Las Palmas Park Ban on Gang Members Expires : San Fernando: The ordinance was enacted after a woman and her children were shot. Officials say the area is calm now.

A controversial ordinance banning gang members from a San Fernando park where a woman and her three small children were wounded by gunfire a year ago has been allowed to expire because city officials say it is no longer necessary.

The ordinance banning known gang members from Las Palmas Park ran out at the end of June, San Fernando City Administrator Mary Strenn said. The ordinance had made the city the focal point of a national controversy over civil liberties and law enforcement tactics after the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit to overturn it.

“It was emergency legislation and the emergency has passed,” Strenn said. “The people have the park back. The park is healthy.”

The shooting of Enriqueta Duran, 31, and her three children as they walked along the edge of the park on July 3, 1991, prompted the ordinance as a way to keep citizens out of the cross-fire of street warfare.

Within weeks of beginning enforcement of the gang member ban in September, police declared the ordinance an unqualified success. Neighbors agreed and even Duran now lets her children play just a few feet from where they were shot.

“Now, there are children playing in the park. There aren’t cholos in the park. There aren’t gang members,” said Duran, who lives three blocks from Las Palmas and goes there occasionally. “It’s safe for children, for families.”

Although the ordinance caught the attention of public officials throughout the nation who considered similar legislation in their communities, it was subsequently challenged by the ACLU as unconstitutional. The lawsuit is still pending, although ACLU officials said they were unaware that the ordinance had expired.

If the gang wars heat up again, Strenn said, the city would revive the ban.

“We have a very watchful neighborhood,” Strenn said. “The Neighborhood Watch has been invigorated and, with stepped-up police patrols, I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad again. If it does, we’re ready.”

Gang members still bristle at mention of the ordinance, but some grudgingly admit it has cooled down their feud. San Fernando police said they have only tried to keep gang leaders out of the park and usually cut foot soldiers more slack.

San Fernando Police Chief Dominick Rivetti said only about 25 gang members were banned from the park. Under the ordinance, gang members who had been notified in writing by anti-gang officers that they were not welcome in the park could be fined up to $250 if they were caught there.

“By keeping out the leaders and some of the hard-core members, we were able to discourage both gangs from hanging around there,” Rivetti said. “The park has been virtually crime-free since we put the ordinance in place.”

“I still hate the SanFers and I don’t want to see them anywhere around here,” said Danny, 19, a self-described member of the rival Shakin Cats who said he was banned from the park. “But it’s gotten slower. With cops in your face all the time, everyone kind of backed off.”

The current calm in the park contrasts sharply with the situation a year earlier when Duran, her two sons and daughter were shot while strolling at the edge of the park near Huntington and Hollister streets.

Ten SanFers ran from the parking lot toward a group of Shakin Cats standing near the basketball courts. A SanFer opened fire with a shotgun and all four members of the Duran family were struck with shotgun pellets.

Duran, daughter Melina, 11, and son Hector, 9, were seriously wounded. Her other son, Hugo, 10, suffered minor wounds. All have since recovered.

“We used to avoid the park. It wasn’t safe,” Duran said in an interview this past week. “All those cholos made everyone scared. But I never thought they would shoot my family--for nothing, for walking.”

Duran’s children had come to live with her only a month before the shooting, moving to San Fernando from her parents’ home in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Duran said she worried about their safety even before the shooting and had been intentionally skirting the park when the incident occurred.

“The shooting happened fast. It confused me,” Duran said, clutching Melina as she recounted the shooting. “It was crazy.”

“I’m not scared anymore,” said Melina, a shy, thin 11-year-old who showed off scars on her stomach after prodding from her mother. “I play there.”

After the shooting, Duran, a clothing factory worker, considered sending her children back to Mexico but decided she could no longer bear to live away from them.

In February, Frank Edward Santiago, 19, of San Fernando pleaded guilty to four counts of assault with a deadly weapon in the shootings. In return for the guilty plea in San Fernando Superior Court, prosecutors agreed to drop an attempted murder charge because they said Santiago was not aiming at the Durans.

The city’s gang ordinance, adopted with the help of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, received attention from municipalities throughout the nation. Pomona and Bell Gardens adopted similar ordinances and both the city and county of Los Angeles considered similar laws while awaiting the outcome of the ACLU challenge, Strenn said.

But in San Fernando, the gang ban actually was but a small part of the city’s anti-gang effort, Strenn and Rivetti said. Most of the city’s energy was directed toward encouraging gang members to change their ways.

“We don’t just want to kick them out of the park. We want to help them improve their lives,” Strenn said. “The ordinance got all the publicity, but it was just one step.”

Under the city’s anti-gang program, counselors visited the homes of gang members and spoke with their parents, Strenn said.

“We offered them help getting a job or getting back into school,” she said. “But we’ve also let them know that we consider criminal gang behavior unacceptable.”

The city also helped neighbors organize themselves--not just for security reasons--but also to seek their input in planning for the park’s future, Strenn said.

Based largely on the opinions of residents, the city drew up a $6-million renovation plan that includes a new amphitheater, swimming pool, gardens and other amenities. The plan remains unfunded, however, and only $50,000 is included in this year’s budget to continue studying renovation of the park, Strenn said.

“It’s a modest start, but we’re proud of it,” Strenn said. “We’re proud of all the citizen participation. For people nearby, that park is an extension of their back yard. It’s their open space.”

Now, the Duran family, which lives in a small apartment on Pico Street, also see the park as part of their back yard. But Enriqueta Duran said that sometimes as she walks through the neighborhood memories of the shooting haunt her. She still would rather take her kids to play at San Fernando Recreation Park about half a mile away, just to avoid the memories.

“I work to forget these things, but sometimes I see a cholo and I think: ‘Does he have a gun?’ Then I want to grab my children and run away as fast as I can,” Duran said. “But I know you can never run fast enough.”