O.C. Groups Fight Gangs by Offering Alternatives

James Strong, 23, and Jesus Rodriguez, 16, spend most afternoons playing soccer and basketball with children half their height in two of Orange County’s most gang-riddled neighborhoods. Both young men’s brothers were shot in the past 18 months. Now they are determined to help the next generation find sports and school instead of gangs and guns.

Antonio Acosta, 18, grew up a member of Buena Park’s Eastside gang. Last summer, he traded his baggy pants for a sombrero and cowboy boots and joined Club Novillero, one of a network of new quebradita dance troupes across the Southland.

“A lot of young people are leaving their gangs, alcohol and spray paint behind to join the (dance) clubs,” Acosta said after a recent performance at a local elementary school. “It makes us feel good not to be scared all the time.”

With gang membership skyrocketing and gang-related killings breaking records in Orange County, politicians, police officers, educators and community organizers are scrambling to combat the terror on the streets. Cities across Southern California are considering curfews, local schools have passed sweeping dress codes, and grass-roots groups and frustrated residents like Strong, Rodriguez and Acosta are springing up in all corners of the county to fight back.

A Santa Ana plumber is about to open an after-school boxing ring, complete with academic tutors.

A South County school administrator gives gang members part-time jobs in his office to keep them close to the classroom.

A church sends missionaries to inner-city community events to carry the banner: “God Loves the Gang Member.”

At Orange County’s gang prevention summit Tuesday, organizers urged the 1,000 delegates crammed into an Anaheim ballroom to swap business cards, “make hundreds of little connections” and join in a united, countywide effort to stamp out the growing gang problem.

“It’s not the schools, it’s not the police, it’s not the neighborhoods, it’s all of us,” said Rick Krey, gang program specialist in the Anaheim Union High School District. “The whole idea of making communities safe is literally a team effort. It’s not ‘us versus them,’ it’s ‘we.’ ”

While communities such as Lake Forest and Los Alamitos are just waking up to the problem, gang-scarred cities such as Santa Ana and Anaheim have had anti-gang programs in place for a decade or more. No one has found a quick-fix solution to get kids out of gangs or keep them from joining. But scores are working on it.

In the Classroom

Those who grapple with the gang problem each day sigh in despair when asked how to reform hard-core gang members. They would much rather talk about the positive steps they are taking to keep the little ones from joining gangs.

“Prevention is the hope of our communities,” said Nina Winn, director of the county’s safe schools program. “We need to focus our efforts and our dollars in prevention to help students and children turn to positive lifestyles instead of negative behaviors. . . . We need to get to younger and younger kids.”

To that end, Winn’s office oversees the nationally acclaimed Project YES curriculum, which was spearheaded several years ago by the Orange County Department of Education and is now in place in most local school districts (and 300 nationwide). Taught in grades 2 through 7, Project YES consists of five lessons per grade dealing with responsible citizenship, cultural diversity, choices and consequences, refusal skills and success.

The overall message: Don’t do drugs, stay out of gangs.

That same motto is repeated in the extracurricular Peer Assistance Leadership program, which the county’s Department of Education launched in 1980 and now operates in about 350 schools.

PAL trains campus leaders in conflict resolution and mediation and encourages youngsters to spread the anti-gang, anti-drug message to their classmates. In elementary schools, “PALs” patrol the playground in orange vests, on the lookout for trouble; in high schools, they meet weekly as a support group, and offer one-on-one counseling for teens with family problems, substance abuse, or school-related dilemmas.

“We learn about ourselves and ways to help other people, generally, how to be a good person and how to help other people who have problems (and) how to get other people to feel good about themselves,” said Jamie Burnett, a sophomore PAL at Foothill High School in Tustin.

Grade-schoolers sing the following song at countywide PAL training camps:

“I respect myself (uh huh). . . . I like to have fun you see (uh huh). . . . Look at me, I’m proud that I’m drug free (uh huh, oh yeah, uh huh). I can choose wisely (oh yeah). . . . I’m healthy as can be (oh yeah). . . . I refuse to lose, so drugs I won’t abuse. . . . I’d rather sing about good news than sing the blues!”

On the Playground

Telling youngsters to stay out of gangs is not enough, educators and community workers say: There has to be something else for them to do.

Gangs offer a group of friends with a full plate of activities (many of them criminal), officials say. To compete, anti-gang programs must provide a similar sense of camaraderie and fun and--especially--be cool.

