Call of the Wild : In the Upscale Suburbs, a Teen Fascination With Gang Life Creates Fears, Challenges for Adults

Gangsta! Gangsta! That’s what they’re yelling It ain’t about a salary It’s all about reality. --Lyrics by the rap group, N.W.A

They were bombing the back wall of an apartment house, out by the train tracks in Van Nuys. One youth, Skill, thought Krush had just “dis-ed” one of his characters.

“We battle right now,” he said. The two young men chose their weapons and went at it. Their crews gathered around.

John Ky (not his real name) recalled the scene with relish.

Cans of Spray Paint

Krush “had more wild style.” He painted a “fresher” graffiti piece on the wall with the cans of blue and baby blue spray paint he wielded.

So Krush won the battle, Ky said, holding up a snapshot of the four-color “piece” added to a wall already decorated in a wild tangle of strange caricatures and “tags”--the jagged, stylized pseudonyms that identify graffiti writers.

A 17-year-old Agoura High senior and first-generation Vietnamese immigrant, Ky first saw “graffiti art” along the Hollywood Freeway. Krush, a member of the KSN (Keeping Suckers Nervous) crew encouraged him and taught him some of the etiquette--you don’t “dis” (paint over) a well-done tag or piece, for instance.

Together they went “bombing” in Los Angeles and Van Nuys.

But Ky lives with his parents, both well-paid professionals, in Westlake Village north of Los Angeles. Before long, he was looking for walls closer to home.

About the same time, other suburban kids had the same idea, accompanying their new-found enthusiasm for spray paint with the patois and attire of inner-city gangs.

But the distinctions they claim exist between themselves and the hard-core gangsters they seem to emulate were lost on most adults. Almost before the adolescents got started, they found out that there are reasons why the walls in affluent bedroom communities tend to be cleaner than those in impoverished ghettos.

In Los Angeles, where so many of the folks in the northern county work, graffiti screams a jarring greeting and farewell each weekday, reminding commuters why they spend two hours or more a day on the 101 Freeway.

To many of these people, a hastily scrawled acronym along the Harbor Freeway says “2,700 gang-related homicides in the past 10 years!” A blue X through a name on a Wilshire doughnut shop speaks of 3-year-old girls torn apart in automatic rifle cross fire.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies John Cater and Gary Spencer noticed the tagging almost immediately after it hit the walls in Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, two upper-middle-class suburbs of cookie-cutter landscaping and uniformly beige, two-story tiled-roof homes.

The community noticed, too, and responded with a collective shudder.

Two Young Deputies

The Sheriff’s Department had assigned the two young deputies to a “problem-oriented” patrol, working with juveniles in the bedroom communities spreading across the rolling hills from Malibu up to the Ventura County border. So when local residents called to complain that the Bloods or Crips had moved in to take over their pristine parks, Spencer and Cater were responsible for investigating.

Spencer, 35, had spent his early career as a campus policeman and investigator with Los Angeles Unified School District. He once took a dying declaration from a 15-year-old whose face had been the target of a young gangster’s point-blank shotgun blast.

Cater, 27, worked with the Sheriff’s Department in Carson, patrolling areas terrorized by gangs.

Both know the signs of hard-core gang activity when they see it. Clearly, the tagging on these suburban walls wasn’t it.

Still, it made the deputies uneasy.

In the past year or so, young people who would seem to be at no risk of becoming gang members have begun to imitate gang behavior. Their inspiration comes in part, youth workers say, from the movie “Colors,” with its graphic depiction of inner-city gang life. Another factor, they say, is the growing popularity of rap music.

Suddenly, suburban kids who wouldn’t know crack from Camembert are slamming Run DMC and Public Enemy tapes into boom-boxes and letting the audio ambiance of the inner city wash over their middle-class souls.

One of the hottest current rap groups in the ‘burbs as well as Watts is N.W.A, whose “Straight Outta Compton” album is an unflinchingly violent and obscene reflection of gangsterism and ghetto life.

Generations that grew up on Sinatra or Simon and Garfunkel may have a hard time relating to the lyrics that accompany the group ‘ s well-produced mix of bone-thumping bass and percussive automatic weapons fire. In one song, for instance, a young black rapper boasts that he is:

on the warpath,

and when I finish

it’s gonna be a blood bath

of cops,

dying in L.A.

But the album has sold almost 1 million copies and is on record stores’ Top 40 shelves in the still-safe suburbs, where the relative anarchy of the ghetto apparently has growing appeal.

For instance, in a brief flurry of spray paint earlier this year, copy-cat gangsters went on a binge through the southern Orange County bourgeois belt, tagging the sparkling clean parks of Mission Viejo with the raggedy scrawl of pseudo - gangs such as “Aspan Street Posse.”

