County Leaders Look for Answers as Influence of Gangs Keeps Growing

After a series of gang-related shootings last weekend in Santa Ana, a group of women met Monday at a church in Orange and prayed that the young people involved would change their ways.

At a junior high school in La Habra, students in a special gang-diversion program asked their teacher to explain what had brought on the violence.

Throughout the county, community leaders, parents, police and school officials involved in the war on gangs were searching their souls and asking themselves why, after all their efforts, gang violence in Orange County has claimed 16 lives so far in 1990.

In the last two years, a variety of organizations, task forces and school projects have been created or assigned to counter the problem. Experts have tried to learn from the mistakes of other urban areas and have even put to the test new strategies to keep young people from getting lured into gangs by notions of romanticism and machismo.

But in spite of all this, gang membership in Orange County continues to grow, officials say, and the influence of gangs is spreading beyond just a few cities.

“Gangs are just like the Medfly--they’re not gonna die,” said Ralph Fuentez, a former gang member who now takes part in a Christian ministry in Orange that tries to convert gang members. “All they’re doing is multiplying. The problem is real, and so you really need to deal with it realistically.”

Apprehending and jailing gang members guilty of violence is one thing, but those involved in anti-gang efforts say the best solution is to guide young people away from gang influence.

And now is the time to do that, they say, before gang violence explodes into a crisis in Orange County.

“Obviously, the gang problem here is growing, but it is not coming close to reaching the stages we see in Los Angeles,” said Felipe Plascencia, hired this year by the La Habra City School District to lead its gang-diversion program. “But, we’re gaining ground very, very quickly. And I think that by looking at Los Angeles, we have learned a lesson that if we wait until the last minute, we can’t control it that easily.”

The gang population is growing younger--with some youths being “jumped in” or initiated as early as age 10--and they are more violent, said Orange County Deputy Probation Officer Mike Fleager. Orange County is experiencing a rise of so-called “hybrid” gangs whose members are racially mixed and often from middle-class homes, he said.

And Orange County gangs are different in many significant ways from the more established gangs of Los Angeles County that have a certain level of ethics.

“The traditional gangs are extremely violent in their histories,” Fleager said. “The new gangs aren’t excluded from committing violence either, but they go from zero to 60 overnight. They turn violent immediately.”

While some school districts, such as Santa Ana and La Habra, have incorporated gang education into their curriculums, other districts have yet to confront the problem, officials say.

“It’s fairly spotty now,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. John D. Conley, until recently the head of the gang prosecution unit. “We’ve got a ways to go until the schools adequately address the gang problem.”

Conley said too many districts, officials and parents are lulled into thinking that gang violence cannot happen in their neighborhoods.

“It can happen anywhere,” he said. “It was nice and quiet in San Juan Capistrano and then boom, you have a little girl shot by some gang members.”

Conley was referring to a 4-year-old girl who was wounded in a drive-by shooting last Christmas Eve.

Indeed, in the past year, signs of spreading gang activity have cropped up in the most unlikely places, such as graffiti on Mission Viejo sound walls and bridges and a drive-by shooting near Magnolia Park in Tustin.

There is a tendency on the part of some cities, school districts and even parents not to admit that gangs are a problem out of fear that it will damage the image of their communities, experts say.

But even experts are wary about mentioning the word “gang” to young people, or seeing gang names get published in the media, because they believe it acknowledges the groups and feeds their need for notoriety. And that, experts say, helps gangs to recruit more members.

“I try not to give it that much publicity because I think that glorifies the gang problem itself,” said Plascencia, of the La Habra school district. “When those gangs are brought up, we put it into context, and we make sure it’s not a point of glorification for the gangs.”

Plascencia spends two or three days a week at several junior high schools, consulting with students who are believed to be vulnerable to gang influences.

Plascencia talks to them about goal-setting, decision-making and even ethnic history to those who are minorities. He also once took some of the students--considered low achievers by their teachers--to visit the Cal State Fullerton campus.

“I told them, look those college students in the eye, and some of them are stupider than you, and yet they’re here,” he said. “You can do it too.

“The main way to keep kids from going into gangs is by teaching them about themselves, teaching them their own history so that they know who they are. I think most of our youth are very confused. They don’t know where they are going, they have no goals, no vision, no positive role models,” he said.

Tony Borbon, who is director of Turning Points, a nonprofit organization funded by various agencies to work with schools and community groups, said he is encouraged that social and educational efforts to tackle the gang problem in Orange County are well-coordinated.

But he said there needs to be more leadership from these groups because county residents often don’t know what to do when violence turns up in their own neighborhoods.

“This is the time when we must all work together and come out and shout, ‘Hey, we’ve had enough violence from you (gang) people,’ ” he said.

Turning Points provides everything from training teachers to understand and handle the gang problem in their schools to rehabilitating former gang members who were incarcerated.

Borbon said the worst thing people in the county can do is to become complacent about the problem since it doesn’t compare so badly to other places.

“Why are we still talking about Los Angeles or San Francisco or Alameda County?” he said. “We love to point the finger everywhere else. But what’s the difference in a child dying anywhere else and a child dying in Orange County? I thought we had a very high price on life here in Orange County too.”

Sadly, experts acknowledge that if youngsters are not reached before they enter gangs, it is almost impossible to persuade them to break the clutches of groups whose members may include their neighbors, their brothers, their fathers or their classmates.

“To be honest with you, I don’t know any program that has been extremely successful in getting kids out of gangs,” Fleager said. “When there are kids who want to get out of gangs, we can help them with that--with drug diversion, with job counseling and such. But as far as programs encouraging them to get out of gangs, I don’t know of any.”

Said Deputy Dist. Atty. Brent Romney, who succeeded Conley as head of gang prosecutions: “It’s very difficult to turn kids away from gangs once they get involved. But if they are still fairly naive and not sophisticated in the gang, we can still pull them out.

“If they are heavily involved . . . we’ve lost them.”