Gang-Related Killings in County, City Set Record in ’89

Gang-related killings in Los Angeles County skyrocketed to a record 570 in 1989, outstripping 1988’s total of 452, according to estimates released Thursday by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Los Angeles police reported that an unprecedented 303 people were slain in gang-related killings in the city last year, a nearly 18% increase over the record 257 slayings logged in 1988.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Wes McBride said there were 116 gang-related slayings in 1989 in unincorporated areas of the county and in cities patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department--also an all-time high--surpassing 1988’s record of 96 deaths.

Law enforcement officials partly blamed the rise in gang-related slayings on a worsening drug war between the region’s street gangs.

Officials define gang-related slayings as killings in which either the assailant or the victim is a gang member. These homicides do not necessarily result from gang activity. A more limited category, gang-motivated homicides, includes only those killings stemming directly from gang activity.

That category usually yields lower totals, but those figures were not available Thursday.

“There’s a lot of push and pull for drug locations,” said an LAPD anti-gang officer who asked that he not be identified. “It’s like the Prohibition Era. We’ve got a mini-Chicago here.”

Police Lt. Fred Nixon said a portion of the increase in gang slayings was due to the growth of police files that list known gang members, enabling investigators to more easily identify which victims belong to gangs.

There are about 600 gangs with 70,000 members in Los Angeles County, according to law enforcement estimates.

Authorities also estimate that there are about 25,000 members making up about 260 so-called sets of the Bloods and Crips, the city’s two largest primarily black gangs. There are also between 40,000 and 50,000 Latino gang members,.

Despite the increase in gang-related slayings, the killings do not appear to account for a larger proportion of all homicides, Nixon said. The number of gang-related killings in the city increased 17.9% in 1989 while the overall number of slayings increased at nearly the same pace, up 17.2%, from 745 deaths in 1988 to 873 deaths in 1989.

Nixon, too, cited drugs as a chief reason for the increase.

“We would be foolish to ignore the influence that narcotics trafficking has on our crime statistics, particularly on homicide stats,” he said. “We know, for instance, that more than half of the homicides that we’ve seen in the 1980s were somehow related to drug abuse or drug trafficking. We certainly attribute a lot of these numbers to the scourge of drugs.

“We are talking about turf wars to protect drug markets; we’re talking about people committing crimes while under the influence, and people committing crimes to get money to purchase drugs.”