Era of Crime : Chief Gates, Sheriff Block Say the Tide Will Only Worsen

With an estimated 80,000 gang members and 15,000 police officers; with the annual increase in gang murders nearing 40%, and with a vast amount of the cocaine imported from South America coming through Los Angeles, local law enforcement agencies are embattled as never before. In a wide-ranging joint interview with Times urban affairs writer Frank Clifford, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and Los Angeles Chief of Police Daryl F. Gates argue that the fight against crime will not be won by their agencies alone. Without more police officers and jails, without help from the private sector to create more jobs, Block and Gates hold out little hope that the community will become any safer in the coming decade. Block warns that without more economic opportunity, today’s gang wars could become tomorrow’s class wars. With nearly a century of police work between them, the two are wistful about the days when police officers had the time to chase down stolen bicycles. They admit that police officers have occasionally made serious mistakes in the face of better-armed and more violent criminals. But despite the shocking trends, Block and Gates say that law enforcement is holding its own.

THE PROSPECT OF CLASS WARFARE

Block:

I think that we in law enforcement are succeeding. We are arresting more people. We are prosecuting more people. We are incarcerating more people. So we are doing our job very well. That is not the answer to the problem, because there is a new crop coming along all the time, and that is somebody else’s responsibility. And they are not succeeding.

Gates:

We are faced with dealing with the failures . . . and it seems to be a continuing failure and we don’t seem to learn any lessons at all from the past, and as a result we the police are thrust in the situation of having to deal with the problem. But I think we both would agree that we are not the ultimate answer. And I think we both would agree that (we) know what the answers are but we are not sure if the society is willing to do what (it needs) . . . to solve some of these problems.

I would hope to have someone like Michael Milken (the junk bond king recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy and securities fraud; Gates urged leniency in his sentencing) . . . convince the board rooms throughout this city, this county, this state, perhaps this nation that there (are) a lot of IOUs out there . . . and I would like to see him make the corporate world understand (that) this is not a government problem, this is everyone’s problem. And it is particularly private industry’s problem.

One of the reasons that private industry runs off to Malaysia and all over the world is because they can’t harness the labor force that they have. The labor force is not in tune to what they need, and vice versa. . . .

(At one time) a guy, even though he didn’t finish high school, could get a fairly decent job. He could support a family and kind of move into lower-middle class, maybe middle. . . . Today, that doesn’t exist. But we have not had the adjustment by the private sector to fill this horrible gap.

Block:

There are other institutions in society that have to break this cycle. I believe that one of the things that needs to be done more quickly and more extensively than anything else is a restoration of programs such as Head Start. To take 2- and 3-year-olds, and I don’t care what community they are in, not only in a high-risk community but throughout this community, throughout society, and begin teaching youngsters social skills and establishing a value system. . . . If I had the time and the resources, I would start a Head Start program along with other programs.

Interviewer:

If it were proposed that some of the money for these programs come out of your budget, would you go along with that?

Block:

No. For a simple reason that what we are doing is essential. And I think it is not a case of either or. . . . While we are focusing on the next generation, we can’t allow the current criminals in our society to prey upon the community unmolested. Do you think the citizens would tolerate that? Not for a minute.

What I fear really for the future--and I think not in the too long-term future--is that we are going to experience in this community, in this country, a class struggle, not a racial struggle, not ethnic-based, but a class struggle because, as the chief said, our industry-type opportunities, (such as) manufacturing, assembly-line types of jobs, have moved away and we have gone more and more into the information economy. It requires people with education and significant skills.

(For) the individuals who possess those skills, the ones who stayed in school and got the education, it is going to be a seller’s market. They are going to be able to demand top dollar for their labor. There is not going to be enough of them. Those who do not have that skill base and that educational base, there are going to be few if any jobs available for them.

Class warfare means that those who have and those who have not are going to be in conflict, and those who have not are going to look for scapegoats and to rationalize that it is the haves who are keeping them from acquiring the kinds of things they need. And these are basic, inherent rights, as if some giant conspiracy is at work to deprive them of what they are entitled to, and that they have a right to go out and take it.

COMBATTING THE GANGS

Block:

I think there is a misunderstanding of gangs today. You know, preying on each other because it is the drive-by shooting and the mass violence that gets the attention. These people are very busy committing other crimes--robberies, burglaries, car thefts and a whole range of criminal activities so they are not focusing entirely on other gangs. They are in for the full spectrum of crime.

Most of those people who are dealing drugs are small-time street dealers who are often dealing to support their own drug use or doing it for a few bucks, working for somebody else. I think (it) has been totally misstated . . . in various publications (that) current levels of gang violence (equate) with Prohibition-era of violence, where bootleggers were shooting each other. Somewhere between 1% and 3% of (gang) violence is related to a dispute over turf, drug-dealing turf. The rest is the kind of mindless violence (that occurs when) gangs perceive some slight. Sometimes the killings are almost recreational, they are attempts for notoriety and attention. . . . During Prohibition, gang members, traditional gangsters, worked hard to try and maintain a positive public image and went to church. They contributed to charity and attended all the fashionable events and when they did engage in an act of violence, it was with surgical precision so they would not outrage the community. These people (today) will go out and shoot into a crowd of 20 people you know, without any problem. They are sociopaths, they are individuals who have no sense of self-worth and very simply I believe that people who don’t care about themselves certainly are not going to care about anybody else and that is one of our problems.

Gates:

Well, I think that the drugs are there and probably the gang violence would not occur if they weren’t all on drugs. They are already, as the sheriff says, driven by a sociopathic mentality that kind of permeates the group, and they have a few beers and snort some coke and they are on their way. “Why don’t we go out and have some fun? Let’s go shoot somebody.”

