Crime Summit Opens With Call for Tougher Penalties : Law enforcement: Governor begins with emotional memorial to victims. Sessions have political overtones.

Surrounded by the mothers and fathers of murdered children, Gov. Pete Wilson opened his crime summit Monday at a Hollywood church by renewing his call for increased penalties for violent criminals.

The summit began with an emotional memorial service in the chapel of Hollywood Presbyterian Church, where photographs of more than 100 murder victims, most of them children, lined the walls.

“This summit is to bring change, to make this state the safe and civilized place it was once and can be again,” Wilson said at the memorial. “We have a right, each one of us, to never become a crime victim.”

While the topic is a familiar one, the governor’s crime summit is an unprecedented gathering of the state’s highest officials, experts and victims of crime to discuss the best ways to prevent and punish criminal behavior. Wilson moderated panels on crime against women and children, school violence and crime prevention. More sessions are scheduled for today.

Among those gathered were a number of Orange County officials, including Rudy Castruita, Santa Ana Unified School District superintendent, and San Juan Capistrano Mayor Collene Campbell, who offered gripping testimony about her personal losses due to violence.

The event was rife with political overtones, as the subject of the conference coincides with one of the major themes of Wilson’s campaign for reelection. A Wilson aide said the governor’s campaign will purchase a videotape of the publicly funded event, presumably for use in television commercials.

“It was good that the governor’s campaign kicked off with a crime summit,” said Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove), a likely candidate for state attorney general. “But I don’t know how many minds will be changed as a result of this. I didn’t hear Wilson say any new things. That’s a bit disappointing but not unexpected.”

Nor was the political significance lost on Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), an official of Wilson’s own political stripe.

“Most of what everybody is saying here is known by everybody in California who still is breathing,” Ferguson said. “The only real good that comes out of these things is politicians are apt to make statements that they’ll have to follow through on.

“It seems that crime is finally being taken seriously,” Ferguson said. “But a meeting like this probably wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for crime getting into places like Beverly Hills and Newport Beach. That’s sad.”

Many of the crime victims who appeared at the governor’s side have been involved in past anti-crime efforts, including the 1986 campaign to unseat California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

“It’s an election year,” said James Steyer, executive director of Children Now, an advocacy group that favors prevention programs over punishment. Steyer, a member of one of the panels, said in an interview, “The governor, shrewd politician that he is, read the public mood, and he captured the issue by saying how tough he was going to be. Now we’ve got Democrats and Republicans in a bidding war to see how tough they can be. But it’s all rhetoric.”

Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, among the officials who traveled from Sacramento to attend the event, defended Wilson’s decision to convene the summit, which was labeled by the governor’s Democratic challengers as a campaign event.

“It is a campaign event, but I don’t think that’s inconsistent with substance coming out of it,” said Brown, who convened an economic summit last year and is convening his own education summit in San Francisco next week.

There were repeated calls for passage of the “three strikes and you’re out” initiative headed for the November ballot and other tough anti-crime bills, including a truth-in-sentencing measure that would reduce credits inmates earn for good behavior.

Participants called for “zero tolerance” of guns and violence in school, requiring children to wear school uniforms and withholding a portion of welfare payments to parents whose children break the law.

Atty. Gen. Daniel Lungren, noting that he gains a “tremendous clarity of vision” when he views crime through the eyes of crime victims, repeated his call for legislation requiring the public release of names, photos and descriptions of all paroled child molesters. In Lungren’s proposal, the information would be available in public libraries.

Amid the talk of tougher criminal penalties, Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) made a renewed call for gun control. He referred to mass killings at 101 California Street in San Francisco last year and at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton in 1989, and noted that neither killer had a significant criminal history. Both would have been on the streets whether or not there were laws providing for life sentences for habitual criminals.

“Those victims can only be saved if we reduce firepower and make sure that the nuts in our society don’t have the firepower to kill the kids,” Roberti said.

In an interview, Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams, who attended the conference along with Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, tempered some of the politicians’ law-and-order proposals for tougher sentences by calling also for “treatment, rehabilitation and education.”

“They absolutely must be part of any comprehensive crime package,” Williams said.

At the first panel discussion, which focused on violence against women and children, a San Diego County judge said that imposing life sentences on child molesters, which Wilson has proposed, could backfire.

Superior Court Judge Harry Elias said he feared that long sentences could cause a decline in prosecutions because people would be more reluctant to report the crime.

“It’s a mistake to put everyone in the same cookie-cutter scenario,” Elias said.

But the day’s overriding theme was struck at the morning memorial to murder victims.

The service took on the tone of a convention of crime victims and their surviving family members. Several of them wept during the memorial, and members of Justice for Murdered Victims, Parents of Murdered Children, Justice for Homicide Victims and other groups wore yellow ribbons in remembrance of those they have buried.

Campbell, whose son, Scott, was murdered in 1982 and whose brother also was murdered, introduced Wilson as “our friend, our champion.” Campbell noted that Wilson’s grandfather, a Chicago police officer, was killed in the line of duty.

Pastor Lloyd Ogilvie of Hollywood Presbyterian Church opened the ceremony with a call for tougher sentences, more prisons and a limit on death penalty appeals.

“Enough! Enough! Enough!” Ogilvie said in a booming voice. “We will not live with tyranny.”

Wilson, meanwhile, used a speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Monday night to propose several new measures to fight hate crimes.

The governor suggested increasing penalties for hate crimes, developing hate-crime curriculum for schools and establishing a special system to track crimes motivated by prejudice or bigotry.

The opening of the Los Angeles crime meeting coincided Monday with the first gathering of local officials following Orange County’s gang violence summit held in November.

Huntington Beach Police Chief Ronald E. Lowenberg, a member of the Orange County Gang Prevention Alliance Executive Committee, said the group will meet every month in an attempt to formulate successful anti-gang and anti-crime strategies.

“I think we have a group assembled that will check the egos at the door,” Lowenberg said. “This issue is too important.”

In its first meeting, committee members reviewed notes submitted by delegates to the November summit, many of whom expressed concern about the lack of parental responsibility and the overall operation of the state criminal justice system.

“The criminal justice system hasn’t worked in a long time,” Lowenberg said. “Whether (the breakdown) is real or perceived, people see police arresting criminals only to see them back out on the streets in a very short time. People know there is something wrong. I’ve seen it deteriorate for years.”

Times staff writer Kevin Johnson contributed to this report.