TELEVISION REVIEW : O.C.’s Asian Gangs: Story With No End in Sight : The KDOC special’s interviews with young criminals, community leaders and police offer some explanations but no answers.

“Asian Gangs Part II: When Will the Violence End?”--only to report that there are no answers in sight.

Producer-writer-reporter Beth Bingham has returned to the Little Saigon area spread over Westminster, Garden Grove and Santa Ana to tackle issues left untouched in March in her first 30-minute special on the subject.

This time, she interviews some current and former gang members as well as the police officers whose viewpoints dominated the previous installment. Bingham also has sought out some community leaders to show that it’s not just law enforcement that is worried about the gangs, described by one official as “probably the most difficult criminal element we’ve ever had to deal with.” The program asserts that Orange County ranks fourth in the nation for crimes committed by Asian gangs, behind only New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Bingham outlines why these gangs prey almost totally on fellow Asians. As former gang member Johnny Leng explains it, recent Asian immigrants are more likely than non-Asians to stash jewelry and large sums of cash in their houses, which also is why many gangs are abandoning auto burglaries and thefts in favor of more lucrative--and violent--”home invasions.”

Also, the program reports, the gang members know their countrymen aren’t inclined to report crimes to the police.

“A lot of them take their cues . . . from old Asian organized crime elements--for instance, the Triad society, the Chinese secret organizations--where criminal activity was kept within the community,” says Westminster Detective Marcus Frank, who strives to understand the cultural and historical context of Asian attitudes about crime and punishment.

“You never shared your problems with . . . the outside community,” Frank has learned, “and you certainly don’t involve the government or law enforcement in problems pertaining to the family.”

Some interviews with gang members run on too long and aren’t always as informative as they might be. One 17-year-old member of an all-girl gang rambles on anticlimactically when asked to describe the worst physical attack she’s ever witnessed (it’s one of the injustices of reporting that criminals don’t always give great quotes). Also, if there are further updates (as certainly would be warranted by a problem of this scope), subtitles would help viewers better understand those immigrants whose accents are especially thick.

As to that question--when will the violence end?--most of the interviewees don’t even hazard a guess. Some suggest that programs aimed at elementary school kids might encourage them to avoid gang membership, but they acknowledge that the lure of quick, big money is a temptation that many can’t resist.

Frank thinks it may take a generation or two of assimilation before such Western responses as counseling or detention have any impact on Southeast Asian youths, thousands of whom endured horrors back home far worse than anything they would encounter under the U.S. justice system.

It doesn’t make for a particularly happy ending. But as KDOC’s two specials have made abundantly clear, this is no fairy tale.

* “Asian Gangs Part II: When Will the Violence End?” is being shown tonight at 8 and repeats Saturday night at 8 on KDOC Channel 56.