Block:

The chief has said that his department is not a large police department and it is not by national standards, by population and so forth, when you consider that in our computers that we have an excess of 80,000 identified gang members in this community, which means that there are more than four active gang members for every police officer and sheriff’s officer that is on patrol in this community. We are not adequately staffed. . . .

Let me talk about jail. I would say that the majority of those 80,000 need institutionalization of some kind, perhaps not a hard-lock jail, but perhaps a program of intermediate sanction, a boot camp where they can get a message that hey, if this is the way you want to go, there is a price to pay, there are sanctions.

Gates:

The lack of facilities you know, the controversy (over) building a prison in our community, in Lancaster, nobody wants it in their back yard. But I don’t think people really realize how critical the situation is. I know they believe in building prisons that we have and I think we build them faster here than anywhere else. . . . But I looked at the data the other day on the Blue Ribbon Committee on Corrections. Twenty thousand are released from prison before they serve three months.

That’s right. Less than three months, 20,000. Forty thousand are released in less than six months and 60,000 are released who do less than one year. Now if anyone thinks that law enforcement is going to be able to get any kind of control over that criminal element when that is all the time they do, which is foolish, you can’t do it.

POLICE CORRUPTION

Interviewer:

What happened at 39th and Dalton (an anti-drug raid in which 38 city police officers were disciplined for allegedly ransacking apartments and roughing up residents in Southwest Los Angeles)?

Gates:

Well, it is very simple. We had officers who were trying to address a very serious problem, a family there, a Hispanic family that had been the victims of a drive-by shooting. There were gang members and dope dealers in that area, and there was a lot of fear in that area so good police officers thought they were putting together a plan that was going to deal with that. Unfortunately, it was a very poorly constructed plan, and there was unfortunately very poor control when it was put into place. . . . (If) just one sergeant had stepped forward and said “knock it off,” we would have never heard of 39th and Dalton. We made a mistake. We did a lousy job. I am the first to admit it. We disciplined a lot of officers because of it.

Interviewer:

Sheriff, last winter after the announcements of charges (against) some of your men came out (six deputies were convicted this week of conspiring to steal cash seized from drug traffickers; a seventh was convicted of lesser charges), you said that in 34 years (it was) the saddest day, outside of a loss of life. Is it becoming increasingly difficult for people in law enforcement to resist the kind of extraordinary temptation that drug money presents?

Block:

I think people in law enforcement should be above that kind of temptation. Certainly the opportunities and the exposure to these kinds of dollar amounts are greater than they ever have been, and to me a thief is a thief is a thief. I mean whether you take $2 out of a billfold of a drunk or whether you bring in or whether you take a million dollars from a major drug dealer. It is just not acceptable conduct for people in law enforcement. And when someone goes over the line, that is a terrible trauma that is inflicted not on me personally, but on the entire organization.

I don’t think there is any question that there was a failure of supervision. In fact, in the particular crew that (was) on trial, the supervisor was a part of the problem. You know you can devise a variety of systems but people can find ways to deviate from the systems. We had, and I still believe we have in place, a very good system on how those dollars were taken, transported and recorded and the whole bit. But if individuals that were together at the moment of seizure decide to take a portion of that money and not place it in the container that will be sealed, that is serial-numbered, that can’t be opened by anyone and the whole bit. You know, there is not much you can do.

RECALLING A SIMPLER TIME

Gates:

I went out last Saturday. I guess it was last Saturday night when one of my sergeants was shot in the leg. And as I was talking to him, and asking what happened: Well, we got a call, shots fired at a party and we get these calls all the time. . . . (He was) confronted with a couple of people, actually two groups, two parties who crossed the alley from one another and were shooting at one another and he walked into it and got shot in the leg and shot a suspect in the process. The point is that that is the kind of society and that is the kind of situation that police officers and sheriff’s deputies are walking into all the time.

I am operating in the mode where the uniform and the badge meant something and that people paid attention to that and respected it, and there weren’t that many guns on the street and people were very adverse to shooting at a police officer. That situation doesn’t exist today.

Block:

What I see about being most different from when I was working the streets 30 years ago or more was that there was a pretty well-defined line of demarcation between who the good guys were and who the bad guys were, and every cop on the street was pretty well able to tell and prepare themselves to deal with the situation knowing that hey, these were good guys, and these were bad guys. Drugs, more than anything else, has blurred that line and today, you just don’t know what to expect. So, oftentimes, officers will approach a vehicle with a gun drawn, and pretty soon you receive a letter or a phone call from this law-abiding citizen who felt threatened by the fact that the officer approached with a gun drawn. The officer could very well approach that same car and end up dead, and this is the difficult task out there to them.

Interviewer:

Can people expect the same service, the same level of promptness in response today that they did when you were young police officers in this community? People who live in Los Angeles are just going to have to get used to the fact that this is a rougher town and they can’t go to the police as often as they might like, is this true?

Gates:

If your bicycle was stolen . . . if nothing else, we gave you a little tender loving care. And I think you deserve it, and I think people deserve it. And not only that, when we were doing that we got more information. We send, believe it or not, we send a car on about 28% of the calls that we receive for service, about 28% and that in my judgment is really a shame. We were at one time up to about 33% to 35%. Going back when I began in the Police Department we were probably sending units on 80% of the calls.

Block:

What I see is the greatest difficulty today is with technology, you know, with the ability to take reports over the telephone, with the communications system that allows us to get information more rapidly with helicopters and with all of the things that we’ve got, we have moved further and further away from our ability, as the chief stated, that can provide a little tender loving care, to have the luxury of interacting with people in a more personal nature, and I think that is a component of law enforcement that has been lost. . . . You just don’t have the luxury of time that we used to have.