Many Nonfatal Shootings Get Scant Police Attention : Guns: Victims are interviewed briefly or not at all. Harried police seldom use crime lab, rarely trace weapons.

When Los Angeles police detectives are assigned to investigate nonfatal shootings in which there are no obvious suspects, this is what typically happens in the busiest divisions:

“We call (the victim) on the phone,” said Southeast Division Lt. Richard W. Eide. “ ‘Do you know who shot you? No? Well, call us when you do.’ Next case.”

No knocking on doors to find potential witnesses. No careful crime scene analysis. Nothing.

Gunplay has become so commonplace in Los Angeles, many detectives say, that it is all they can do to investigate murders, only the most “serious” shootings and those shootings that require no investigation to solve.

If a bullet narrowly misses someone or crashes into someone’s house, detectives in most instances barely read the report.

If a victim suffers a flesh wound and there are no apparent suspects, detectives sometimes do not bother calling.

In hundreds of cases, they do not even retrieve bullets that have been surgically removed from shooting victims.

And investigators rarely ask the LAPD’s crime lab to dust for fingerprints and conduct other forensic tests on a confiscated firearm unless it is a murder case. The lab last year analyzed guns from 730 homicides--but from only 41 attempted homicides, statistics show.

Federal records, meanwhile, show that Los Angeles police only occasionally attempt to trace the origin of captured firearms--a process that authorities in many other cities say they use to uncover gun runners and dealers who cater to criminals.

Before the riots, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates more than once touted Los Angeles as “the safest big city in America.” FBI statistics show that Los Angeles’ murder rate was slightly lower in 1990 than New York’s and Philadelphia’s, and considerably lower than Washington’s.

But such figures, detectives said, do not reflect the scores of nonfatal shootings and near misses that occur each week in Los Angeles.

Nonfatal shootings in Los Angeles are usually investigated by LAPD detectives assigned to Crimes Against Persons (CAPS) units. The detectives are also responsible for investigating nonfatal stabbings, beatings, terrorist threats, domestic violence, lost passports and threatening phone calls, among other crimes.

At the Rampart Division, northwest of downtown, there are eight CAPS detectives with a collective backlog of more than 1,000 cases.

“My guys should be out talking to victims. My guys should be out investigating,” said supervising Detective Lee D. Prentiss. “But it would take twice the detectives we’ve got.”

Prentiss said that members of his unit generally will look into a shooting only if there is a workable lead and the victim is hospitalized overnight or longer.

What happens if the victim suffers a flesh wound and is not hospitalized?

“You want to know?” Prentiss picked up a piece of paper from his desk, gave it a quick glance . . . and dropped it in his trash can.

“Nothing’s going to be done,” Prentiss said, “because there’s nobody to do it.”

Police often do not bother to pick up bullets removed from shooting victims at local hospitals.

Each spring, officials at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center mail letters to police agencies, asking them to pick up bullets that investigators may have inadvertently forgotten to retrieve for evidence in the previous year.

As recently as 1984, detectives used to come and get every bullet, records show. But as the annual number of shootings in Los Angeles County has grown, the percentage of bullets that go unclaimed has climbed.

“We notify everybody when a bullet is removed,” said George Frank, chief of the medical center’s police department. “In some cases, (the police) come right away. In some cases . . . they don’t come at all. I don’t have an explanation, but I think you can make the assumption that law enforcement is overwhelmed.”

Of 374 bullets left over from 1990 cases, 118--about 32%--were picked up and the rest were discarded as pharmaceutical waste. Earlier this year, there were 305 bullets unclaimed from 1991 shootings, two-thirds of them LAPD cases.

Of those, 63 belonged to the Police Department’s Hollenbeck Division, in whose jurisdiction the medical center is located.

Lt. John R. Ferguson, Hollenbeck’s detective commander, had the bullets retrieved a day after The Times inquired. Upon review, Ferguson said that only 20 of the 63 pieces of metal actually related to Hollenbeck cases--and all were nonfatal shootings with no apparent leads.

“The fact that we now have those (bullets) . . . has no bearing on those cases,” the lieutenant said.

The matter of leftover bullets may seem esoteric, but some detectives say it illustrates how the rise in gun-related violence is hindering their ability to thoroughly investigate all but the most serious shootings.

An investigator assigned to these so-called “Category 1” crimes must take some step toward solving them within 10 working days of receiving each case.

Detectives assigned a Category 2 shooting, those where “additional investigation may provide a significant lead,” are supposed to make progress on the case within 30 calendar days.

