Buena Park, Its Eye on the Tourist, Seeks to Curb Gangs

The sidewalks of Berry and Thelma avenues in Buena Park are mostly deserted during the day. The only sounds come from children at play in the well-kept yards of the modest homes and from the faint buzz of afternoon TV filtering through screen doors.

By day there is little evidence of gang activity. Graffiti are relegated to some street signs, dumpsters and hidden alleys.

But at night, the gangs appear.

In this and nearby neighborhoods, Latino youth gangs have carved out territories and established their own rule by fear.

“If you look wrong at one of them, they’ll get you,” said Humberto Garcia, 16, on a recent Friday night in front of an apartment complex on Franklin Street.

“There’s a lot of fistfights,” Garcia said of his neighborhood at night. “But you can’t really call them fights because it’s not just one guy against one guy. It’s a whole bunch of them.”

‘Part of Neighborhood Life’

Gang violence has increasingly become part of life in some neighborhoods of this small northern Orange County town that was once just a roadside berry stand on old California 39.

“I don’t know how anyone is going to stop it,” said Buena Park Mayor Rhonda J. McCune. “They’ve been trying since the ‘50s. (Gangs) are still writing on the walls, and I just don’t know (how to stop it). And the experts don’t either.”

In the spring, three people were shot in gang-related incidents, two of them fatally. Longtime resident Cornelia Mitchell, 82, was killed May 28 by a bullet as she stood inside the door of her locked house.

The month before, 17-year-old Rick Magallanes was killed in a shooting that police said was gang-related. And a week after the Mitchell killing, Buena Park resident Javier Tinajero, 20, was shot three times on Beach Boulevard.

“We thought it was terrible when there was one shooting,” said Councilman Don R. Griffin. “When there were two, it was like, ‘Good God almighty, now there are two.’ ”

In fact, two of the four gang-related homicides in Buena Park in the last 10 years occurred in the spring, said Ken Coovert, gang specialist with the Special Problems Unit of the Buena Park Police Department.

On July 15, a 17-year-old boy was stabbed in front of Cypress High School. Police identified the victim as a gang member from Buena Park, and three youths arrested in the attack were identified as members of a Compton gang.

“We have seen more violence in Buena Park in the last six months than probably the last 100 years,” Councilman Donald L. Bone said.

In a city that relies heavily on a wholesome family image to boost its tourism, officials are actively trying to contain the problem with stepped-up police patrols, constant discussions with gang members on the street and an anti-gang program in elementary schools.

“We are trying very hard to get a handle on this gang activity . . . to prevent us from having the problems that Los Angeles and other cities have,” Bone said. “It’s a problem society-wide, not just one city or one police department.”

But solving a problem that brings officials of larger cities to their knees is not easy, Bone said.

“It’s frustrating in that it makes no sense,” he said. “It’s not a simple problem with one simple answer. It’s not like having a street that’s broken and you can send someone out to patch the street.”

The problem in Buena Park, which is about 18% Latino, can be defined most simply as a decade-long feud between two Latino gangs.

They are Los Coyotes, which police said has from 60 to 80 members, and the East Side group, which has about 100 members. There is also a 9th Street gang, aligned with Los Coyotes, police said, but some gang members say the group doesn’t exist.

Los Coyotes has been active for more than 20 years, Coovert said, and the East Side group was started about nine years ago. The conflict began shortly after the East Side gang formed.

Gang Origins in Dispute

Gang members have told police that the problems arose when members of Los Coyotes called the East Sides illegal aliens.

Some East Side gang members said the dispute started after a football game in 1975 when the rival group crossed out spray-painted names on a wall.

The gangs fight for traditional reasons, such as disputes over territory or girlfriends. Probation and police officials said the gangs don’t appear to be involved in gun running or drug dealing.

“For most Hispanic gangs, power lies in territory, and the more violent you are and the greater your reputation, the more power you have,” said Tom Wright of the County Probation Department’s Gang Violence Suppression Unit. “The whole dynamics center around power.”

The groups usually get in trouble with police for graffiti, malicious mischief and disturbing the peace, said. Ken Coovert, a gang specialist with the Special Problems Unit of the Buena Park Police Department. Since July 1, 1987, police have responded to 102 calls about gang activity and made 108 arrests of gang members and associates, he said. No gang figures were kept in previous years.

Theories vary on the reasons the violence has erupted now.

“At times in the past, we have had gang shootings,” said Rich McMillen, Buena Park police spokesman. “Somebody would get shot in the leg or (there would be) a minor shooting. You can only have so many of those before somebody dies.”

Boredom a Factor

Many of the violent incidents occur on the spur of the moment, partly out of boredom, Coovert said.

“A group (of gang members) will get together, (and) whoever happens to be the strongest willed, has the gun or for whatever reason takes charge, becomes the leader for that time,” he said.

One community worker said the problems start when the groups leave their neighborhoods.

“It becomes a bad thing when they go out looking for trouble,” said Jeff Woods, a program director at the Boys Club of Buena Park. “Then trouble is going to happen.”

The violence leaves city officials perplexed. With millions of dollars of tourist money at stake, they are concerned about the publicity.

“There’s no doubt that if this sort of thing continues, it would have to have a negative impact upon our city,” Bone said.