So, Anaheim has Project Save a Youth, a network of community clubs operating three afternoons a week and Saturdays at various parks or neighborhood centers. Children 5 to 12 filter in after school to play non-competitive games such as telephone--games where nobody really wins and everybody is on the same team. Added to the recreation schedule is a curriculum designed to help build self-esteem and commitment to the community.

“If you take pride in your community, you’re not going to want to go out and destroy it or destroy the people in it,” SAY supervisor Debbie Moore said. “I don’t know if (the kids) would tell you, ‘Oh, we’re in a gang-prevention program.’ It’s more subtle than that: They’re there to have a good time.”

Wearing cutoff sweat pants and a Santa Ana Parks and Recreation Department T-shirt, James Strong blows his whistle and calls to order the meeting of the Diamond Elementary School PRIDE club to order. Run by the City of Santa Ana, Project PRIDE is almost a clone of Anaheim’s Project SAY: The clubs are intended as an alternative to the street clubs called gangs that have terrorized the neighborhoods.

“On my honor, I will pledge to help the City of Santa Ana fight the gang problem by not becoming a gang member myself,” the children repeat, phrase by phrase, at the start of each PRIDE club meeting. “I pledge to think positively about myself and to take PRIDE in my accomplishments. I pledge to do my best to help others remain gang free.”

Strong, a Cal State Fullerton student whose brother was killed in a gang shooting last summer, counts on athletics as an antidote to violence. That’s what kept him clean, so he hopes it will work for the children that clamor at his legs each day when he arrives to open the equipment shed. He teaches them soccer, basketball and board games, explaining that the most important rules are to respect each other and not put anyone down.

“They see me, and I’m not a gang member. They know I play a lot of sports and go to college, “ he says, proud to be a black, male, inner-city role model. “I’m just like them, but I didn’t have this” program.

From the Streets

The toughest part of the fight against gangs, experts agree, is saving youths who are already entrenched. Once in a gang, getting out costs at least a severe beating--at most, a bullet to the head.

“It’s a real personal thing, it’s like drug addiction,” said Andrea Paredes, one of five outreach workers who comb Anaheim schools and streets daily to talk with at-risk youth and their parents through the intervention component of Project SAY.

“Until you’re ready to let go, nobody is going to make you do it,” Paredes said. “Not your parent, not law enforcement, no one.”

But that doesn’t mean no one will try.

In the county’s most gang-riddled areas, outreach workers such as Paredes work full time with gang members and their families.

They know the gang members by name and are up-to-date on the latest street battles. They make home visits, warning parents of their children’s gang ties and trying to help smooth relations between the generations. Most, like Paredes, grew up in tough neighborhoods and are still young enough to relate; many are actually reformed gang members.

Also on the streets are urban missionaries, spreading a religious anti-gang message that is often accompanied by rap music. And, over the past several months, quebradita dance groups have grown increasingly popular in neighborhoods that have long been hot turf for gang recruitment.

With strict dress codes and rules prohibiting gang membership, alcohol or drug use, there are more than 500 such dance clubs in Los Angeles and Orange counties, with thousands of teen-age members. They celebrate Mexican culture in the fast-paced country-Western style quebradita dance as loud Banda music pulsates in the background.

“This is a great thing that’s happening for today’s young people,” Santa Ana police officer Jose Vargas said. “I am so proud of these kids. . . . I hope the quebradita clubs stay around until all gang members convert.”

Police in Santa Ana and Buena Park are working with club members to paint over graffiti and other community-improvement projects. For many youngsters, the clubs are a direct replacement for gangs.

“The clubs give them brothers and sisters who care and let them know that they have a soul, that they can think and feel and love their neighbors--not hate each other because they live on different streets,” said Cuauhtemoc Zaragoza, who works with Hermandad Mexicana Nacional of Orange County, an immigrants-rights group. “That, in turn, creates positive, productive members of society.”

Cops on the Beat

Despite all the prevention and intervention programs, law enforcement officials estimate that there are nearly 17,000 gang members in 275 gangs roaming Orange County streets. Police chiefs and county leaders say Westminster’s 2-year-old TARGET program is the best local model for reducing the crime and violence gangs cause.

TARGET teams up two police officers, an investigator and prosecutor from the district attorney’s office and a county probation officer. They brainstorm together in a subterranean office at the Westminster Police Department and cruise the city’s cafes and other gang hangouts together, handcuffs at the ready.

