Understanding the Riots--Six Months Later : A New Blue Line / REMAKING THE LAPD : GILBERT AYUYAO

Youth counselor Gilbert Ayuyao tries to teach the Filipino teen-agers he works with that if you break the law, you must suffer the consequences. But this simple lesson is difficult to get across to youths who feel that neighborhood cops assume that most young people are gang members and consequently treat them as guilty until proven innocent.

“Because they live in certain areas or they dress a certain way, the kids get hassled by the police,” said Ayuyao, 26, coordinator of the Delinquency Prevention and Intervention unit of Search to Involve Pilipino Americans Inc.

The community organization serves Echo Park, Silver Lake and Temple-Beaudry, the heart of Los Angeles’ Filipino community. The area’s densely populated neighborhoods are just west of downtown Los Angeles, home to mostly working-class Latinos and Asians. The area is troubled by the increasing presence of gangs and other urban problems.

“The police have to do their jobs, but sometimes it’s done indiscriminately,” he said. “The police think (the kids) are all gang members. Whether they are or not, the kids see it as harassment.”

When police work is based on stereotypes, Ayuyao argues, the message he tries to instill in the youths is undermined. “They think no matter what they do, they’re going to get harassed, so they might as well just do it,” said Ayuyao, a Silver Lake native and a 1984 graduate of Marshall High School.

There were times, he recalled, when the Los Angeles Police Department’s Asian Task Force officers waited around the corner from the SIPA office on 3rd Street, where youths--some with prior encounters with law enforcement--came for services. “When the kids stepped out of our office, the police would hassle them,” he says.

These days, Asian Task Force officers are no longer as visible as they were five years ago, Ayuyao said, but feelings of distrust still dominate young people’s sentiments toward the men and women in blue.

Although generally critical of the police, Ayuayo applauded programs like the Youth Advocacy Project, which teams LAPD and other law enforcement agencies with community groups to offer alternatives to incarceration to young first-time offenders.

Ayuyao said he worries that LAPD officers are not properly trained to work with communities of color and he said LAPD needs more Asian officers, especially in his community.

“We don’t see many Asian officers around here,” he said.

According to Officer Arthur Holmes, an LAPD spokesman, there are 228 Asian-American officers out of the 7,832 on the force.