A Year After Westwood Killing : L.A. Outrage Makes Little Impact on Gang Epidemic : Analysis

A year ago today, a 27-year-old woman was killed by a bullet fired during a confrontation between members of two rival street gangs, the Rolling 60s Crips and the Mansfield Hustler Crips.

Normally, Los Angeles nods at such events. It is inured to them. More than 2,700 people have been killed by gang members in the 1980s in Los Angeles County and 15,000 more have been seriously injured. As many as half the victims were innocent bystanders, standing or living in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But this time the innocent bystander’s name was Karen Toshima, a resident of Long Beach, a graphic artist for a Studio City advertising agency. She was killed in Westwood Village, an upscale Southern California entertainment and shopping area, home to UCLA, that acts as a magnet for crowds ranging in age from high school students to grandparents. The gang members spotted each other on Broxton Avenue and hurled insults before gunshots exploded.

The fact that two South Los Angeles gangs could bring their feud to Westwood and take the life of a young professional shocked Los Angeles, intensifying its awareness of the long-festering gang epidemic and bringing calls for someone to do something.

Many people answered the call. Thousands of police officers scoured the streets in anti-gang sweeps. City officials and prosecutors vowed to get tougher. Mothers stopped weeping and started organizing, trying to make the stopping of gang violence a cause with the stature of gun control, slowing the pace of development or saving Santa Monica Bay.

There have been improvements in communication among law enforcement, government agencies and community organizations that work with children in gang neighborhoods. The prospect that a network will be created among these traditionally fragmented forces has been improved. In addition, there has been a marked increase in government money allocated to police and sheriff’s anti-gang efforts.

Several new programs have been created: $2.1 million for a new Los Angeles city office to coordinate and create services for “at-risk” children; a $1.8-million city grant that will keep playgrounds open two hours later at most of the elementary and junior high schools in the Los Angeles district through June; a $329,000 federal grant to develop child-care centers at housing projects to aid welfare mothers who want to find jobs; a $1-million federal and state grant to strengthen gang-prevention programs in the Wilmington-Carson area, and state legislation to use $1 million seized in drug raids for local gang-prevention programs.

However, despite much public discussion about the relationship between gangs and crumbling social conditions in some neighborhoods, there has been no new systematic attack on those conditions.

Earlier this month, for example, a governor’s task force on gangs and drugs issued 100 recommendations, many of them involving preventive measures such as expanding after-school programs, better psychological testing of children and encouraging business to offer training and jobs.

When it came time in the report to estimate how much this would cost, or what level of government was responsible, or how the money could be raised, the head of the task force, former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian, demurred.

“We did not want to be hamstrung by worrying about the costs of these things,” he said.

As a result, a broader issue lingers. State Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) described it last week as the “steady deterioration in our society, from the lowest-income neighborhoods on up.” The inner-city “social fabric is being ripped apart,” Roberti said, by cuts in social programs forced over the past decade by California’s Proposition 13 tax limitation initiative and the Reagan Administration’s budget reductions.

That sentiment runs deep in poor minority communities--particularly in the black neighborhoods of South Los Angeles--where the relationship between gangs and the quality of life around them is far more apparent than it is on a police report, numerous residents said in interviews. To many of them, the rise in gang killings is, in the jargon of gang life, a pay-back for what life has become.

Crack cocaine--sold as often by non-gang members as by gang members--has ruined thousands of households with its addictive power. The black middle class has, for the most part, packed up and left, often with feelings of estrangement. There is precious little networking and virtually no power base to lead the protests against ills like inferior schools, domestic violence, too many liquor stores and too few supermarkets.

These kinds of problems spilled out, one after another, last June when Mayor Tom Bradley convened 200 educators, ministers, health administrators and police officials to offer suggestions on gang and drug-use prevention.

We need more counseling, the participants said, more adult literacy programs, more teen pregnancy programs, more drug-treatment programs, more penalties for parents who let their children sell drugs, more jobs, more police, more jails--and more dollars to pay for all of it.

