IN PERSON : From the ‘Hood to Campus, He Brings a Warning

A lifetime ago, when a 10-year-old Gregory C. Brown sometimes out-earned his mother by selling candy, when he saw his gang friends killed in the streets of South-Central Los Angeles, violent death was no stranger.

Now, as a Chapman University assistant professor of criminal justice, as a 36-year-old homeowner and dad in Irvine, he doesn’t hear daily gunfire anymore, the calling card of turf-protecting gangs. But he still sees what it does--this time, from the standpoint of a Ph.D. and an O.G., Original Gangster, as the old homeboys call him.

Someone who has been there, someone who has been shot at more than once.

Someone who understands what goes through a gang member’s mind on the “street of killers” when he shoots a 3-year-old girl to death on a dead-end street in Cypress Park, penance for the wrong turn her family friend made after returning from a barbecue.

“You have people who just want to make a name for themselves,” said Brown, who lectures on gang topics, sometimes inviting rival Bloods and Crips gang members to speak to his classes. “Hey, it doesn’t matter if they shot the wrong person. They shot someone under the color of their gang.”

Two decades ago, when Brown was gangbanging, there were rules, a line in the sand. You protected your ‘hood, you protected your boys. They broke the law--they robbed people and they stole--but there was understood honor among thieves.

“When I was in a gang, we had rules,” he said. “You don’t go and shoot somebody’s mother. You don’t shoot an innocent bystander. You don’t shoot a 3-year-old girl. If those things happened when I was in a gang, you would wind up getting hurt. When you make a mistake like that, it puts everybody in the community at danger.

“The youngsters today have no respect for anyone but the gang leaders. Everyone else is a casualty of that disregard for life. Consequently, what we have now is a battle zone, where we always had turf wars before. That’s different from a battle zone, where there’s a no-man’s land and if you walk in, you are bound to lose your life.

“Today you’re not afforded any of that kind of respect. That has a lot to do with people who have no respect for life. People who want to make a name for themselves quickly. The way you do that is to kill someone.”

Brown never shot or killed anyone; he declines to specify the sort of gang activity in which he partook. His gang was a notorious one--famous for killing people--with more than 200 members, so big that it had offshoots--the baby gang, the main gang, the female gang. He won’t name the gang for fear of retribution from old rivals, although he left that life behind two decades ago.

These days, he wears button-down shirts and suits to work, rides horses on weekends and goes home to a three-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood. But he says he is still the same person he was as a kid, the son of a mother who bore him at age 13, the gangbanger who once wrestled a knife away from a rival who was trying to kill him.

His students call him Chris. He wears two earring studs in his left ear. On his office wall, he posted an African flag with reggae singer Bob Marley’s face on it; at first, he thought he shouldn’t hang it because the singer is associated with marijuana smokers, but then decided, so what.

For Brown, college was his ticket out of gang life. These days, he said, gang members see no way out.

The tragic death of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen on Sept. 17, allegedly at the hands of the Avenues gang in an area known by some as “Street of the Assassins,” underscores a new level of senseless urban violence in Los Angeles, he said, and sends up a warning flare for Orange County: This is what can happen if the gang situation here gets worse.

Orange County’s gang culture is still young compared with that in Los Angeles County, he said. Law enforcement officials in Orange County have the chance that Los Angeles never had--to make a preemptive strike before more 3-year-olds are shot. Often, he said, because of the relative lack of high-profile gang killings in Orange County, public officials and residents here don’t pay much attention to the problem.

“What I think Orange County has learned from all this is you have to take gangs seriously,” he said. “I don’t think gangs were taken seriously by Los Angeles in the beginning.”

One way to fight gangs, he said, is for mothers, fathers, church officials and community leaders to start programs such as midnight basketball. The effort must be neighborhood-based, he said.

“No black brother who grew up in the ghetto is going to let a white man come in with a gun and badge--thinking he doesn’t like me and would kill me if he had the chance--and let him have a positive impact,” Brown said.

He gives the Orange Police Department high marks for its highly visible gang enforcement unit, beefy men in black who drive black cars. The message, he said, is, “You think you bad? Look at our gang.”

And he applauds county law enforcement for starting CRASH units, Community Resource Against Street Hoodlums, with police, probation officers and district attorney’s office personnel working on gang problems. That way, he said, agencies can track and compare notes on repeat offenders, who are sure to have had brushes with at least one of those departments before.

He wasn’t surprised when the Orange County district attorney’s office announced in June that a record 550 suspected gang members were charged last year with violent crimes including murder, robbery and drive-by shootings, up 18% from the previous year.

And he wasn’t surprised in his research to hear local police officers say that gang members shoot at them.

“Any time you have gangs that will try to assassinate cops, I think that’s a [potential] ‘Street of the Assassins’ situation,” he said.