Latino and Asian Gangs Engage in Deadly Warfare : Violence: Influx of Cambodians into Long Beach has escalated tensions. ‘Cultural misunderstanding’ is blamed by some officials.

The violence started with two cars racing alongside each other down a narrow Long Beach street.

One was occupied by Latino youths, the other was full of young Southeast Asians. Suddenly, bullets streaked from the Asians’ car into the Latinos’, hitting the driver. Mortally wounded, he swerved into an intersection causing an accident.

That was in October, 1989. It was the beginning, Long Beach police now say, of a protracted gang war that has become one of the most violent in the city’s history. On one side is the area’s largest Latino gang, which for years has claimed as its turf a neighborhood of less than two square miles in central Long Beach. On the other are the offspring of the city’s burgeoning Cambodian population, most of whom arrived as refugees in the late 1970s after the Vietnam War, settled in the same neighborhood and transformed it into an area now known as Little Phnom Penh.

The toll so far: nine deaths, more than 50 injuries and hundreds of arrests. The most recent death occurred last week when two suspected Latino gang members entered the upstairs balcony of an apartment building occupied by Cambodians and fired through a front window, killing a 17-year-old boy and injuring three others as they watched the 10 p.m. news.

“It’s escalating at an alarming rate,” said Norm Sorenson, a detective in the Long Beach Police Department’s gang violence suppression unit, adding that some of the confrontations have involved assault rifles and machine guns. “It’s gotten to the point where we’re experiencing an incident almost every other day.”

Theories abound as to the causes underlying the tension.

The Cambodians say their young people have been victimized for years by Latino gang members who beat them up, stole their money and verbally harassed them. While decrying the violence, they say, it has only been recently that Cambodian youngsters have begun fighting back by forming their own gangs.

Latinos point to simmering resentment among their young people over the influx of Cambodians. Since 1979, when the refugees began arriving, they say, the newcomers have virtually remade the neighborhood, often seeming more economically successful than those who have lived there for years.

“It’s a problem of cultural misunderstanding,” said Jerome Torres, a board member of the local League of United Latin American Citizens and president of the Hispanic Advisory Committee to the Long Beach Unified School District. “The Latino kids feel displaced.”

Song S. Kamsath, the Cambodian director of the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, said: “People are afraid. The Cambodians have nowhere to go.”

Whatever the causes of the animosity, longtime residents say that it is taking place in an area that has traditionally been a landing point for immigrants and a home to minorities.

In the years leading to World War II, the neighborhood known as the “Anaheim corridor”--a 2.5-mile stretch of Anaheim Street from Long Beach Boulevard to Redondo Avenue--attracted many Jewish immigrants from Europe. Later, as the Jews moved into more affluent areas, the neighborhood became home to blacks and Latinos. Since 1979, according to city officials, about 45,000 Cambodians have settled in and around the area, giving Long Beach the largest Cambodian population of any city outside Southeast Asia.

Mostly refugees, many of the newcomers arrived after fleeing the dictatorial regime of Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to early 1979, during which more than 1 million of the country’s 7 million people died or were brutally murdered.

In Long Beach the newcomers began opening grocery stores, restaurants, Buddhist temples, newspapers and social service agencies. By pooling their resources, raising funds and securing low-interest government loans, they were able to bring about what most residents now recognize as an economic rebirth of the neighborhood. In the process they also transformed it into the most visibly Cambodian area in the country, despite the fact that nearly 40% of its residents are Latino compared to 25% who are Asian.

One highly visible symbol of the area’s transformation is the new headquarters of United Cambodian Community, a major social service agency. Covering nearly a city block on Anaheim Street, the two-story building--dedicated Friday--sits on a lot previously occupied by the rundown headquarters of Centro de la Raza, a social service agency run by Latinos.

“They knocked the old building down and put up a beautiful new one,” said Yolanda Benavidez, Latino coordinator of an anti-gang program in the school district. “We’ve tried to have a center like that for years and it hasn’t come to pass; (this has) only brought more anger.”

While adult members of the two ethnic communities have generally been able to settle their differences, it has been a different story among the youths. Police say they first suspected trouble a few years ago when Cambodian youngsters began defacing Latino gang graffiti. Gradually, the Cambodian gangs began to emerge, and police now estimate their membership at several hundred.

Recently, many Cambodian gang crimes have been aimed at their own people, including armed robberies and widespread extortions of Cambodian-owned businesses. The fatal 1989 encounter on Anaheim Street began a series of “pay-back” shootings between Cambodians and Latinos that continue to this day.

Unfortunately, according to police, the combatants--especially Latinos--sometimes have difficulty identifying the members of a rival gang. As a result, Detective Sorenson said, the number of innocent victims increases.

“What makes it crazy,” he said, “is that it doesn’t make a bit of difference if (they) get the guy who shot (their) pal or not as long as (they) go into the neighborhood and shoot somebody. It’s a blood feud.”

Arthur Kraft, a psychologist employed by the school district, got interested in the problem after hearing of the first shooting in 1989. To learn more, he met separately with a group of Cambodian high school students and a group of Latinos over several months. The eight-page report he submitted to the district portrays young people full of resentment toward each other.

“It has to do primarily with turf,” he said. “The Mexican kids feel that they were here first. Basically, what you have is one racial/ethnic group (encroaching) on the area of another.”

Dr. Wing-Ki Lee, a psychiatrist who directs the Long Beach Asian Pacific Mental Health Program, agrees.

“It’s territorial,” he said. “The (Latinos) have the feeling that the area is being taken over . . . (that) the coming of the Cambodian refugees was an intrusion.”

Florentius Chan, a psychologist who works for Lee, said he is not surprised that so many Cambodian young people are joining gangs given the fact that many lost their fathers or mothers under Pol Pot and grew up in an American environment perceived as alien.

“They have a sense of loss of identity,” he said. “They feel insecure and they lack role models. They join the gangs for power.”

No one seems quite sure what to do about the problem.

Last week, the Police Department set up a committee to begin meeting with various specialists and community leaders to formulate a strategy for dealing with the ongoing violence. “We’re going to go for saturation enforcement in the neighborhoods where this is happening,” Sorenson said. “We’re going to turn up the heat. We’ve got to quit having kids killing kids.”

Leaders in both ethnic communities say they are working to set up a series of public meetings to examine the problem. One idea being discussed, they said, is a sort of “summit” gathering during which gang leaders could meet face to face.

At the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, which serves Cambodians as well as Latinos, Kamsath said he is attempting to get younger members of the warring ethnic groups to play together. “I put them in the same basketball game so they can become friends at an early age,” he said.

Whether it is working is not yet evident.

“(Latinos) ask you what gang you’re in,” said Sithouk Sam, a Cambodian sixth-grader. “And I tell them I’m not in any gang. Sometimes they beat me up. All I can do is just stay home.”