On the northern frontier of urban sprawl, the office of the country clublike Lindero Canyon Middle School in Agoura Hills is decorated with a 1988-’89 class photograph in which several of the well-scrubbed, white students flash pseudo-gang signs and strike gang poses, with their baseball caps on backwards in supposed gang style. That, in a city where the average household income is almost $64,000 and well over half the adult population is college-educated.

Sitting in a Parking Lot

Still, Cater and Spencer recall sitting in the parking lot of an Agoura Hills convenience store, dressed in civilian clothes and listening to the conversation. “If I closed my eyes, I’d have sworn I was back in Carson District,” Cater said. “It was ‘Holmes, this’ and ‘Homeboy, that.’ ”

Cater said he has heard of suburban kids wearing beepers, in imitation of young inner-city crack runners. “The only time they’d get beeped is when their mothers wanted them home for dinner,” he said.

In March, the officers even took a report about some kids who had committed a drive-by shooting with BB guns.

Jack Katz, a UCLA sociologist and the author of the 1988 book “Seductions of Crime--Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil,” thinks it’s extremely unlikely that suburban copycat behavior will escalate into real violence.

Inner-city gang behavior is the way one group dominates and humiliates others, he said.

He links the copycat gang-bangers to the “forms that deviance has taken in the middle class since the Second World War--the beats, hippies, punk. . . . Now rap music and ghettoized violence.”

Suburban kids, he said, see their dress styles and graffiti as “a root to power. . . . But this is a more indirect, symbolic conflict,” he said. “They don’t fight each other. They’re fighting the adult world.”

People who deal with juvenile crime, however, aren’t so sure that the suburbs are immune to real gang activity.

So far there have been no cases of “wanna-be gangsters,” joining hard-core gangs in Orange County, said Gus Frias, manager of the Orange County Department of Education’s Operation Safe Schools. But Frias believes the temptation is as real as what has lured a handful of Orange County kids into skinhead and other white supremacist-type gangs.

“Gangs come into being because certain needs are not being met,” he said. In his presentations at area schools, he lists needs parents fulfill for children, such as love, affection, a hierarchy of power. Then he lists needs gangs fulfill. “A gang meets the same needs as parents,” he said. “Kids want someone to scold them and punish them, to give them rewards and punishments and the self-esteem that goes with that,” he said.

Boredom is another factor in luring kids to gangs, he added. “And boredom, believe me, is not limited to lower-class neighborhoods. These rich kids are also looking for fun.”

These days, the most potent popular images of fun, as portrayed on television and radio, focus on gangster life, he said. Even rap videos and television programs such as “21 Jump Street” often undermine their anti-gang messages with a visual message about “nice cars, beautiful women, lots of jewelry, weapons. . . ,” Frias said. “The music is enticing. I guarantee you a lot of kids are being seduced.”

As evidence, Frias said he just spoke at a middle-class Orange County elementary school, where some of the kids had penned gang-style “tattoos” on their hands and arms.

Because the graffiti appearing in Agoura Hills and Westlake Village smacked of gang imitators, Cater and Spencer decided to approach the problem as they would a real gang. They put together a “moniker file” tracing the seemingly indecipherable tags--Poet, Dest, Krush--to real names.

Luckily, developing leads from the Agoura youth wasn’t exactly like interrogating streetwise homeboys.

“We stopped a couple little kids on skateboards and asked if they knew who was doing it,” Spencer said. Within three weeks, they had a list of 18 or so names to match the tags.

The first youth they confronted was “Dest.” They approached him at his junior high school. “He was mimicking street gangs in his style of dress,” Spencer said. “He had a baseball cap on backwards, baggy pants, high-top tennis shoes.”

The boy hesitated in confessing his vandalism; the deputies pointed out that the same tag defacing several walls around town also was scrawled on his shoes.

One youth led to another, and before long, Cater and Spencer paid a visit to Ky.

Ky knows that Spencer and Cater think he’s got the potential to drift into serious gang activity. His parents already think he’s a full-blown gangster, he said. He scoffs at that. Like many of his buddies, he sees himself as a graffiti “artist” or “writer,” not a gang member or even a wanna-be.

Graffiti artists group together in what they call “crews.” But while that term is borrowed from street-gang terminology, graffiti crews battle with spray paint, not AKs and Uzis, Ky said. They wear gang-style clothing and listen to rappers like N.W.A only to distinguish themselves from the homogeneous surfer crowd that populates the area’s high schools and middle schools, he and others said. “Out here, everyone’s a surfer. That’s why we look different to them. To us, we’re just us.”

Tagging for Fame

There are ways his crews resemble gangs, he acknowledged. “Like we’re close; we have a sense of pride. But we don’t go around marking territory. The tagging we do is just to get fame.”

Ky’s face animates with an intense sincerity when he talks about his passion. “Graffiti is a hobby. It’s constructive.” Like rap, though, it’s a hard-edged art form that most adults don’t understand, he said.

“All these people around here have such a bad image of us,” said Patty, an attractive 17-year-old Latina who sometimes helps Krush fill in his more elaborate work, adding her own tag--”Secret”--to a finished piece.

