Fight Against Gangs Turns to Social Solution

A decade of law enforcement crackdowns and get-tough judicial policies have failed to curb the growth of gangs and their violence in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California, and defeated engineers of these efforts are now looking for more sweeping and fundamental social solutions.

The number of identified gangs and gang members has doubled in the last five years and account for 35% of homicides countywide, compared with about 10% a decade ago, law enforcement authorities said. Tellingly, at the county’s largest medical rehabilitation center, the number of people crippled by knife and gunshot wounds--many of them gang-inflicted--now exceeds those injured in automobile accidents.

Gangs are changing as their ranks swell. Better armed and more violent, traditional gangs are expanding their territory as newer gangs mushroom in their midst. The well-established ethnic lines of gangs are becoming blurred, reflecting demographic changes brought by immigration.

Exploring new strategies, law enforcement officials have begun reconsidering the value of social programs--many of which died for lack of funding over the last decade--to combat a crime problem they concede is rooted in societal problems beyond their power to control.

“The message to be made clear to average citizens is that putting more dollars into law enforcement is not going to enhance their safety,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block. “We need social programs. They are absolutely essential.

“As long as gang cultures exist, we are chasing our tails,” Block said. “Law enforcement cannot break the cycle, only social improvements can break it.”

Interviews with police, prosecutors, social workers and gang members yielded a near-unanimous assessment that law enforcement gang-crackdowns have not worked.

“We started a little bit late and our battle plan to get rid of the gangs isn’t working,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Robert Contreras, who has worked in the department’s gang detail for 20 years.

Jim Gallipeau, a specialized gang supervision officer with the Los Angeles County Probation Department, predicted that “young professionals in the next 5 to 10 years will have to make room in their budgets for armed security and bodyguards.”

Such comments contrast sharply with that of assistant Los Angeles Police Chief Robert Vernon three years ago, who promised at the time that the Police Department was “prepared to do anything” to “eradicate the effectiveness” of the city’s street gangs by 1991.

Vernon was speaking amid a get-tough era of gang policing. In the late 1980s, the Police Department and other law enforcement agencies countywide initiated ever-changing combinations of gang tactics. They tried foot and bicycle patrols, neighborhood watch programs, anti-graffiti units, predawn raids and street sweeps. Most prominent was the Police Department’s “Operation Hammer”: massive deployments of officers, dressed in riot gear and armed with search warrants and battering rams, to smash cocaine “rock houses” and make mass arrests.

“We’re still working on those things Chief Vernon was talking about,” said police spokesman Cmdr. William Booth. “We haven’t eradicated violence yet, but the city is safer than it would have been had those efforts not been made.”

According to Diego Vigil, a professor of anthropology at USC who has studied the gang problem, the crackdowns put thousands of people away for mostly brief jail terms only to have them come out tougher and smarter about how to rob businesses and homes, but with few other skills because rehabilitation in prison is all but non-existent.

“These guys get prestige by going to prison,” Vigil said. “They brag about surviving it.”

While the crackdowns have brought temporary relief to gang-plagued neighborhoods--and have been applauded by many residents--they also are resented by other community members. Critics, said Leon Watkins, director of Family Help Line in South-Central Los Angeles, complain of living under “police state conditions.”

“The people who live here need to feel they are part of the solution,” said Watkins. “Just locking kids up will never work.”

Deputy Police Chief William Rathburn, in charge of the Police Department’s South Bureau, agrees. He pointed to a yearlong experimental effort to combine community-based programs with meat-hook law enforcement in his region that has reduced gang homicides by 23% this year.

“I’m convinced the solution to the gang problem is prevention--not just enforcement, incarceration or more police,” said Rathburn, who credited groups such as Community Youth Gang Services, Nation of Islam, Brotherhood Crusade and others for helping reduce gang murders in the region.

Certainly, no one in law enforcement is talking about surrendering the fight to identify gang members and arrest wrongdoers.

Rather, they are beginning to advocate more strongly for additional help from social agencies--community-based job training, educational tutoring, parenting, athletic and gang and drug abuse programs--that had been receiving shorter shrift in an era of limited government spending and skepticism about the legitimacy of many such programs.

Some social scientists are dubious about law enforcement’s seeming about-face.

“Social scientists and community leaders are still a little suspicious about the new religion that law enforcement seems to have caught,” said Mel Oliver, professor of sociology and associate director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty.

“While it is refreshing that those officers and entities in the trenches are realizing community programs are necessary,” Oliver said, “it is also disconcerting when law enforcement continually promotes, at the electoral level, more funds for jails and retributional policies.”

Advocates of a broadened approach toward gangs trace the rise of gang violence to the late 1970s--when such programs as the Comprehensive Educational Training Act began to be eliminated.

“We were hit hard,” said Raphael Harris, executive director of Teen Post, which provides job training and gang prevention programs for troubled youths. “Three years ago, we were getting $500,000 from the federal government, compared with $321,000 this year. In the early 1980s, we had 35 centers across the county. Today, we only have five in the city of Los Angeles.”

These cuts, including those prompted by passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, seemed to coincide with the advent of rock cocaine consumption and sales, according to UCLA’s Oliver.