A case in which there are no apparent leads and little chance of ever identifying a suspect through investigation is rated Category 3--no detective work required.

The level of police response to shootings can vary widely depending on the area of the city, The Times found.

In the comparatively quiet West Valley Division, where there were 17 homicides last year, detectives are routinely summoned from home in the middle of the night if the wounds sustained by a shooting victim are considered life-threatening.

“Nonfatal shootings I consider a very serious type crime,” said Lt. William J. Gaida, West Valley detective commander.

But in the busiest LAPD divisions, such as those in southern and central Los Angeles, a shooting victim often must die or be wounded in the kind of high-profile incident that attracts media attention before detectives are called in after-hours--even when the wounds are life-threatening.

Donald R. Floyd discovered that reality the hard way.

Floyd, a telephone operator, had taken a bus from work and was walking toward his home in South Los Angeles shortly after midnight on Nov. 25 when he was caught in what may have been a cross-fire between rival gang members.

Floyd was shot four times--twice in the back, once in the chest and once in the leg. Doctors at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center performed emergency surgery, removing six inches of his colon, and told him he was lucky to be alive.

He would be out of work for three months.

Two weeks after the shooting, Floyd said, a detective from the Southwest Division telephoned and asked what had happened. Floyd told him what he could.

He never heard from the police again.

Floyd’s case, according to Southwest Division detectives, was deemed a Category 2 crime--neither the highest priority nor the lowest.

“Unfortunately,” said Southwest Detective Michael D. Heffernan, “due to the lack of manpower and the amount of crime, all we can do is focus our attention on the cases that are most solvable.”

Other LAPD divisions face the same problem.

“We’re running a conveyor belt here,” said Lt. Eide, the detective commander at Southeast. “You stop to scratch your butt, the work piles up in a big hurry.”

There were 18,983 crimes of all kinds assigned to Eide’s 48 investigators and staff in 1991, a 5% increase over 1990. At the same time, Eide said, the number of person-days devoted to solving those crimes declined by 14% as some detectives retired, were transferred or took extended sick leaves.

“I don’t have enough people to call every (victim) back,” Eide said, “let alone investigate all their cases.”

Gloria M. Vicente never got a call back.

The 33-year-old woman, accompanied by her son, was shot once in the hip last July during an apparent robbery outside a market in the 8800 block of South Central Avenue. A gunman had come out of nowhere, fired and vanished, she told patrol officers.

Vicente was taken to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center where officials indicated that “she’d be OK,” Eide said. Given her apparently stable condition and the lack of immediate leads, the case was deemed a Category 2 crime--requiring some follow-up within 30 days.

Thirty-eight days later, without ever having spoken to a detective, Vicente died. An autopsy would show that the bullet had ripped through her pancreas and stomach before lodging in her chest.

When hospital officials routinely notified the LAPD’s South Bureau homicide unit of Vicente’s death, investigators were amazed to discover that detectives at Southeast Division had never interviewed her or her son, according to South Bureau Lt. Richard Molony.

Molony said he promptly assigned investigators to Vicente’s killing, but not before firing off a letter to the Southeast Division expressing his concern about their apparent lack of detective work.

“This was probably one that just fell through the cracks,” Molony said. “But I’m sure until the day she died, that woman was thinking, ‘I wonder what happened to those . . . cops? They never came back and talked to me.’ ”

Eide of the Southeast Division said the patrol officers who responded to the shooting had thoroughly interviewed the woman, and he said he believes little would have been gained by having his detectives re-interview her.

Within two weeks of picking up the case, South Bureau investigators identified a possible suspect and contacted Vicente’s son, who picked the suspect out of a photographic lineup. An arrest warrant was issued.

The suspect, a 17-year-old reputed gang member, was arrested three weeks ago by sheriff’s deputies on suspicion of twice robbing a developmentally disabled man. A hearing on the murder charge against him is scheduled this week.

Unlike their LAPD counterparts, sheriff’s detectives say they investigate every shooting, no matter how insignificant the victim’s wounds.

Sgt. Axel Anderson, supervisor of the eight-member robbery-assault team at the sheriff’s East Los Angeles station, said that even minor, nonfatal shooting cases are classified as “active”--the highest priority.

“We insist that (the investigator) go out to the scene,” Anderson said. “We have found . . . that if the investigator just goes by the scene, talks to a few people, checks around, tries to find a witness or two, that something can pop up and we can do something about the case. Sometimes, it doesn’t pop up. We’ll still make a run at it.”

