dealing crack as openly as if they were selling T-shirts or hamburgers. Now they’ve retreated indoors, paying rent to single mothers and old people willing to turn their homes into crack houses.

Four California gang members moved in with one of Tate’s neighbors, and the young mother now smokes crack and wonders how to get rid of her roommates. McFalls gets phone calls in the wee hours from a woman who became an addict, gave birth to a 1-pound baby and now hears disembodied voices as she aimlessly rides buses around the West.

“Don’t you realize what you’re doing to your own people?” an infuriated Tate once asked a gang member. “You’re ruining their minds so they don’t know how to think. You’re killing them.”

The Crip sat thinking for a long time. “I guess you’re right,” he told her later. “But I may as well be making the money as somebody else.”