Peace Thrives Where Terror Reigned

Back when gang bullets ripped through Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood, when gun battles raged between the V-13s and the Shoreline Crips, longtime residents dared not walk down the street or take their kids to the park. Even gang members found it too dangerous to stand outside to deal drugs in the neighborhood, which is roughly half a mile inland from Venice Beach.

Nine unprecedented months of gang warfare--from fall 1993 until June 1994--left at least 17 dead and 55 wounded.

Two years later, the scene is decidedly different. Youths play softball at the park and throw footballs out on the Venice High School field. Some residents work side by side on new construction jobs that have flowed into the neighborhood. And most important, according to police, neighborhood activists and residents, Oakwood is no longer under a violent siege.

A gang truce--brokered in June 1994 by probation officers, community leaders and gang members--is credited with ending the reign of terror.

Even as other gang truces have fractured--including one in the San Fernando Valley and another in South-Central Los Angeles between the Crips and Bloods--the Oakwood truce appears strong.

While drug trading continues to plague Oakwood--a diverse community with a large poor population but also an artsy, gentrified stratum--a truce has all but stopped the intense and bloody gun battles between rival gangs. And time seems to have healed the racial wounds inflicted by the fighting, which caused many residents to take sides.

Neighborhood activists say jobs and recreation programs have helped to keep some street hooligans busy and out of trouble.

Gang investigators theorize that a bottom-line motivation also is encouraging gang members to keep the peace: Street wars interfere with their lucrative drug trade. Quieter streets means brisker business.

Current and former gang members, meanwhile, say the truce has lasted because the bloodshed tore families and friends apart. The violence sundered relations between Latinos and African American youths and young adults, many of whom had grown up and gone to school together.

“Both sides don’t want to fall into that war again,” said Levell Harris, 29, a former gang member. “A lot of us got kids--it’s mainly because of the kids that we don’t want to see this anymore.”

Nestled west of Lincoln Boulevard, between Rose and California avenues, Oakwood is a passionate and tight-knit community. It is a place where neighborhood leaders bicker viciously over how best to improve the area, yet still remain loyal to each other and to the cause.

Neatly kept bungalows, typical of a beach neighborhood, line many of the streets, interspersed with occasional large modern redos--virtually all with steel bars on the windows. Here you may see a $1-million home down the street from clusters of subsidized apartment complexes that gained attention a few years ago when the Nation of Islam was hired to provide security patrols in them.

Los Angeles police report that violent crime in Oakwood has dropped about 80% since the gang war ended. There has not been a murder, shooting or other violent crime linked to gang warfare there in at least a year, said Capt. David Doan of the LAPD’s Pacific Division.

During the height of the gang war, Oakwood was saddled with the highest rate of violent crime in the division. Today it boasts the lowest.

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About six months ago, the LAPD began dismantling a special task force it formed to saturate the area with police. Now one patrol car is assigned to the neighborhood, and several additional police units keep tabs on gang activity.

“The first year or so things were strained,” said Brad Carson, one of the probation officers who brought the gang members together. “But now [gang members] are bonded together more than they were in the past.”

Police believe that the gang war of 1993-94 was touched off by a drug-related dispute. One theory is that the V-13s were assuming too much control of the cocaine business, a market long dominated by the Shoreline Crips. Gang investigators will not speculate on how many gang members are left in Oakwood, but they say sweeping drug arrests in the past two years have diminished the number of Shoreline Crips.

During the months of the gang strife, innocent victims often were caught in the cross-fire. Among those shot was a UCLA nurse and a man who was sitting in his car while taking his children to school.

Residents marched for peace. They prayed and pleaded for it. The LAPD formed the Oakwood Task Force and at one point deployed up to 100 extra officers in the area in hopes of staving off the violence.

“I’d leave my house for work at 6 in the morning and I honestly used to wonder was I going to get shot,” said one woman, a 20-year resident of Oakwood. “I don’t have to think about that anymore.”

After a particularly brutal round of shooting one weekend in June 1994 that left two dead and several injured, gang leaders told their probation officers that enough was enough.

“I kept saying, ‘If we don’t do something, everyone’s gonna go to jail and then we’ll all be gone,’ ” said a 24-year-old V-13 member, currently on probation, who helped form the truce. “At first, a lot of people hated [the peace], but I got tired, you know, of having to like sit in my backyard with a gun.”

Probation officers arranged a meeting. Within hours, the gang members had hammered out an agreement.

They emerged from the talks asking for more jobs and recreation programs. They also requested that the city cancel its plan to break Oakwood’s gang network by declaring it a gang abatement zone. Under an abatement program, law enforcement officials are able to obtain court orders against some gang activities--such as gathering in public places--that are not necessarily criminal but are considered precursors to crime.

The Oakwood abatement program was shelved, but will be resurrected if the violence erupts again, said Mitchell Fox, a deputy city attorney who handles gang cases.

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Law enforcement has turned toward thwarting the drug trade in the neighborhood, which police and prosecutors say thrives under a trade agreement of sorts between the gangs.

“[The gangs] found out what the price was of fighting--it was bad for business,” said the LAPD’s Doan.

Recent FBI and LAPD drug raids have led to the arrest of some dealers, but Oakwood remains a drug haven, attracting visitors from places such as Malibu and West Los Angeles who are on the prowl for rock and crack cocaine and tar heroin, said Det. Bernard Rogers of the LAPD’s West Bureau CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit.

Community leaders admit that drugs remain a major problem in Oakwood, but bristle at the notion that the trafficking helps to keep the truce intact.

“There are a lot of organizations and people in our community who have worked hard to keep the peace,” said Kathy Brown, who recently formed a group called Venice For a Positive Change. “We have taken a stand.”

Brown and others credit new jobs, recreation activities and intervention programs. There are softball games at the local park and training programs at the Venice Skills Center.

Venice For a Positive Change provides career mentoring, tutoring and job placement. And another group, Barrios Unidos, plans to open a T-shirt shop in Oakwood, selling clothes decorated with artwork done by “some of the guys in jail,” said director Rick Mejia, who describes himself as a member of the V-13 gang.

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Oakwood’s flagship initiative is construction training offered by the Venice Community Housing Corp. The housing program has hired nearly 20 gang members in the past two years to build a 25-unit apartment building in the middle of Oakwood.

Steve Clare, executive director of the corporation, hopes the Playa Vista development project and the rebuilding of the Venice Pier will provide more jobs in the future.

“These are the opportunities that help create hope that makes young people believe in themselves and others like themselves,” Clare said.

Other efforts to create jobs, however, have faltered.

A program that hired youths to work on artistic plates for sale in museum shops went out of business not long after it started. A low-flush toilet replacement program, sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Metropolitan Water District, may be discontinued in the fall, partly because so few low-flush toilets have been distributed in Oakwood.

And not all residents in Oakwood feel optimistic about their future.

“Out in the street, they don’t see a lot of opportunity, so [the drug dealers] do what they can to pay the rent and put food on the table for their children,” said one V-13 member.

But residents such as Jewel Petty, who is better known as “Mama Petty,” don’t want to hear about the downside of the truce and Oakwood’s future.

“It’s coming back here and it’s coming back better than ever--I can feel it,” she said.

Times staff writer Kenneth Chang contributed to this story.