Anaheim Fears Drug Turf Wars Among Gangs

Local street gangs are making dangerous inroads into Anaheim’s illegal drug trade, fueling fears that commonplace battles for turf could soon explode into more violent wars for profit, authorities said this week.

“What we are starting to see now is something that happens in larger cities and what we hoped we wouldn’t see here,” said Police Sgt. Craig Hunter, assigned to the department’s Gang Enforcement Unit. “The gangs are starting to deal drugs. Soon, you’re going to start seeing wars.”

Hunter’s revelations came as the City Council was presented a report Tuesday showing a dramatic increase in citywide gang activity. The study by the city’s Gang/Drug Citizen Advisory Committee revealed that Anaheim has become home to more than 35 individual gangs involving about 700 members, or seven times the number that roamed the streets in the early 1980s.

Police have identified nearly 51 gangs that include both Anaheim-based organizations and those from surrounding areas that are active throughout the city.

“It’s the No. 1 problem of our department,” Hunter said. “Gangs and drugs are at the top of our list. “It’s getting to where you can’t separate the two.”

Officers fear that drug dealing gangs will obtain new, sophisticated weapons, prompting violent confrontations with established drug dealers.

“Right now, they have shotguns and handguns, mostly small caliber,” Hunter said. “(The drug dealing) will have a snowball effect. Now, they will have more money and better guns.”

Councilman Bob D. Simpson said that the problem has been “creeping up” on the city for years and that attempts at bolstering the city’s year-old Gang Enforcement Unit have stalled because of recent citywide budget deficits.

“This has escalated over a short period of time,” Simpson said Wednesday. “I recognize full well that gangs are a significant problem. It’s probably the most talked about thing among the council members. I think a majority of the council is struggling to do something about it.”

Police said the growing presence of local and outside gang activity coincides with the city’s recent and vast demographic changes. Sgt. Hunter said gang membership has soared as Anaheim’s immigrant population has surged and as families from the gang-plagued Los Angeles area have moved to Orange County seeking safe haven in Anaheim.

Even after those changes, Simpson and police officials said civic groups and others largely ignored the gang activity and, in some cases, actually denied their existence.

Police Lt. Marc Hedgpeth said denial has been a problem in virtually every city where gangs are present.

“People just refuse to believe that kind of thing could be a problem in their cities, so they deny it exists,” Hedgpeth said.

Just in the past decade, authorities said, Anaheim’s gang activity has gone from a core group of five longstanding Latino gangs to a diverse roster that includes white, black, Asian and an exclusive group whose members are all young women.

Known as the Citron Street Badgirls, the gang of about 12 to 15 members has gained a particularly nasty reputation for its participation in strong-arm robberies of pedestrians in the Loara High School area on the city’s west side, Hunter said.

“They are a tough group,” Hunter said, adding that for the past eight years the Badgirls have attracted gangs from outside the city to their parties.

Hunter said residents need only look down the street from City Hall to learn of the gang lifestyle’s overpowering influence on young people.

There, on Kroeger and Melrose streets, less than a mile from the city’s administration building and the mayor’s law office, is the home turf of the Kroeger Street gang.

Although one of its members, a 15-year-old youth known only as “Weasel,” was one of the city’s three gang-related murder victims of 1991, three youths travel all the way from the Weir Canyon area on the city’s far northeast side to maintain membership in the group, Hunter said.

Hunter said the youths travel to the downtown area most weekends and are sometimes driven there by their parents.

To keep up with the increased activity, the department created the enforcement unit last April and maintains a staff of six officers assigned exclusively to gang details.

“We could easily double that number, and there would still be enough work to go around,” Hunter said.

PLACENTIA PROBLEM: Gang membership at 300. A18

FBI ENTERS FRAY: Agents to focus on gangs. A19