Public relations executive Mark Schwed and his girlfriend had parked in front of their home in Silver Lake last Thanksgiving weekend when an angry-looking motorist armed with a rifle jumped out of his car, shouted “Hey stupid, get out of the way!” then fired.

“I hit the deck,” recalled Schwed, 36. “He obviously wasn’t firing at me because he could’ve killed me, but I’m thinking, ‘The next shot is my head. This is a gang thing, some robbery and I’m dead.’ He levels the gun . . . and I’m eating the carpet. My girlfriend’s starting to get up and I’m screaming, ‘Get down!’ ”

The rifleman instead fired at Schwed’s house, then calmly drove away “like he was going to a church picnic.”

Schwed called the LAPD. The couple were so unnerved that when police arrived 10 minutes later, they could not provide a license plate number or even agree on the gunman’s ethnicity.

“The two officers were laughing kind of,” said Schwed. “It was like there was no blood on the sidewalk, no big deal--like it was a jaywalking incident. . . . We have some Mexican masks on the wall and one of the cops was saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you had a picture of my mother-in-law.’ ”

Schwed said he showed the officers where one of the bullets had buried itself in a wall--not four feet from where a neighbor had been standing. The officers, Schwed said, declined to dig out the slug, saying it was probably too deformed to be of value as evidence.

Schwed said he also took the officers to the spot where he had found a brass casing. He assumed that they would carefully place it in an evidence bag to be fingerprinted. Instead, one of the patrolmen snatched up the shell and popped it in his pocket.

Schwed never heard from the police again. A few days later, he purchased a .38-caliber revolver. “It’s like the old cowboy days here,” Schwed said. “Everybody has guns.”

Detectives would be the first to agree.

“You used to go to a crime scene and pick up two or three (bullet) casings,” said supervising homicide Detective Paul Mize. “Now you look on the ground, and there’s brass (casings) all over and they’re all different caliber. It’s just amazing.”

The LAPD used to maintain a “shots fired board” on the first floor of the department’s Parker Center headquarters. Anytime a shooting occurred in the city--regardless of whether it involved bloodshed--a colored pin was stuck in a map indicating the location.

The board has long since been dismantled.

“Can you imagine,” said Mize, “what it would look like now?”

In the LAPD’s South Bureau, where Mize works, there were 377 homicides last year, 83% committed with guns.

Police detectives in some other cities routinely ask the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to trace the origin of guns recovered from homicides and other crime scenes. Manufacturer and dealer records kept by the ATF, according to detectives elsewhere, can lead to the arrests of those who supply criminals with guns.

In Los Angeles, where the tracing of crime guns is left to the discretion of individual detectives, LAPD and sheriff’s investigators say they are too busy investigating who did the shooting to worry about the origin of the weapon.

The value of tracing, however, was underscored by a case two years ago.

An informant had notified the LAPD that a man was selling guns out of a van in Lincoln Park, northeast of downtown. The police, according to federal records, directed the informant to contact the ATF.

An undercover agent subsequently bought more than a dozen firearms over a five-month period from the man in the van, later identified as Mario Miranda. Miranda was acting as a salesman for Gustavo Salazar, a federally licensed firearms dealer who got his guns in bulk from a wholesaler in Orange County.

After Salazar and Miranda were arrested in August of 1990, agents found that the two men had sold more than 1,100 guns. Salazar was sentenced to a year in federal prison. Miranda got eight months.

At least 89 of the weapons, it turned out, had been recovered by the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department in murders, robberies, assaults and drug deals, among other crimes. However, records show no indication that detectives had tried to trace any of the guns to stem the flow of weapons.

“We use (tracing) as an automatic investigative lead,” said ATF Special Agent April J. Carroll, “but that’s not to say the local police agencies do the same.”

The ATF’s National Tracing Center in Landover, Md., logged fewer than 120 gun trace requests from the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department combined during fiscal 1990 and 1991--less than far smaller agencies such as the police departments in Milwaukee, Boston and Baltimore.

In addition to traces requested directly by the LAPD and the sheriff’s office, many other trace requests are initiated by the ATF’s Los Angeles office for its own investigations and those of local police agencies. But even those numbers pale when compared to traces requested by ATF offices in other cities.

During fiscal 1990 and 1991, Los Angeles-based ATF agents logged 909 trace requests, compared to 3,886 in New York, 2,700 in Philadelphia, 2,390 in Detroit and 1,172 in Chicago.