The three major tourist attractions--Knott’s Berry Farm, Movieland Wax Museum and Medieval Times--draw about 5.5 million visitors annually, said Jerry La Pointe of the Buena Park tourist office.

Influx of Tourists

The city of 65,000 residents has more than 2,000 hotel rooms, he said. Buena Park makes money from a sales tax on the attractions and a hotel room tax. For the fiscal year ending June 30, the city reaped more than $2 million in hotel taxes alone.

Many Buena Park officials say gang violence in their city will not affect the attitudes of potential visitors.

“One may identify Knott’s Berry Farm with Buena Park and read some issue that’s a negative issue and relate that, but if you take it overall, Buena Park has had a good reputation,” Griffin said. “I, for example, read of other communities and things that happen there, and I still do business in those communities.”

Far worse gang problems in other cities have not been detrimental to tourism, Bone said.

“To me, it’s a societal problem,” Bone said. “In comparison to some of the horror stories we hear out of Los Angeles, it’s clear that we are not in that classification.”

But, Bone said, it is vital that the city conquer the problem quickly, to protect not only tourism but residents.

Police officials say gang members justify their existence and behavior by pledging to protect the neighborhoods, but actually they endanger them.

“They say they are there to protect, but they commit crimes against their neighbors,” said Wright of the Probation Department. “Because they have more enemies than friends, a lot of innocent people will be hurt because they live in the neighborhood.”

Gang members blame all of the problems on rivals.

“I don’t look for trouble,” said East Side member Richard Lomelia, 22. “But if it comes around, then we have to take care of it.”

Youths Targeted

But some gang members do look for trouble, and any young Latino going into the neighborhood can become a target.

“If we see someone at the liquor store, we ask them: “Where are you from?” 22-year-old gang member Ken Bennett said. “If they say something wrong, we sock ‘em up.”

They pledge total devotion to their barrio and, in the same breath, joke about terrorizing those who live there.

“I would die for my neighborhood,” boasts Bennett before singing his gang’s chant: “Click, click, bang, bang. It’s all about the East Side Buena Park gang.”

Buena Park’s most ambitious effort to prevent gang activity has been the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, which sends officers into elementary schools to speak against gangs.

But it is the programs that are designed to combat, rather than prevent, gangs that generally receive more political support because residents would rather see their money used for action on the street, McCune said.

That action includes having two officers patrol gang areas every night during the summer rather than stand by at the police station, as they did before May 28, when Mitchell was killed. The officers are trained to look for gang members and outsiders coming into the neighborhood to start trouble, Coovert said.

Gang Surveillance

“If you notice a carload of individuals and you don’t recognize them, the car is going to get stopped and they are going to get talked to,” Coovert said. “If they are lost or need help, the officer can help them. If they’re (starting trouble), then the officer will handle that too.”

Police have conducted 268 field interviews with gang members since July, 1987, some of them repeats. “It just lets you know that our patrol is doing something,” Coovert said. “We’re talking to them, getting involved.”

Buena Park also benefits from countywide anti-gang programs.

The county’s Department of Education has been given a $300,000 grant to run Operation Safe Schools, which provides anti-gang educational programs in schools, spokesman Gil Martinez said.

And the district attorney’s office has a special gang unit that includes five prosecutors and five investigators, who are handling about 60 gang-related cases in the court system, said John Conley, a gang specialist with the district attorney’s office.

10% of Caseload

The Probation Department has an office in Anaheim that handles Buena Park gang members on probation. Two juvenile probation officers oversee more than 100 youths on probation for gang-related incidents and petty crimes, as well as emotionally disturbed juveniles, director Kittie Luedke said.

Fourteen hard-core Buena Park gang members are on probation, making up about 10% of the juvenile probationer caseload, she said.

“As a manager, I don’t think we are going to get a handle on gangs in Orange County in general or Buena Park specifically unless we can put the specialists in there,” she said. “For petty theft and burglaries, I don’t think you need a specialist. For gangs, you do need a specialist.”

Residents, like the experts, are hard-pressed to explain why one youth will join a gang and another will not.

Jane Valdivia, who works with the Latino community at St. Pius V Roman Catholic Church in Buena Park, said she sees gang members attend church on Sunday and then hears of them committing crimes later.

“A lot of people say they belong to the gang because they are neglected,” she said. “These kids are not neglected. They have very close ties with their family. They need jobs. They need someplace to go.”

Need for Jobs

McCune agreed that the problem is rooted in giving youths jobs or something productive to do with their time.

“It’s indicative of a problem of teen-agers with nothing to do,” she said. “They will find something to do, and it is not always positive and it is not always legal.”

Woods, of the Boys Club, said joining a gang is often not a conscious decision by youths but a situation that is forced upon them.

“For a Hispanic kid to live on Naomi or Thelma (avenues, in Los Coyotes territory), it would be odd” for him not to associate with the gangs, he said. “They probably would be picked on.”

With some of the gangs long-established, members may be from families with gang ties stretching back more than a generation, Woods said.

“All my older brothers have been through it,” said David Rodarte, 18, a member of the East Side gang.

As gang members gathered recently on Franklin Street to “kick back” and drink beer, a 13-year-old boy rode his bike up to the group and bragged about the gang vest his father once wore.

“Take a picture of him,” said an East Side member, pointing at the boy. “That’s our future.”