DEA Will Boost L.A. Staff to Fight Gang Drug Sales

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration will beef up its Los Angeles staff and develop a task force with local and federal law enforcement agencies to combat drug trafficking by street gangs, according to two local congressmen.

Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) and Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) said they were informed Tuesday by top DEA officials that the agency will assign 30 more agents to its Los Angeles office, eight of them within a few weeks.

The agents will work in conjunction with more than 20 police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state narcotics officers and have direct access to a federal law enforcement intelligence center in Texas. That would enable the task force to help track the comings and goings of Los Angeles street gang members, who are increasingly peddling cocaine in cities across the nation.

The announcement by the congressmen, who had previously sponsored unsuccessful legislation to create a Los Angeles drug-gang task force, appeared to catch the DEA by surprise. DEA spokesmen in Los Angeles and Washington said Tuesday that they had no information about any new efforts in Los Angeles.

But spokesmen for the Los Angeles Police Department and county Sheriff’s Department said DEA Administrator John C. Lawn met with local police officials in Los Angeles last week about a stepped-up federal effort to combat gang drug trafficking.

Assistant Sheriff Jerry Harper, who attended the session with the DEA chief, said that a local-federal program should be “crystallized in the next month” and that “significantly more than 20 officers” from local law enforcement departments will be involved.

While the numbers do not approach those in southern Florida, where more than 300 federal agents were dispatched in 1982 to combat cocaine trafficking, Harper said a task force could initially focus “very strongly on the gang narcotics distributing in Southern California.”