Glendale Has Gang Problem, Officials Admit

After three years of minimizing gang violence, Glendale officials publicly acknowledged last week at two community forums that the city has a problem with street gangs.

But Councilman Larry Zarian, the only elected official so far to confront Glendale’s gang problems openly, said the community--not city officials--should take the initiative in dealing with the problem.

During the first forum, organized last Tuesday by a group of community leaders called the Glendale Coordinating Council, Glendale Police Officer Rick Young for the first time released statistics on crimes directly attributed to gang activity.

In just 40 days’ work, spread over the last 12 months, Young said, the part-time Glendale Police gang task force called CRASH has made 78 arrests for felonies and 53 for misdemeanors. They have investigated nine drive-by shootings and solved eight. They have confiscated nine handguns, two sawed-off shotguns, a sawed-off rifle and a military-type assault rifle from youths identified as gang members.

The panelists in the forum agreed that these statistics show the city of Glendale has been plagued for two to three years by a growing epidemic of gang violence.

There are now at least 20 Glendale gangs with 20 or more members each, and several more “wanna-be” gangs, said Young, a CRASH member. Another 30 gangs sometimes come into the city, he added.

“We need to do something quickly to put out the fire in the beginning before it’s too late,” said Zarian, who was one of the panel members.

“But don’t turn to the city for answers,” he said. “There is an answer, and it’s called family.”

In the past, Glendale has been reluctant to react to the gang problem. Last May, at a gang forum sponsored by Zarian, Sgt. Don Meredith, head of the CRASH unit, said the city would be in for a “long, hot summer” unless authorities created a full-time gang task force.

His words proved prophetic. Since then, drive-by shootings and other gang-related crime in the city has reached an all-time high. The full-time task force, however, never materialized. Higher-ranking police officials dismissed Meredith’s predictions, and the subject was never brought up at City Council meetings.

Meanwhile, Glendale Police Chief David Thompson cited “gang-related behavior, both criminal and antisocial,” as an example of the new type of law enforcement demands being made on the city when he asked for an unprecedented 28 new sworn officers during budget negotiations in June. Thompson had added fewer than 15 police officers in the past decade to his initial roster of 177. The city’s population grew by more than 25,000 to 165,000 during that time, reducing the ratio of officers from 1.25 per 1,000 residents to 1.12.

In explaining his request, Thompson said that Glendale’s rapid growth has led to significant changes in the patterns of criminal behavior, and that the urban-type crimes prevalent today demand more police manpower than those of the past.

The city authorized 11 new sworn officers. Staffing for a full-time gang detail was not part of the request, but last week Thompson said in an interview that in light of the recent increase in gang-related crimes, he will study the possibility “very, very hard.”

Young blamed the rise in gang activity on socioeconomic factors. Low-income immigrants are crammed into tiny apartments, sometimes up to eight people to a room, he said. Or both parents work and their children come home from school to an empty apartment. “They need a place to go and things to do,” he said. “So they join the gangs.”

Robert Aguayo, director of El Centro del Pueblo, an Echo Park youth center that works with former gang members, said the main solution to gang problems is providing youths with alternatives for their free time.

“The Hammer approach” used in Los Angeles “doesn’t really cut it,” Aguayo, also a panelist, said. “Sure, you need to lock up kids every once in a while, but as long as the need to belong exists, so will the gangs.”

Zarian gave no indication that the city would step up its anti-gang efforts. He said displaced immigrant children feel the need to join gangs, and this initial natural impulse leads to a life of crime.

As the primary example of the city’s commitment to fighting gangs, Zarian cited this year’s $12,000 allocation for a police computer, which--among other things--helps police keep records of known gang members in the area. “It helped the police catch the last drive-by shooter last month,” Zarian said.

Zarian was asked when Glendale will imitate neighboring cities and create a youth program or community center aimed specifically at keeping children out of gangs.

The question came from Marietta Buzzo, a counselor at Hoover High School. “All we have is the YMCA and that’s about it,” she said. “It’s not enough, as far as alternatives go.”

“I can’t really answer that,” Zarian said, “because there are members of the press in the audience.”

He was equally noncommittal at his biweekly forum last Thursday, when about 120 residents packed the City Council chambers to hear a discussion on the subject by Zarian, Thompson and Donald Empey, the Glendale Unified School District’s assistant superintendent for instruction.

Empey outlined the school district’s measures to improve security on high school and junior high school campuses. By the end of the school year, he said, every campus in the city will be completely fenced, and there will be only one available entrance to each school. Visitors, students, employees, teachers and administrators, Empey said, will be required to wear identification tags.

“It would be nice if we didn’t have to do that,” he said. “But we are now a large urban district, and we have to take some precautions.”

Last year the school district did not report a single gang-related incident, but this year there have been five such incidents, including two in which non-student gang members participated, Empey said.

Aside from counseling programs for troubled students, Empey said, the schools have little to offer in the form of alternate afternoon recreational activities for would-be gang members. “We have some chess clubs and things like that, and we’re looking into expanding these activities,” he said.

Several parents at the forum expressed concern over the lack of recreation alternatives and open space for youths growing up in the crowded, ethnically diverse, moderate-income neighborhoods of South Glendale.

Thompson agreed with the parents. “What we need desperately, but don’t have, is a place for our youths to go, to get some sort of recreation,” he said. “We need to do something about this pretty quickly.”

He said he will organize a public gang education workshop at the Police Department’s auditorium on a yet-to-be-determined date.

Richard Seeley, an unsuccessful former candidate for City Council, asked Zarian what alternatives the city had to offer potential gang members. Zarian responded, “Any time people look to the city to provide answers, we’re in trouble already.”

In addition to the part-time police task force, the city’s only other anti-gang project is the graffiti removal program, which employs three full-time city employees and two part-timers at an annual cost of $250,000.

How much the city spends on the part-time task force and how many officers make up that force cannot be revealed, Assistant City Manager Bob McFall said in a telephone interview.

“Some gangs may think it’s less than in other places and decide to move in,” he said.