“The drug sub-economy became very important because a great deal of plants were closing, and the jobs coming into prominence were not jobs the youth could qualify for,” Oliver said. “We are talking about a whole generation of youth caught up in a lifestyle that will be very hard to break.”

Government budgets remain tight, and it is unclear whether any more money will soon become available for the social programs some see as the best attack on gangs.

L.A. County Supervisor Ed Edelman believes the money might come from law enforcement budgets.

“Since law enforcement is failing in this war, we need to put money into imaginative social programs,” he said. “Maybe we can pay for them by squeezing money from law enforcement, or perhaps from other sources, which will probably be hard to find.”

Experts said the forces driving youngsters toward gangs remain stronger than any of the would-be deterrents. Whether black, brown, white or Asian, young men and women continue to join gangs for self-defense, identity and a sense of self-esteem in inner-city minority neighborhoods and in communities from Ventura to San Diego and from Santa Monica to Pasadena.

“The gang phenomenon is no longer an East and South-Central Los Angeles issue,” said Steve Valdivia, executive director of Community Youth Gang Services, the largest local gang intervention organization, which employs 67 workers patrolling 4,000 square miles countywide.

“We are getting calls for help now from people who never thought they would be calling,” Valdivia said, “people from Encino, Tarzana, Glendale and La Canada (Flintridge).”

For many of the poorer immigrants who must seek housing in low-income, gang-infested communities, joining existing gangs or forming multiethnic ones that mirror the changing demography of their neighborhoods has become part of an Americanization process.

“We have Samoans, blacks, Filipinos, Chicanos and people from Guam in our gang,” said a gang member in Wilmington. “We used to be pure Chicano.”

In 1985, there were an estimated 400 gangs and 45,000 gang members countywide. Today, there are about 800 gangs and 90,000 gang members--an estimated 10% are believed responsible for hundreds of drive-by shootings and more than 600 murders a year countywide, law enforcement officials said.

As new gangs form rapidly, some neighborhoods are so “Balkanized” by hastily drawn territorial boundaries that even seasoned gang experts can hardly keep up with them. A half-mile stretch of Brooklyn Avenue east of downtown, for example, is splattered with a confusing melange of graffiti left by the Tiny Boys, the Street Boys, the State Street Boys, Evergreen and Vickie’s Town, among others.

“We’ve recruited new fighters and expanded to North Hollywood, Alhambra, El Monte and Huntington Park within the last eight years,” said a battle-scarred veterano from one of the city’s oldest Eastside gangs. “We are forming a new clique in Orange County.”

Gang warfare also is becoming more deadly.

“I buried nine kids in 1990--more kids than I’ve buried in my entire life,” said Father Greg Boyle, 36, of the Eastside’s Dolores Mission. “It’s rough out here.”

Deaths from gang activity between Jan. 1 and Nov. 6 increased 51% over the same period last year in those portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department, said Sheriff’s spokesman Wes McBride.

Similarly, the Los Angeles Police Department reported a 37.5% increase in gang-motivated murders between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 compared to the same period a year ago.

Block earlier this year surprised some of his colleagues by declaring that gang violence cannot be attributed to drug trafficking, as many in law enforcement have long held. Block said that the gang battles were being waged over turf and inspired by the universal need of youngsters to believe in something.

This, he said, underscored the need to address the gang problem with more sweeping solutions than crackdowns--a view well-received by most gang experts.

“Law enforcement is not the answer--the answer is jobs,” said Jim Johnson, director of the UCLA urban poverty center. “Gang activity is a symptom of joblessness, and joblessness is a symptom of the way the local economy is restructuring itself.”

The loss of generally low-pay, unskilled assembly and manufacturing jobs--many of which were close to East and South-Central Los Angeles--stranded an entire generation of poorly educated men and women who relied on such positions to “mature out” of gangs, Johnson said.

Meanwhile, schools are substandard and overcrowded in some urban communities. An estimated 50% of students in some communities do not finish high school and wind up functionally illiterate and unprepared for available service-oriented and high technology jobs.

Without better ways of keeping youths in school and training them for the jobs, more youngsters are joining gangs. As manufacturing jobs close or move elsewhere, fewer gang members are leaving the fray to support families, said Joan Moore, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who has studied two Los Angeles gangs for 20 years.

“We are seeing more geriatric gangbangers hanging around to carry the myth for youngsters,” Moore said.

What jobs are left--pushing brooms at warehouses, stacking boxes at corner grocery stores--often go to recent immigrants who seem to compete more successfully for such positions than people with prison records and jailhouse tattoos on their face and neck, Moore said.

Raul (Yogi) Alaniz, 28, is an ex-gang member who has spent 12 years behind bars. Now on parole, Alaniz has been looking for a job since a Department of Water and Power summer work program that had him cutting trees for minimum wage ended in October.

His worst fear is “having too much spare time on my hands.”

Staring out at the street from the porch of his mother’s East Los Angeles home, Alaniz said: “When a dude is my age and still in a gang, he either wants to be in it or he wants out. I want to get out.

“I’ve been shot with a .32, a .38, and a shotgun; I’ve been stabbed in the eye, the neck and the arms; I’ve been run over and thrown off a building,” Alaniz said. “Around the neighborhood, they call these scars trophies. . . . That’s where your respect comes from.

“But I’ve been out of that stuff for five years. I need somebody to help me make it. I want a chance. I want a job.”