LAPD Beefs Up Venice Patrols to Halt Gang War

The streets of Venice swarmed with police officers Saturday, providing at least a temporary respite in a bloodthirsty gang war that is killing bystanders and changing the rhythm of life in the funky beach community.

“We’ve got what I would call an army of officers deployed,” said Capt. Richard LeGarra, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Division. “We look at this as a public emergency.”

LeGarra said that about 100 extra police officers would be at work in Venice through the weekend--nearly five times the normal complement on the busiest shifts.

Two killings Friday morning prompted the increased police deployment and were the latest in a furious and complex gang war that has killed at least 17 people since it erupted last fall. The attacks have pitted black and Latino gangs against each other and, according to police intelligence reports, may be fueled in part by the Mexican Mafia, which is said to be trying to seize control of the neighborhood drug trade from black gangs and supplying Latino gangs with some of their weapons.

Although centered in the Oakwood section of Venice--a mile-square neighborhood that is home to more homicides than any other area on the Westside--the war has affected the entire community, with attacks reported in other parts of Venice and in neighboring Mar Vista.

As the violence has spread, it has cast a specter of fear across much of Venice--an eclectic community that bristles with an energetic mix of artists and householders, tourists and weightlifters, beach bums and gourmets, rich and poor. In some neighborhoods, people who once went to the market at night now do their shopping during daylight, and residents who visited friends in the evenings now use the phone.

“At night, no one goes out,” Domitilo Aguayo, 47, said Saturday as he watched his two young sons play baseball in a park. “They’re shooting at anyone, not necessarily gang members. That’s new. If you have the wrong haircut, they mow you down. You live in fear.”

Nearby, Clarke Martin, 32, a maintenance worker who used to live in Oakwood, said he now steers clear of his old neighborhood and its increasingly violent racial tension.

“With the black and brown battles, I just try to stay out of the way,” Martin said. “It seems like the gangs are all over the place now.”

Among the people shot in the attacks were a UCLA nurse and a man sitting in his car while taking his children to school.

“There’s no reason or rationale for some of these, at least that we’ve been able to determine,” LeGarra said.

The apparent randomness of some attacks, as well as the geographic spread of the violence, has projected fear into art galleries, popular restaurants and the beachfront.

Some residents say they have taken to living in the back rooms of their homes so they will be protected from any bullets that might be fired from a passing automobile. Others say they have altered their routes to work.

“I worried about it coming to work today,” said Jan Gillen, 36, assistant to the director of the Bobbie Greenfield Fine Art Gallery in a trendy section of Venice.

Gillen said she chose a different route to work Saturday so she would not pass anywhere near Oakwood. “Flying bullets hit anyone,” she added, “regardless of color.”

Greenfield said the recent violence has escalated to the point that it has become impossible to ignore.

“This is a new experience,” she said. “You know, the perception of danger. We are all going through this for the first time.”

In an effort to at least temporarily restore the peace, the LAPD assigned more than 100 extra officers to patrol Venice over the weekend focusing their attention on potential hot spots such as Oakwood and Mar Vista and stretches along the beach where large crowds of summer visitors regularly descend. Special gang units and crime suppression details known as “mobile field forces” were dispatched. Normal patrol forces were increased as well.

By early afternoon, dozens of officers were patrolling the boardwalk, sometimes four abreast, amid the usual collection of jugglers, musicians and other assorted street performers. Police trucks, black-and-whites and unmarked police cars were cruising the area. Police reported little trouble through the busy afternoon.

“It’s the usual crowd,” said Officer Larry Nichols, watching the thick boardwalk crowds as he stood next to three parked police cruisers.

LeGarra said officers were working 10-hour days and that some days off had been canceled. As the officers prepared to hit the streets Saturday morning, Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents the area and who was a victim of a former gang member’s violent attack in 1987, attended their roll call to thank them for putting in the extra time.

Residents, many of them frightened and weary from eight months of gang battles, welcomed the influx of officers.

“Their presence makes a difference,” said Pearl White, 74, an Oakwood resident who has lobbied the police and City Council for years. “The people here are overjoyed. Now if they’d just stay.”

Boardwalk merchant Lucas Silva, 34, echoed White’s comments, saying he was glad for the extra police. But he added that he would have preferred that the LAPD send more officers and that it commit them for a longer stay.

As he spoke, Silva sat on a stool outside his Universal Art framing store. But with sundown approaching, he said he planned to move inside.

“After 4 o’clock, I don’t sit outside,” he said. “A bullet can hit you anytime.”

LeGarra conceded that the deployment was only temporary.

“We’ve got the area saturated right now,” he said. “But obviously, we can’t keep that up forever.”

While patrol officers pounded the pavement, gang detectives and homicide investigators from the Pacific Division tried to ferret out clues in the most recent killings. Two teen-agers were slain and two others were wounded Friday morning. The teen-agers, all Latino students at Dorsey High School, were not believed to be gang members. Three suspects, all of them black, were being sought, and police would not comment on the investigation.

Despite the extra investigators, police concede that they still do not fully understand the reasons for the recent rash of violence.

Intelligence reports gathered by the Oakwood Task Force, a special unit assigned to combat the gang violence, suggest that a web of territorial disputes, a quest for control of the local drug trade and racial tension all have contributed to the violence.

According to those reports, the gang tension began when a Latino gang known as the Culver City Boys took over drug trafficking in the Mar Vista area from the Shoreline Crips, a black gang. Tensions grew and erupted into warfare, those reports add, after the Culver City Boys and V-13, another Latino gang, struck a truce in the Oakwood area and began to gather there, a development that angered members of the Shoreline Crips.

What has followed has been a deadly cycle of violence and retaliation, much of it racially motivated.

“You have a black who shoots a Hispanic,” LeGarra said. “When that happens, you can be sure you’ll have a Hispanic shoot a black. It goes on and on.”

Fed up with the violence, Oakwood residents have banded in an attempt to get police and city officials to devote more resources to fighting crime in their neighborhood. Many in the community have rallied behind the effort.

“If you love a place like we love it over here, you can’t help but be involved in it,” said White, who has lived in Oakwood since 1945. “And we love it over here. We don’t have any money, but we have one thing: We have pride.”

Last month, about 40 Oakwood residents appeared before the Los Angeles Police Commission, and commission President Gary Greenebaum has been meeting with residents and police commanders in a search for a lasting solution to the violence.

Although Greenebaum is hopeful that police can make a difference, he admits that real progress has been difficult to achieve.

“Everybody says something’s got to change, something’s got to give,” he said. “I just don’t know what it’s going to be.”