The program focuses on hard-core gang leaders in a targeted area in hopes that removing the kingpins will leave other gang members in limbo.

“With this coordinated team, we can move with warp speed through an antiquated judicial system,” said Westminster Police Chief James Cook, who doggedly pushed for the specialized program and beams when he talks about it now. “They can do their work faster, better and to a higher quality standard.”

As of September, police officers had arrested 54 of the 75 gang leaders targeted by the program, and 34 of those had been prosecuted. Police Department statistics show that gang members were responsible for only 10% of the city’s violent crimes so far this year, compared to 25% last year and 24% in 1991.

Because of this success, Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael A. Capizzi has lobbied the Orange County Board of Supervisors for $1 million to launch copycat TARGET programs across the county.

Alongside the TARGET program, Westminster tried a far more controversial program this year to rid the city of a gang that has reigned on its streets for more than a generation.

In June, city officials obtained a temporary court order that declared the West Trece gang a public nuisance and prevented about 50 suspected members from “standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering or appearing anywhere in public view” in a 25-block neighborhood the gang claimed as its turf.

A judge declared the order unconstitutional Aug. 31, but city officials are appealing. Still, West Trece members are scarce these days in the neighborhood.

“The cops are on us, trying to bust us for associating,” 16-year-old West Trece member Javier said one afternoon last week as he walked home from school. “That’s why there’s no one out here.”

Other cities around Southern California have experimented with curfews that prohibit people under 18 from being out late at night without a parent or guardian. Stanton passed a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew Nov. 23. Because of the increase in graffiti and other crime, state and local officials adopted beach curfews in Newport Beach and Huntington Beach last summer.

Elsewhere in the Southland, Norwalk has a curfew and Long Beach Mayor Ernie Kell is pushing for a similar program that would fine parents and take away the drivers’ licenses of youths who are repeat offenders.

In Norwalk--a Los Angeles County city of 11 square miles that has about 2,000 members in seven gangs--the curfew yields about 60 arrests each month. Graffiti is down 70% since the city began to enforce the curfew in 1990, and there has been only one gang-related killing this year, compared to four in 1992.

Elsewhere, in a larger metropolitan area, Phoenix began enforcing its curfew last May and has seen a 17% drop in the number of teen-agers arrested for violent crime after curfew in the past six months. In several troubled neighborhoods, violence has been “squelched to nothing,” said Phoenix Lt. John Augustyn. The curfew “puts a heck of a crimp in the gang style.”

Does it Work?

Most prevention and intervention programs either have not been in place long enough or lack adequate funding to evaluate their effectiveness.

“Gangs didn’t come here overnight, they’ve been here for generations,” said Ruben Lopez, an Anaheim outreach worker. “Now, with schools fighting it and community people fighting it, with more and more organizations, it will just take a few more generations to get rid of it.

“It’s one of the old scenarios, it has to get worse before it gets better.”

Those who run the programs say they are optimistic that building self-esteem and giving kids something productive to do in their free time will keep gangs from growing. But dozens of gang members interviewed say no government mandate or community program can halt the violence.

Only the gang members themselves, they say, can decide to stop the bloodshed.

“If they say, ‘This is bad,’ that ain’t going to work because most kids when they’re growing up, they’re rebels. They just do the opposite of what (authorities) say,” said Francisco, 15, whose mother recently moved to Huntington Beach to keep him away from his gang in Paramount.

The teen-ager suggested scaring kids by bringing veteran gang members into schools to show their scars and relive the danger: not movies or pictures, he said, real people.

Francisco, who has a gang tattoo on the back of his neck, laughed as he remembered the gang-prevention programs he went through in elementary school. Just after he joined the East Side Paramount gang, at 14, Francisco received in the mail a crayon drawing he had made in fourth grade. “Say No to Gangs” said the caption over his childish rendering of a gang member.

That was then.

Times staff writers Alicia Di Rado, Kevin Johnson and Eric Young and correspondent Mimi Ko contributed to this report.

Resisting Gangs

Government agencies and nonprofit private groups offer anti-gang assistance and information programs. Many services are free.

* Orange County Gang Hot Line, (800) NO GANGS (664-2647). Confidential hot line offers crisis intervention counseling and resource referrals for youth and parents.

* Caltrans Orange County Graffiti Hot Line, (714) 724-2500. 24-hour hot line to report graffiti on state highways or freeway walls and bridges.