LAPD and sheriff’s detectives point out that they check local and state computer systems to see if a gun has been reported stolen so that they can return it to its rightful owner. But trying to trace the source of a gun via the ATF is rarely fruitful, they say, because guns often change hands and most suspects lie when asked where they got them.

“Hell, 99.9% of the time they’ll tell you some B.S. story about how they found the gun or bought it from some guy named Joe,” said juvenile Detective Charles R. Flippo.

Moreover, detectives complained, it can take a month or longer for the ATF to complete a trace request, only to have the agency respond that it can find no information on the gun.

ATF officials said that if a detective stipulates that his request is “high priority,” the trace can be completed within hours, but other traces often take much longer.

Still, authorities in other cities say the benefits of tracing guns are plainly evident.

In New York City, ATF agents routinely run a trace on any firearm confiscated by police after use in a violent crime. The primary intent, ATF officials say, is to track down gunrunners who violate New York’s highly restrictive gun laws.

“Maybe that gun we trace is wanted (by police) in another state,” said Sgt. Norris Hollomon, a spokesman for the New York Police Department. “Maybe it’s been stolen from an arms dealer. Maybe it’s wanted in 15 homicides. You never know.”

A joint effort between Detroit police and ATF agents in tracing more than 1,200 confiscated guns in 1990 resulted in 13 federally licensed gun dealers being prosecutors along with 12 other individuals, all accused of arming criminals.

“You can go out and pick up these guns one at a time or you can seal off the source,” said Bernard H. LaForest, head of the ATF’s Detroit office. “The choice seems pretty obvious to me.”

More recently, police and ATF agents in Milwaukee traced 620 guns that had been used in crimes. The effort, according to resident agent Dale Faesi, has so far resulted in the indictments of two licensed firearms dealers and investigative leads into dozens of unsolved crimes.

In February, the ATF began a pilot project to trace every gun confiscated by the LAPD’s Southeast, Southwest, Harbor and 77th Street divisions.

George A. Rodriguez, who heads the ATF’s Los Angeles office, said he hopes eventually to persuade all law enforcement agencies in Southern California to automatically request ATF traces when guns are seized.

The process, Rodriguez said, is likely to take years.

Times staff writer Ted Rohrlich contributed to this story.

Next: Children, guns and the future.

Tracing a Gun

The United States does not have gun registration or centralized record-keeping for an estimated 200 million firearms in circulation. But the present system of federal record-keeping allows some tracing of firearms.

Tracing a firearm after a crime can lead to prosecutions for federal firearms law violations and to revocation of dealer licenses.

The Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the following chart shows, request fewer traces than many other major law enforcement agencies. It also shows that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ office in Los Angeles requested fewer traces than in many other areas. The figures are for fiscal 1990 and 1991.

Traces Requested by Law Enforcement Agency Milwaukee PD: 469 Baltimore PD: 426 Boston PD: 376 Macon, Ga. PD: 285 New York PD: 193 Metro Dade, Fla. PD: 116 Buffalo PD: 115 Houston PD: 110 Chicago PD: 106 Norfolk, Va. PD: 92 Newark, N.J. PD: 91 St. Petersburg, Fla. PD: 89 LOS ANGELES PD: 81 Atlanta PD: 78 Suffolk Co., N.Y. PD: 68 Minneapolis PD: 57 Daytona Beach, Fla. PD: 43 Savannah, Ga. PD: 36 L.A. COUNTY SHERIFF: 36 Phoenix PD: 33 San Francisco PD: 27

Traces Requested by ATF Field Offices New York: 3,886 Philadelphia: 2,700 Detroit: 2,390 Chicago: 1,172 Miami: 963 Atlanta: 958 LOS ANGELES: 909 Cleveland: 882 Houston: 666 Boston: 661 Kansas City, Mo.: 613 Dallas: 577 Milwaukee: 475

Following the Trail

When a gun is recovered in connection with a crime, local police agencies can ask the ATF to trace the weapon.

1. The Manufacturer: Using a serial number and other information, the agency contacts the manufacturer and follows the gun through paperwork to a wholesaler and then to a retailer.

2. The Retailer: The retailer is required to keep a record of everyone who purchases a gun.

3. The Purchaser: The ATF can use these records to trace a gun to a primary purchaser, but often the paper trail ends there. Guns sometimes are sold among multiple private parties or stolen in burglaries without any notification to the federal government or other record-keeping agencies.

Source: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms