Viewing of Autopsies Draws Fire : Crime prevention: Coroner’s office plans to have at-risk teen-agers watch examinations of their slain comrades. But critics say the anti-gang program could make the youths more hardened.

Raul Alvarado’s field trip to the horror show was a breeze--until he saw a fellow member of his gang lying naked and dead on a gurney, awaiting the knife.

Stunned into silence, he was led down the hall at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, where he watched as much of another gangbanger’s autopsy as he could take.

For a long time, Alvarado would not talk. It took him most of the morning to get over the experience.

As he struggled with his feelings on that day five months ago, Alvarado was closely watched by county officials. He was helping to test a program in which youths would gather in the warehouse of corpses to watch slain gang members getting post-mortem examinations as a staff member explains the procedure.

The idea is to turn them away from gangs.

The 20-year-old Alvarado told officials it would work--but only for much younger gang members.

Partly as a result, the controversial program is to start next month after an expected approval by the Board of Supervisors. The board has appropriated $50,000 for the program’s first year. But opposition has arisen.

Believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, the idea is loosely based on Scared Straight, a 1970s program in which teen-agers where shown the worst of prison life by inmates of New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison.

Supporters say it could help strip away the romance of gang murder that TV shows and gang funerals portray.

“It’s not as clean and beautiful as it looks on the street and in the funeral,” said Mark Cooper, the coroner’s chief of disaster and community services. “We want to show them what goes on here, what happens to a body once it is taken from the homicide scene. We don’t want to scare them but to educate them.”

“It is not a very glamorous or pleasant process,” said Rob Garrott, who heads the coroner’s fledgling Gang Diversion Task Force. “You wouldn’t want it to happen to your friends, and you certainly wouldn’t want it to happen to yourself.

“It is very graphic.”

Some experts, however, doubt that watching an autopsy will frighten gang-prone youths into lawfulness. Instead, they believe that the experience will further desensitize the violent ones and traumatize the rest.

Citing serious concerns, the county’s Violence Prevention Coalition, made up of private and government experts, sent a letter last week to the coroner’s office saying that the program could “really have a psychologically numbing impact and result in denial or actually trigger a violent reaction.”

“People were quite dismayed about it,” Billie Weiss, the coalition’s administrator, said of the program. “We don’t think showing them an autopsy will have the effect they are looking for, and research supports that.” Weiss is an epidemiologist with the county Department of Health Services.

Los Angeles Detective Bill Humphry said the autopsy visits are “a terrible idea.”

He agrees that they will make an impact. He has seen hundreds of bodies in 24 years on the force and says he will never forget his first autopsy.

“So for somebody that is 13 or 15 or 18, even if they’ve grown up on the street, watching a human being lying there and being carved up like a piece of meat is just too gruesome,” said Humphry, commander of an anti-gang unit in the San Fernando Valley.

But he believes that the experience will have the opposite effect from the one sought.

“These kids are hard enough,” he said. “We don’t need to make them harder.”

Weiss, Humphry and others suggested that gang members be shown a lifesaving operation or be forced to work with paralyzed gang members.

“If these kids spent a day in an emergency room instead, they would have an appreciation for life and an appreciation that their actions can affect not just one individual but their whole family, a whole scenario of victims,” said coalition member Anthony Borbon, a program consultant at Community Youth Gang Services.

Garrott said coroner’s officials were studying the coalition’s objections.

“Everyone has warned us to be careful, which is why we haven’t started sooner,” he said. “We welcome the criticism because we really want a good program.”

Coroner officials cite differences between Scared Straight, which was widely criticized, and their program.

Scared Straight is believed to have sometimes backfired because there was little counseling and follow-up. Some youngsters said that the visits to Rahway made prison life attractive, Cooper said.

He said the coroner’s office will draw on its experience in bringing in youths convicted of drunk driving to tour the office and glimpse autopsies.

A gang expert and mental health worker will screen youngsters in anti-gang programs to see if they are mentally stable and not emotionally hardened. The participants will get at least six months follow-up and counseling.

The first ones are to come from South and East Los Angeles, Paramount, Compton and Lennox. After a year, officials hope to expand the effort countywide.

One of the program’s biggest supporters is Pam Rector, a gang counselor at Lennox Middle School and a member of the coroner’s task force. Rector coaxed Alvarado into the coroner’s office in August.

Alvarado was a hardened gang member fresh from prison with a tattoo identifying his Lennox 13 “set” on his forehead, she said.

He was horrified to see his comrade’s corpse, Rector said. The pair had been together the previous Saturday night.

“He got really white and really quiet,” Rector said. “One of the things that was amazing to Raul was how alone you are in there, all cold and alone.”

Alvarado, who is back in prison and declined to be interviewed, could watch only a small portion of another victim’s autopsy before walking away. Afterward, he said such a program would help scare youngsters away from joining gangs but would not make older members disavow their affiliations, Rector said.

In an interview, another Lennox gang member, nicknamed Evil, said the program could help. But he went on:

“You’ve got to get them when they’re young. Thirteen-years-old and they’ve already watched their brothers and cousins, and they’re excited--they like the power, the girls, the glamour.”

The best age for autopsy visits, he said, would be before the age of 10.