Gang Violence Threatens to Swamp Police : Law enforcement: The plague is no longer confined to core cities, prosecutors warn, so more resources are vital.

Law enforcement experts say some police departments in Orange County are being swamped by a rising tide of youth gang activity that has grown increasingly violent.

And with prosecutors predicting a record number of gang homicides this year, just one of the county’s 22 police departments has a formal gang detail. Moreover, there is no centralized bank of crime data that can accurately measure gang activity, officials say.

Acknowledging that gang problems are increasing in Santa Ana, Police Chief Paul M. Walters on Friday began a dramatic series of neighborhood gang sweeps and announced that he will double--from four officers to eight--the size of the department’s gang detail, which tries to keep track of up to 7,000 gang members.

In the Friday night sweeps, 20 youths were held for questioning on curfew violations and other offenses. Police said the anti-gang patrols will run indefinitely, but they cautioned that only limited results can be expected without greater manpower.

“With only four people to handle the gang problem in Santa Ana, it’s pretty self-evident that they were harried,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. John D. Conley, who until recently led the county’s gang prosecution unit. “They were stretched thin.”

Lt. David Salazar, who heads the Santa Ana gang detail, agreed that the current unit has “overloaded.”

“But the gang problem cannot be solved with just more manpower,” Salazar said. “We need more jails to put the more violent gang members in, and we need a streamlined judicial system to get them off of the streets faster.”

Juvenile Court Judge Robert C. Jameson said the rest of the county must also recognize that gang activity is increasing in cities beyond Santa Ana, which has previously been the center of most gang-related violence.

“There’s a definite trend in the county where gang-related crimes are increasing,” Jameson said.

While the county used to average no more than 12 gang-related homicides a year, in 1989 the death toll rose to 16, and that number has already been reached just four months into this year.

As the county grows, Jameson predicted, “the number of incidents may subside, but it will never be the same.”

The county does not have the enormous problems faced by law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County, where a staggering 554 gang-related homicides occurred last year and 150 so far this year. But Orange County does have the potential to become a breeding ground for gangs, warned Los Angeles Deputy Dist. Atty. John D.S. Allen, head of the hard-core gang prosecution unit.

“Gangs are like cancer, they spread,” Allen said.

Walters, one of Santa Ana’s two original gang investigators when the unit was formed more than a decade ago, agreed that “we’re not in the magnitude of Los Angeles. . . . But we’re seeing a trend in Orange County that tells us we have to do something now.”

In the last year, gang activity increased suddenly and rapidly in many county cities, said Garden Grove Police Sgt. Frank Hauptmann, who heads the Asian Service Unit, which is responsible for investigating gang cases. Thirty to 40 gangs are based in Garden Grove, with about 3,000 members, Hauptmann said.

“It’s almost like a fad, somehow. These kids want to be in gangs,” Hauptmann said.

Garden Grove police have reported four gang-related homicides so far this year.

Police in Anaheim, Buena Park and Orange have each reported one, as did the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Santa Ana has reported eight.

Santa Ana is the only city with a formal gang detail. Others, including Westminster and Garden Grove, merely have investigators who specialize in gangs as their overall caseloads allow.

Jameson said county gang members are more violent than in the past and have little regard for bystanders, who may be caught in cross-fires. He remembers hearing about instances in Santa Ana and Westminster this year where gang members stood up in open-topped cars and defiantly waved semiautomatic weapons and colored bandanas.

“It’s a new phenomenon,” Jameson said. “We never had to deal with this before. These kids are more aggressive and have an unfit sense of morality.”

Prosecutor Conley pointed to a drive-by shooting in San Juan Capistrano on Christmas Eve as an example of how gang violence has spread far from the county’s urban core. Gang members sprayed a house with bullets and wounded a 4-year-old girl who was playing on the porch. A 17-year-old San Juan Capistrano gang member was later sentenced to 14 years in a California Youth Authority camp after pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon.

“People can’t sit and pat themselves on the back and say, ‘It won’t happen here,’ ” Conley said.

Until last weekend, police considered the county’s worst outbreak of gang violence to have been in September in Garden Grove. Gang members opened fire on an entire family, killing a 17-year-old rival and a 4-year-old boy and wounding six others in a territorial dispute.

Ten years ago, there were just 24 gangs in the county, recalled Michael S. Fleager, one of four probation officers in the county’s gang violence suppression unit. Now there are 75 identified gang groups, with more than 10,000 members.

“The people who are involved in fighting gangs are giving all they can now,” Fleager said. “There need to be more resources given to cut down the numbers of gang members.”

In Los Angeles, the Sheriff’s Department maintains a centralized data bank on gang-related crimes that are reported by law enforcement agencies in the county. The statistics are used to track the ebb and flow of gang activity and to measure effectiveness of enforcement.

But in Orange County, no such resource exists. At times, police and prosecutors have had to rely on newspaper crime reports for gang crime information.

Prosecutor Conley said his unit receives a file on a gang-related homicide only if a suspect is arrested by police and the case is referred to the district attorney for prosecution.