CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / ATTORNEY GENERAL : Jail Leaders, Smith Says, and Gangs Will ‘Deteriorate’

Declaring that “most members of gangs in Los Angeles and all over the state . . . aren’t bad kids,” Democratic state attorney general aspirant Arlo Smith predicted in a weekend speech that street gangs would “ultimately deteriorate” if their leaders were systematically jailed.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Smith’s opponent in June’s primary, responded that such thinking is “naive.”

“There is a romanticized view of kids in gangs as being out of ‘West Side Story’--tap dancing their way into your hearts,” Reiner said. “If you’re going to be effective in dealing with gangs, you have to get to the kids before they get into the gangs, when they are 11 or 12 years old. You don’t go up to a 17-year-old killer and talk about underlying social conditions.”

The pair’s positions appeared to underscore a rare philosophical difference in a campaign that has been marked mainly by personal attacks.

Smith, San Francisco’s district attorney, made his remarks Saturday night in a speech at a Van Nuys hotel billed by his campaign staff as “a major policy statement” on how, if elected attorney general, he would attack Los Angeles’ gang problem.

During his 30-minute address, which drew polite applause from an audience of more than 100 people at a banquet sponsored by a Pacoima church, Smith said prosecutors in his office have been successfully singling out for tough prosecution youths identified as gang leaders by San Francisco police. The program, he said, is modeled after one pioneered in San Diego County.

“Our experience in San Francisco indicates that most gang members are ‘wanna-bes’ or ‘go-alongs’ or individuals who join gangs out of fears” he said. “They are just often good kids caught in a bad world.”

After his speech, Smith told a reporter he had no qualms about comparing the situation in San Francisco, where he estimates that 1,000 youths are active in drug-selling gangs, to that in Los Angeles, where officials say that upward of 80,000 youngsters belong to street gangs.

“If it operates the same in San Francisco and in San Diego, I think the assumption is they operate the same elsewhere,” he said. “A gang is a gang. You don’t have a gang without leadership. (Then) it’s not a gang.”

Reiner, contacted Sunday, sharply disagreed.

“Gangs aren’t highly structured, they don’t have chairmen of the board . . . they are nothing but marauding packs,” he said. “(And) when you’ve got a 16- or 17-year-old in the street with an Uzi, it’s far less important why he is there than the fact that he is.”

Smith said he had no estimate on how many Los Angeles gang leaders would have to be jailed to ease the gang problem.

If elected, Smith said, he would assign prosecutors and investigators in the attorney general’s office to assist Los Angeles law enforcement officials in pursuing his plan of arresting gang leaders. Smith also pledged to help create a privately funded attorney general’s foundation to help train leaders of neighborhood activist groups “who want to reclaim their streets from gangs.”

Reiner said his office is trying to steer younger children away from gangs through a countywide anti-truancy program that begins at the grade-school level. Reiner said his prosecutors are also employing a new state “street terrorism” law, which his office helped draft, that subjects hard-core gang members to stiffer sentences when they are convicted of crimes.