Children in the Streets : In Your Face : BABY INSANE AND THE BUDDHA: How a Crip and a Cop Joined Forces to Shut Down a Street Gang, By Bob Sipchen (Doubleday: $20; 370 pp.)

Baby Insane is a Neighborhood Crip from San Diego who turned informant; the Buddha is a cop, so tagged by fellow detectives, it is revealed, not for his omniscience but for his belly. Still, the more charitable interpretation of the nickname fits detective Patrick Birse, portrayed as the wise old man of the San Diego Police Department. The cop handled the Crip with threats (“If we’re able to convict you, you’ll be sitting in a penitentiary, isn’t that true? . . . And I will be the one who does it. Is that understood?”) combined with respect (“He was like a father. He asked me, ‘What do you want out of life?’ ” recalls Baby Insane). Author Bob Sipchen treats them both with respect in a narrative that nicely lends equal weight to the perspectives of the cop and the ex-criminal.

The Crip turned state’s witness, or snitch to his friends in the ‘hood, who would have executed him the minute they suspected. Behind smoked glass he rode the streets with the Buddha, helping him see through the eyes of the Crips. As police cameras watched, he moved into a bugged apartment and did drug deals. Baby Insane’s collaboration with the San Diego police and the FBI led to the biggest gang-related drug bust on record. “I did so much bad, now I did something good. I’m sure I saved some mother that phone call to come and identify her son’s body, or get him scraped up from the cement.”

Baby Insane (born Kevin Glass) got his name at age 10, after having spray-painted the street name of a 15-year-old he admired on the pavement. “Insane” and his fellow homies surrounded Kevin and beat him up till Insane shouted to stop. “From now on you can be Baby Insane,” he said in “Godfather” intonations. “Uphold the name. Never betray Crip. Always protect your own.” Thus Kevin, a newcomer to the neighborhood, an orphan being raised by his uncle, was launched on a career of crime.

He upheld the name. As he grew, he displayed a juiced-up ruthlessness, a callous cruelty that will seem mind-boggling to anyone not on the street. When he traveled to hostile turf for drive-by shootings of rival gang members he said that if they didn’t want to get killed they shouldn’t have been standing outside in that neighborhood. When he robbed, he didn’t mess around: One evening he and his homies drove a stolen Toyota through the plate-glass window of a sporting-goods store, scooped up running suits and then moved on to another neighborhood, where they threw a magazine rack through the window of an electronics store, then swiped three VCRs, a Sony boom box and a clock radio.

Zooming off the freeway at 100 miles an hour, they lost the pursuing cops, then decided to chill out while listening to a police scanner they had lifted from a Radio Shack. Around 1 a.m., the tireless robbers were up for another hit; this time, using bolt-cutters, they snipped the grate of a gun store and made away with semiautomatic weapons and ammunition. Things were going so well, they decided to cap the night off with one last adventure. First they stole a Pinto, then drove it through the window of a video store. They ended the evening at dawn, watching the movies--”Debbie Does Dallas,” “Rambo” and “Superman”--and admiring their new firepower.

When you read “Baby Insane and the Buddha,” you experience so many high-speed chases, drug deals, armed robberies and drive-by shootings that you become almost inured to the life. In long hours of interviews, Times staff writer Bob Sipchen reconstructed Baby Insane’s gangster days down to the details of who stole every getaway car, who drove it, where they parked it and what kind of car it was (they were partial to Toyota Z’s; what does it say about the economy when crooks won’t even steal American?)

Sipchen spares us none of the gory details either: When people get blown away, “red wet chunks” and “cantaloupe-sized chunks of gray matter” adhere to walls, ceilings and concrete floors. Sipchen’s style confirms the common outside-of-L.A. suspicion that every writer there would rather be doing screenplays. This is a script for an action thriller with a moral: A lone maverick cop like the Buddha can still fight crime in the Wild West without degenerating to the level of the gangsters. He can even convert a kid like Kevin Glass to the straight and narrow as part of the deal.

But can the street gangs be controlled? Baby Insane, despite his efforts and the risk he took, doesn’t think so: “In my opinion it’s too late. You can’t do nothing to stop ‘em.”

Gangs--and drug use--are spreading. Jobs, legitimate incomes and educational opportunities are shrinking. Kids need gangs, says Baby Insane, “because they don’t have a family structure. They can get money from them. Have people to protect them.” Where will it end? Prisons are so overcrowded that in California some local governments are now paying stiff fines over prison conditions. And few gangsters can escape the life, like Kevin, through the witness-protection program, which he viewed, probably rightly, as his only ticket out of the ghetto.

The program gave Kevin the second chance he otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, and if being treated like an individual and getting a new start in a new setting did so much for Kevin, then somehow the larger solution has to have some of the same elements. For all the talk about rebuilding community, the American way has always been to leave our origins behind. The secret of our success is escaping the past through immigration and then regional migration; to be upwardly mobile you have to be geographically mobile too. But the boys in the ‘hood are stuck.

Sipchen steps out of his screenwriter mode to give us some deeper perspectives on urban gangs. America’s association of blacks with urban gangs is entirely ahistorical. Gangs have always been made up of the out-groups, the poor, the oppressed, the immigrants. Throughout the 19th Century, heavily armed gangs looted, burned and killed. At the time of the Civil War, one commentator wrote of gangs, “Perhaps ninety percent were cocaine addicts.” In the 1920s, a scholar documented 1913 Chicago street gangs composed of Poles, Italians, Irish, Jews, Slavs, Germans and Swedes.

In Los Angeles, the earliest gangs date from the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the Crips were probably not formed until the early ‘70s. They are not so entrenched as to be reasonably considered ineradicable, despite Baby Insane’s view. Increasing opportunity and assimilation into the mainstream historically have allowed other ethnic groups to break free from the lawlessness that flourishes in poverty. Persistent structural racism inhibits that process for blacks; the escape to the middle class is painfully slow and endlessly resisted.

When blacks move into white neighborhoods, whites flee and yes, property values fall; since property taxes pay for schools, schools in black neighborhoods are rarely as good as schools in white ones. There will be no road out for most of the black poor until America decides to at least try some obvious and (compared to national prison costs) affordable remedies, such as investing in social programs like Head Start and guaranteeing equal educational opportunity to all kids.

Sipchen found a terrific story that was crying to be told. He tells it with gritty realism, not false hope. But the gang life will not end unless Americans share the Buddha’s realization that black people (or as is now fashionable to say but no different in essence, black “culture”) cannot be blamed for the predicament of the urban poor. Blacks react to poverty and inequality no differently than whites do, but have been mired in hopelessness far longer.