A Bust for This Gang Is a Lost Game : Sheriff’s deputies sponsor sports leagues to get ‘at-risk’ youngsters off the streets and onto playing fields.

A group of shamefaced boys huddled quietly in the middle of Bassett Park.

They knew they were in trouble. They couldn’t get away. And they were going to hear about it from an angry adult in authority.

“No one paid attention. No one wanted to win. No one was doing their job right,” said Shawn Davis, volunteer coach of the Bassett Oilers, as he scolded the team of 12-year-olds that had been humiliated, 22-8, that recent night in a flag football match.

This is the kind of youth “trouble” that Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Gregory Stokes welcomes. As coordinator of the Youth Athletic League for the City of Industry sheriff’s station, he oversees an 18-month-old program designed to get “at-risk” youngsters off the streets and onto the playing fields.

“I’d rather see the kids being taught discipline for not making the plays, not performing like team players, than being an individual out there stealing cars, or being part of another team--a gang,” Stokes said.

“It’s a positive influence, rather than the negative influence of the streets,” he said of the league.

The Industry league is one of five such programs among sheriff’s stations countywide. Its sports programs attract youths from the Bassett, Hacienda-La Puente and Rowland unified school districts.

The league offers an alternative to Little League baseball and Pop Warner football, which are out of reach for many youngsters whose families cannot afford a $55 or $75 registration fee and the price of a uniform.

Many such kids wind up hanging out on street corners and getting caught up in gangs, but the sheriff’s year-round free program is now reclaiming some of them from the streets, taking back gang-infested parks and increasing the youths’ self-esteem.

Since October, more than 650 San Gabriel Valley boys and girls have played flag football, or led cheers on the sidelines, in T-shirts bought with funds from the program.

The boys compete among 48 teams in four age divisions--from 8 to 18--with games three nights a week. Girls can play football too, but most of them prefer to be cheerleaders, Stokes said.

Three deputies assigned to the league drive their black-and-white patrol cars into three area parks--Bassett, Martin and Rimgrove--to provide a presence of authority, coordinate the events and referee any disputes that arise. Meanwhile, parents, siblings and friends pack the bleachers.

More than 50 volunteer coaches--parents and others from the area--have provided team guidance, while community leaders and business owners serve on the league’s board of directors.

During the summer, the same effort went into a baseball league, a swim day and Camp Courage, a retreat at Mammoth Lakes in the Eastern High Sierra, for 40 hard-core gang-affiliated youths and 17 deputies.

Fueling it all has been about $45,000 in contributions, mainly from area businesses, Stokes said.

“We’ve had a lot of people get behind this--corporations, civic groups, community leaders,” he said.

It is because of Stokes, 42, a six-year veteran of a similar program at the sheriff’s station in East Los Angeles, that the program exists at all in the San Gabriel Valley.

Stokes took a look at the rising number of gang crimes in the region and realized that, as in East Los Angeles, intervention was needed. Capt. Michael Nagaoka, who heads the Industry station, agreed and became executive director of the program.

Both acknowledge that providing sports programs is not a traditional law enforcement job. But they say it is part of community-based, or service-oriented policing--a concept of active involvement by deputies with the communities they serve.

“Often in this job, you’re seen as this big-time super-cop, and you forget that you work for the community,” Stokes said. “I call it the ‘John Wayne Syndrome.’ You swagger a bit and say, ‘I am the man.’ ”

The sports program allows youths and their families to see deputies as human beings and friends. It helps eliminate the estrangement often felt between the community and law enforcement, Stokes said.

That bridge-building effect was obvious as the 6-foot, 3-inch Stokes, who comes to many games, waded in among a sea of sweaty boys wearing red T-shirts, the colors of the victorious Bassett Falcons, one of the teams in the 12- and 13-year-old age division. The boys had just finished shaking hands with the Oilers, and they then exchanged happy high-fives with the deputy, who praised their victory.

“I’d be home doing nothing (without the league),” said 12-year-old Fidel Castaneda, a seventh-grader at Edgewood Middle School in La Puente and a member of the Falcons.

“You’d be home sleeping!” chimed in his teammates.

Another Falcon, 12-year-old Marlo Sandoval, admitted that some of his friends, who prefer tackle football, think flag football is stupid.

“But it’s free, so everybody likes to play,” said Sandoval, also an Edgewood student.

Arcelia Castro, a La Puente resident whose 12-year-old son, Elvis, plays for the Falcons, said she appreciates having a sheriff’s patrol car parked next to the playing field.

“Before, I used to come with my children and I wouldn’t leave them alone here,” Castro said. “But now I feel they’re safe.”

The close contact means that many parents, like Castro, now turn to the Sheriff’s Department for help and to report crimes, contact they would have avoided in the past, Stokes said. He pointed to a house bordering the field where a drug arrest had occurred two weeks earlier.

Authorities got a tip on the case as a result of the league’s presence on the field, Stokes said. An alert league coach noticed that a constant stream of men would enter the park, walk to the back-yard fence and wait until they were handed something over the fence by the house’s occupants.

Sheriff’s deputies later arrested several suspects and seized heroin at the house, Stokes said.

But instances such as these are secondary to the league’s main focus--the games.

When the football season ends this month, the league will shift to basketball. Stokes also hopes to start a boxing program out of an 1,800-square-foot building on South Proctor Avenue that was donated rent-free to the program by Bental Development Corp.

He also is thinking of starting soccer teams to attract even more kids.

“We’ll play badminton. We’ll play soccer. Whatever it takes to get them involved,” he said.