Almost immediately after Karen Toshima’s death, Los Angeles city and county officials allocated nearly $6 million in emergency assistance for law enforcement gang patrols. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI assigned agents to a local gang task force. Legislators introduced numerous anti-gang and drug laws. New parent groups sprouted in South Los Angeles and began to explore more frankly the issue of parental responsibility. Ministers held truce talks between handfuls of rival gang members and tried to put a human face on the problem. The Rev. Jesse Jackson brought his presidential campaign to one of the city’s most dangerous housing projects, where he met gang members and told the nation about their plea for jobs when he addressed the Democratic National Convention weeks later.

Still, gang killings increased with no sign of abatement. There were 452 last year in Los Angeles County, a 67% increase in three years. The decade’s gang death toll in the county equals that of two decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

A month after the Westwood shooting, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates began a series of massive sweeps of officers through the city’s worst neighborhoods, interrogating or arresting young males who looked like gang members. Police arrested 24,000 people in the first nine months of the sweeps, but barely half were gang members. Hard-core gang members often got word of the sweeps on television, stayed indoors and laughed. Gang deaths fell in the neighborhoods where the sweeps were most prevalent but rose in others.

Cocaine Blamed

Some tried to blame the gang killings on Los Angeles’ cocaine epidemic, which began roughly in 1984. Gang members weren’t killing each other over petty, emotional rivalries the way they used to, these politicians said--they were killing each other over drug turf.

This explanation was generally accepted by many in the public and the news media. The explanation seemed logical and easy to grasp, because an increasing number of gang members were indeed selling cocaine and were indeed using drug profits to buy scores of fearsome weapons.

Unfortunately, the explanation was only part of the story.

Interviews with dozens of gang members during the last year underscored that the great majority of gang killings continue to occur the way they always have, from the rekindling of old arguments, or from instant flare-ups growing out of what gang members call “disrespect,” or from the commission of robberies, or from simple boredom.

As one gang member put it, describing his comrades’ motivation: “They get tired of sitting around drinking and smoking weed, so they just get up and say, ‘Let’s go roll on somebody. Let’s go jack (rob) him. Let’s go jack her.’ ”

Increasingly, as they were confronted with a mounting death toll that defied police efforts, government agencies last year began to pay more attention to the concept of prevention. Their leaders talked more about anti-gang programs in schools, and about the idea that a certain amount of social spending--particularly improved job training--might discourage some young men from joining gangs.

“Without strong prevention components, the future is going to be very bleak,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Genelin, head of the district attorney’s anti-gang unit and the county Interagency Gang Task Force, who predicts that gang killings in the county this year will rise to 515.

“The dearth of educational prevention and intervention programs is appalling, especially in developing curriculum and strategies . . . that will teach children not to become involved in the first place,” said George McKenna, superintendent of the Inglewood Unified School District. “We need programs that are ongoing, that are woven into the very fabric of our school or our community.”

Little Aid Forthcoming

However, in a political climate hostile to new spending, or the threat of increased taxes, prevention may mean merely knitting together existing social services, along with programs to make parents and teen-agers more aware of them.

“We keep waiting for the grass-roots people to save themselves,” a frustrated McKenna said. “The power structures are not as willing to offer assistance to the people to save themselves until there’s an uprising. I don’t know what we can do beyond dying at the level we are dying. Enforcement is generally a therapeutic response on the part of the community because it feels good to respond in a forceful way. But it doesn’t necessarily correct the problem. It is not a program. Political leaders need to be more visionary than reactionary to the cries of the public.”

But there is not always agreement on what approach prevention should take.

To some, prevention means a combination of more anti-gang counseling for elementary school-age children and diversion programs to encourage teen-age gang members to give up gangs.

Job Training

“You could pull 80% of gang members 17 or younger out of gangs if you had jobs, job training and social alternatives,” said Charles Norman, director of field operations for Community Youth Gang Services, the county’s largest gang-diversion organization.

To others, prevention means more narrowly focusing on children who have yet to join gangs, and literally giving up on anyone who has.

“Hopefully, we can help the kid in kindergarten right now,” said City Councilwoman Gloria Molina. “Maybe we’re going to save the 5-year-old. I doubt we will save that 13-year-old (gang member). The 17-year-old, unfortunately, you almost have to write off. You can’t roll time back. We’ve injured them so much.”