Police Shortcomings Stymie Efforts to Contain Gang

Speeding down a busy South Los Angeles boulevard, the two-car convoy swerves to the curb. An 18th Streeter jumps out of a station wagon and abandons it--motor running, lights on--in broad daylight.

“That’s a G-ride’--street lingo for a stolen car--one of the gang members explains as together they head for the Century Freeway.

They zip into the carpool lane, sailing past rush-hour traffic, for a rendezvous with compatriots in the blue-collar suburbs of southeast Los Angeles County.

By nightfall, they will have assaulted a rival, intimidated a middle-aged man in a park and robbed an immigrant couple at a bus bench--a spree spanning at least three police jurisdictions.

Eighteenth Street’s criminal ways are not hemmed in by municipal boundaries. The problem is that law enforcement, collectively, has not adjusted its tactics to combat the gang’s mobility. What’s more, economic and logistical obstacles within the criminal justice system have hampered the effort.

“We do a dismal, pathetic job of working together,” says former Bell Police Det. Adrian Punderson, who led a local police task force targeting 18th Street.

Among the hurdles:

* Local police agencies, each concerned mostly with its own slice of the 18th Street problem, admit they have done a poor job of sharing information and of keeping the pressure on through multi-agency task forces. This at a time when evidence is mounting that 18th Street’s loose-knit network of cliques is showing signs of increased organization.

* Citing limited resources, law enforcement agencies have primarily focused on intermittent street-level crackdowns, bringing only fleeting relief to residents and merchants. Authorities have had difficulty penetrating the gang’s hierarchy and its suspected international drug connections.

* The inability of officials to rigorously enforce probation and parole violations by 18th Streeters has allowed the gang to stay strong on the street.

Law enforcement officials differ over what policing strategies should be used against the gang--from roving multi-agency task forces to greatly beefed-up local patrols. Most agree, however, that without broader efforts, law enforcement will be hobbled in curtailing 18th Street’s growth.

Says Capt. Brad Hooper of the Bell Police Department: “Gangs are better at regionalization than we are.”

Turf Battles

In a confidential bulletin to California police agencies last year, the state Department of Justice warned that 18th Street was shifting from loosely connected cells to a more unified force with ties to syndicates such as drug cartels and the Mexican Mafia prison gang.

“Some cliques of the 18th Street gang,” the document concluded, “are rapidly evolving from criminal street gang status into more sophisticated organized groups.”

Even in light of such warnings, local law enforcement authorities acknowledge that they have stumbled in the most basic of steps: exchanging information about 18th Street’s activities.

As a result, individual police agencies end up seeing only the small picture. “No one comes in and says, ‘I’m gonna take the bull by the horns,’ ” a Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang officer says.

Authorities blame turf battles and rivalries among agencies--and within the organizations themselves--for inhibiting cooperation.

“Law enforcement in general [has been] jealous of their own investigations,” says an LAPD field supervisor, who regularly works 18th Street investigations. “We [haven’t been] sharing information as we should.”

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Wes McBride, considered one of the nation’s foremost gang experts, agrees: “We fight ourselves in government more than we fight gangs.”

One area where law enforcement could be better pooling its information on 18th Street and other gangs is in a computerized tracking system maintained by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In some cases, police officers don’t participate because they see it simply as more paperwork. Others say their computer systems are incompatible with the sheriff’s.

Whatever the reason, the result is the same--’a flawed picture of gang activity, often dependent on anecdotal evidence rather than hard data,” according to a recent countywide government report on gangs.

For the most part, law enforcement measures its success against 18th Street by the interruptions it inflicts on the gang’s operations.

Officers rarely have the luxury of working 18th Street investigations long enough to chase away gangsters for good or to infiltrate the ranks of veteran leaders, who hide in the shadows while their young soldiers intimidate business owners and residents.

Even when Los Angeles narcotics officers do take extended action against 18th Street, pressures mount from other LAPD stations with their own needs.

“We try to take down 18th Street [but] the other divisions start complaining that we’re not working their problems,” says a frustrated undercover officer in the central city.

One of Los Angeles’ most untamable street corners is 6th Street and Bonnie Brae Avenue, near MacArthur Park. There, 18th Streeters and their handpicked dope dealers line up against rundown buildings and sell to customers from throughout the region.

For hours at a time, LAPD officers conspicuously station themselves at the corner in a mobile substation known as “Big Blue.”

For extra impact, they set out street barriers with signs: “Warning. Drug Enforcement Zone.”

