Breaking Up the Old Gang : Officers From LAPD’s Anti-Gang Unit Will Be Redeployed to Other Divisions

In an effort to give police more local control in their fight against gangs, the Los Angeles Police Department is preparing to disband its Westside anti-gang unit and distribute the officers among the four Westside LAPD divisions.

Starting next month, the 47-member CRASH unit, an acronym for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, will send officers to the West Los Angeles, Wilshire, Hollywood and Pacific divisions, officials said.

The unit’s decentralization comes amid a campaign by the Police Department to promote community-based policing strategies.

Traditionally, all Westside officers of the unit were deployed from a single police office in West Los Angeles and dispatched to the area’s four divisions depending on gang activity, said Deputy Chief Bayan Lewis, the department’s director of operations.

The new alignment will give smaller units to each of the four divisions, with their respective area commanders responsible for deployment, Lewis said.

“The captains are responsible for everything that happens in their areas, including the gang problems,” he said. “If we hold them responsible, we need to give them the necessary resources to do their jobs.”

The number of West Bureau gang officers assigned to each division has not been determined, said Lt. John Weaver, the unit’s commander. The areas with the most serious gang problems, such as the Wilshire and Hollywood divisions, can expect more officers, he said.

A small group of anti-gang officers will remain at the central unit office in West Los Angeles to process computerized information and make it accessible to the various units.

The West Bureau gang unit is the last of the four LAPD bureaus to be turned over to the individual divisions, police officials said.

The unit has always done a good job keeping track of the dozen or so large Latino gangs in Hollywood, said the Hollywood Division commander, Capt. Glen Ackerman. But now, he said, gang officers can become more familiar with local problems and residents’ expectations.

But not everyone is pleased with the decentralization.

Weaver said he was sorry to see the elite unit disbanded, adding that many of the officers are unhappy with the plan.

“Any time there is change, you’re going to see some resistance,” Weaver said. “Especially when our unit has been so successful, it was hard for some of them to see why the unit should be changed.”

On the LAPD’s Westside turf, gang-related crimes dropped 15% in 1994 from the previous year, Weaver said. The unit in the past year has solved 80% of gang-related homicides, and 42% gang-related crimes overall, he added. Crimes are designated as being gang-related when the suspect or victims are identified as gang members, or if an informant identifies the incident as gang activity.

Weaver said he believes that most crimes committed on the Westside by people between the ages of 16 and 25 years are gang-related. He said there is no reliable estimate of the number of gang members in Los Angeles. But, he said, the 18th Street gang may have as many as 30,000 members in Southern California.

“And that’s just one gang,” Weaver said. “That’s probably more than all the cops in the six counties in Southern California.”