* Community Service Programs Inc. Gang Prevention Program, (714) 250-0488. Works with police, Orange County Probation Department, schools, businesses, churches, parents and community organizations. Based in Irvine; provides parent education, support groups, recreational activities.

* Community United for Fullerton Safety, (714) 966-4164. Interagency project combines police, schools, Orange County Probation Department and community groups in fight against gangs. This is an Orange County Department of Education program.

* Juvenile Connection Program, (714) 972-4859. Offers assessments and referral program for at-risk youth and families. Based in Orange; provides parent education workshops.

* Orange County Youth Gang Action Committee, (714) 241-6428. Provides forum for county agencies to collaborate on gang situation. Based at Valley High School, Santa Ana; presentations and information available.

* Peer Assistance Leadership Program (PAL), (714) 966-4337. Countywide project between Orange County Health Care Agency and Orange County Department of Education. Offers peer counseling, has gang prevention curriculum at elementary, junior high and high schools.

* Pat McCormick Educational Foundation, (310) 493-3733. Seal Beach-based foundation dedicated to helping high-risk students remain in school, gang-free and drug-free. Focuses on youngsters 10 to 13.

* Project PRIDE, (714) 647-5399. Santa Ana-based. Aimed at increasing youth participation in city recreation programs. Targets elementary, intermediate school students. Has bilingual staff.

* Project Save a Youth (SAY), (714) 254-5246. Anaheim-based. Designed a self-esteem curriculum for schools, provides outreach workers for at-risk youth and gang members and runs after-school and weekend programs at local parks and community centers.

* Safe Haven Project, (714) 571-4235. Offers youngsters positive alternatives to drugs and gangs; has education programs for parents on topics such as gangs, drugs and parents’ rights and responsibilities. Based at Santa Ana’s Jerome Center. Has bilingual staff.

* Santa Ana Gang Diversion Information Line, (714) 836-5458. Information line provides free and confidential information on services in Santa Ana and elsewhere in the county for youth. Has bilingual staff.

* Santa Ana Unified School District’s No Weapons Hot Line, (800) 662-4867. 24-hour hot line allows students, parents and other residents to anonymously alert school officials about weapons on school campuses.

* Save Our Youth, (714) 545-0753. Costa Mesa parents’ organization established to create a safe, alternative environment for children.

* Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., (714) 558-6009. Santa Ana-based. Offers assistance to at-risk and incarcerated Vietnamese youth. Aims to be a link among parents, law enforcement and school authorities. Has bilingual staff.

* Victory Outreach Church, (714) 554-2171. Santa Ana-based church offers diversionary activities, gang intervention and counseling for youth. Has bilingual staff.

* WAVE (We’re Against Violence Everywhere), (310) 690-2330. Network of residents, police, businesses and school officials in La Habra works on gang intervention, prevention and suppression. Committees focus on the family, neighborhood, civic matters and school mentor programs.

* Youth Gang and Drug Intervention Program, (714) 834-9331. Established at Santa Ana’s Templo Calvario to help decrease gang activity and drug abuse countywide. Offers counseling and outreach programs to neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent. Support groups and diversionary activities for gang members and presentations to schools and police departments.

* YMCA of Orange County, (714) 549-9622. Provides various alternative activities countywide aimed at keeping youth out of trouble and gangs.

Law Enforcement Programs

* TARGET (Tri-Agency Resources Gang Enforcement Team), (714) 898-3315. Focuses efforts to step up gang enforcement in specific areas involving the Westminster Police Department, Orange County Probation Department and Orange County district attorney’s office.

* Orange County Probation Department Gang Violence Suppression Unit, (714) 569-2213. Provides intense supervision and strict requirements for gang members on probation and works with local police in conducting sweeps of gang probation violators. Active in presenting community talks about gangs and the problems they cause.

* Anaheim Police Department Gang Enforcement Unit, (714) 254-1411. Conducts gang suppression and investigations operations, along with activities within the neighborhoods.

* Orange County District Attorney’s Office Gang Unit, (714) 935-7161. Prosecutes gang members. Offers training seminars and gang manuals for both law enforcement agencies and schools.

Source: Individual organizations

Researched by GREG HERNANDEZ / Los Angeles Times

Special Report: Troubled Turf

Sunday: The countywide growth of gangs and its toll.

Monday: Street talk about living in the line of fire.

Tuesday: Leaders, residents, gang members seek answers.

Wednesday: Coverage of Orange County’s first anti-gang summit.

Today: What works in fighting back against gangs.