Patty said she tends to hang out with other minority teen-agers because she is unwelcome in most white cliques. “They call us (racial epithets),” she said, as she snuggled up against Krush in an Agoura Hills pizza parlor. “They say, ‘Why don’t you go back to the Valley?’ ”

Like many kids in Agoura Hills, Patty drives a new car. But in a gesture of rebellion against the student status quo, she has turned her ’89 Suzuki Swift into a low-rider, had it painted black and tinted the glass. Krush painted their names on the rear window.

But neither her car nor the way she dresses makes her a gangster, she said. “We’re normal kids who live middle-class lives. My mom drives a BMW. We have a nice house. . . . I think everyone out here should take a look at what (real) gang-bangers look like.”

Spencer and Cater say it’s because they have seen the real gang scene that they are appalled by the imitators. That’s why they took a hard line in dealing with the youths behind the graffiti.

We told them that if they look like a gang member and act like a gang member, there’s a good chance they’re going to be treated like one, Spencer said. “I told them . . . their name is going to be on file. They’re going to be photographed. If they don’t want that kind of scrutiny, they should back off.”

Took Message to Parents

Then they took their message to the parents of each of the young people involved.

“I think that there are two groups here, the graffiti artists and the wanna-bes--the taggers,” said a mother who happened to have sons--”Dest” and “Poet”--in each of the groups.

Dest’s mother, who is 42 and in television production, has known the attraction of what used to be known as anti-Establishment behavior. “I lived in a tepee in New Mexico for two years; I’ve experimented with controlled substances; I was as much of a hippie as you can be,” she said.

She appreciates “graffiti art,” such as her older son Poet does in legal “yards” or by commission. It even looks as if her son will get an art scholarship to college for his work, she said. On the other hand, “graffiti bothers me. It’s like a dog lifting his leg on a hydrant. It’s a lack of respect for people’s property.”

The wanna-bes like her son Dest, who “throw up” graffiti, tend to be younger, she said. “I worry more about my little one, about the junior high-level kids. All the gang-related activities on television are unfortunately being romanticized.”

She understands the fear that the sudden appearance of graffiti inspired in her neighbors. “There’s been a tremendous flight from the Valley because of gangs,” she said. “These kids are making a major mistake in dressing like cholos, dressing like gangsters. I tell them, ‘People take you at face value.’ ”

She also tells her younger son and his “freckle-faced, blue-eyed blond” friends who dress like gangsters, “If the Bloods or Crips ever did come up here, you’re the first ones they’d blow away.”

When Cater and Spencer had contacted all of the people involved in the graffiti spree, they gave them the choice of being charged with vandalism or cleaning up the mess.

Treated to Pizza

On a Wednesday during spring break, Ky, Dest, and more than a dozen other juveniles painted over the graffiti they’d put up around town. When they were done, the deputies treated them to pizza.

In part, because they realize how much easier it is to prevent gangs than to get rid of them, Spencer and Cater head over to the local campuses regularly, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in casual dress. As they strolled across the campus at Agoura Hills High School recently, girls flirted and boys came up to talk.

A young man coolly told them he knew some real Crips, from “the Morton Downey projects, man.”

“You mean the Jordan Downs projects,” Cater said. “Gangsta! gangsta!,” someone else called out from a group.

But most of the imitation has subsided, and the graffiti is gone, the deputies said.

As they see it, though, the fact that the walls are clean doesn’t mean that the threat is gone.

Spencer believes that the imitations may have set in deeper than many in the community--including some of the students themselves--are willing to admit.

Earlier this year, for instance, deputies confronted a couple of cars full of young men outside a party in Agoura Hills. The teen-agers were armed with knives and the short clublike souvenir baseball bats sold at Dodger stadium.

Ky was among the young people arrested for possession of a deadly weapon.

“They say they’re just artists,” Spencer said. “. . . When we get a call that there are 25 people with baseball bats and knives going after other people, I can’t call that art.”

Ky said he and his friends were helping out a friend who had been threatened by some football players. “I don’t care if I get beat up, if it’s for a friend. Just so I’m there for him, you know, like he’s there for me.”

He and his friends respect Spencer and Cater--at least more than they do the “redneck cops” they usually encounter, Ky said.

But he thinks their concerns are naive. “They say, ‘Pretty soon there’s going to be a drive-by shooting.’ They say, ‘This is the first stage of gang-banging,’ ” Ky said, looking slightly puzzled. “It’s not going to happen. We’d never be gang members.”

Besides, he said, “around here, you can’t have gangs. The neighborhood’s good. There are lots of police. And they really investigate things like graffiti. Gangs around here just wouldn’t work. It’s senseless.”

Since Spencer and Cater busted him, Ky doesn’t even consider bombing in Westlake Village or Agoura Hills or anywhere else the two cops prowl. He said, “Now we go over to Thousand Oaks.”