Crips, Bloods Have Month of No Pay-Backs : Violence: Police say the two gangs have avoided revenge killings since calling a truce in the wake of the riots. Skeptics say it may just be a random lull.

In the month since the Los Angeles riots, there have been no revenge killings involving the city’s two most notorious street gangs, law enforcement officers in the Los Angeles area said Friday, lending credibility to a truce called by the two gangs in the wake of the riots.

While drive-by shootings among Latino gang members and their associates have continued unabated in such places as South Los Angeles, Compton and Inglewood, the nearly all-black Crips and Bloods seem to have suspended their 20-year-old blood feud in those communities, officers said.

There have been shootings and some deaths involving Crips or Bloods, police said, but none that can be definitely attributed to the rivalry. Most officers credited the truce, which came about during the rioting that followed the verdicts in the Rodney G. King police beating case. But a few said it may only be the result of an inexplicable lull in street crime that occasionally occurs.

But even those who are skeptical of the truce acknowledged that gang members who would have gunned each other down last month are traversing the same neighborhoods without violent confrontations for the first time since the feuds began in the 1970s.

“Young men who went to high school together and were separated because they were in different gangs are passing on the street and not shooting each other,” said Detective Dan Andrews a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire Division.

There have been no gang-versus-gang murders in his division since the riots, which began April 29, although there have been homicides involving people suspected of being in gangs, he said.

The division has about half a dozen Crips and two Bloods “sets,” or gang subdivisions, he said, adding that Crips battle Crips as often as they battle Bloods.

In the Newton Division, which covers much of South Los Angeles where the majority of the city’s Crips and Bloods claim turf, a black gang member was killed May 14, but police have no suspects in the slaying and cannot say for certain it was the result of a gang rivalry.

“We’ve had periods before when the killing just stops temporarily,” said Lt. Rick Morton of the Newton Division. “But this does seem to be going on a little (longer) than usual.”

In the LAPD’s South Bureau, which spans from Watts to Los Angeles Harbor and includes the Southeast, Southwest, Harbor and 77th divisions, there have been no gang-versus-gang killings involving black gangs, said Detective Lionel Robert.

“It’s remarkable,” he said. “We have to accept that the gangs in the truce are sincere. There have been no retaliation killings. No reprisals.”

In several nonfatal shootings involving Crips and Bloods, Robert said, the motive has not been determined and police are not certain if gang rivalries played a part.

In Inglewood, Sgt. Alex Perez said there have been several shootings and stabbings involving gang members, including two deaths, but none of them have been firmly connected to gang rivalries.

“They may be personal things and we don’t want to fuel the flame by saying otherwise,” Perez said, in explaining his reluctance to classify the incidents.

Perez, too, was reluctant to attribute the lack of obvious rivalry killings to the gang truce. In addition he pointed out that no previous truce has lasted very long.

In Compton, where there have been no homicides of any kind since the riots, Sgt. Reggie Wright of the gang homicide unit was delighted.

“I definitely attribute it to the truce and that’s good,” he said. “I just wish someone would get the word out to the Hispanic gangs.”

Wright said he grew up in and still knows people in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, one of the sites where the truce is believed to have begun.

“I’m all for the peace,” he added. “It’s making my job easier.”