This strategy has been used to combat drug-dealing gangs throughout Los Angeles--with varying degrees of success. With 18th Street, because of the gang’s deep ranks, the results seem especially short-lived.

Even when the federal government weighs in with money and a longer-term commitment, the gang bounces back.

Three years ago, an FBI and LAPD task force was formed to target 18th Street’s clandestine network of leaders. After a two-year probe, the FBI announced the arrests of six key gang members in Southwest Los Angeles and declared the neighborhood safer.

Los Angeles police reports show that violent offenses did in fact dip. But by this spring, the area was suffering some of its highest crime levels since early 1994.

Further hampering the task force approach has been a decision by some police agencies to bail out, citing a shortage of funds.

In the LAPD’s Rampart Division--which includes the Pico-Union area, where the gang was born three decades ago--a detail of federal, state and local investigators slowed the gang’s activity this year. But the effort was funded for only 90 days.

In southeast Los Angeles County, seven law enforcement agencies once provided officers for an anti-gang squad targeting 18th Street strongholds. Today, only three remain because the others wanted to keep their scarce dollars inside their own borders.

Parolees as Leaders

A group of 18th Streeters has just chased off some rivals down Hoover Street south of the Coliseum. An older member--a convicted killer on parole--turns to a younger member with a simple instruction: “Go get the strap,” he says of a hidden gun.

Although the evening would pass without bloodshed, the scene highlighted one of law enforcement’s greatest problems in dealing with 18th Street and other gangs. The 31-year-old gang veteran was in clear violation of his parole by associating with 18th Streeters and directing criminal action.

The truth is that he goes weeks without seeing his parole agent, who is grateful that this particular gangster phones him once in a while. Other parolees don’t, and there aren’t enough agents or hours to keep tabs on all the 18th Streeters violating conditions of their release.

Just days out of the California Youth Authority, where he served time for armed robbery, probationer “Greedy” is back in the thick of 18th Street activity at a Cudahy park. In a plastic shopping bag held by his girlfriend is a chrome-plated pistol and nuggets of rock cocaine.

A Sheriff’s Department cruiser slowly appears, pausing as the deputy talks to a gang member. Greedy and his girlfriend slide away. After the cruiser leaves, he returns to say he’s off to raise some cash by unloading the cocaine.

Even when police nab juvenile probation offenders, they often are released without being prosecuted, officials say.

“If you took every juvenile [violating] probation and locked them up, you would avoid hundreds of thousands of crimes,” says Punderson, ex-chief of the southeast area’s anti-gang unit.

Prosecutors say state laws require more proof to convict a juvenile for violating probation than an adult, thus limiting the cases they can file.

“It’s systemic [and] very frustrating for detectives,” acknowledges Deputy Dist. Atty. James Hickey, who supervises juvenile prosecutions in the southeast area.

Probation officers also have little time for the kind of research judges need before removing juvenile offenders from their homes. Los Angeles County’s chief probation officer, Barry Nidorf, says that unless a juvenile probationer is caught with a weapon, his department probably would recommend he be set free.

“There’s just no way the system can detain everybody,” Nidorf says.

Even when 18th Streeters are jailed, the desired deterrent effect disappears in the camaraderie of the homeboys behind bars.

Because of the gang’s size, 18th Streeters constitute the largest bloc in the California Youth Authority--one of the few custody systems that tracks gang affiliation.

Ironically, this has worked to tighten the bonds of the gang, boost membership and create more hardened members who return to the streets with a new level of respect.

“Huero,” a 16-year-old 18th Streeter who says he has been locked up for car theft and robbery, is almost reverential when he speaks of Juvenile Hall. “That’s our heart,” he says.

One city--for the moment--can claim victory over 18th Street: Covina, a 50,000-resident suburban bedroom community in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. Officials there hit the gang hard, arresting members and uprooting its leaders before they could burrow too deeply.

In 1992, a handful of hard-core 18th Streeters from the gang’s Pico-Union and Westlake cliques moved in and began aggressive recruitment.

“They’d take anybody they could get,” recalls Covina Police Det. John Zumwalt. “They just needed numbers.”

At Covina Elementary School, tattooed 18th Streeters showed up at the basketball court next to the campus, trying to lure youngsters, the principal recalls.

Soon, the gang included about 40 members, associates and wannabes. Crime took off--auto burglaries, petty thefts, narcotics use and robberies. “They were probably committing 50% of the crimes in the east end of our town,” Zumwalt says.

Getting tough, police arrested gang members found with knives, pistols and sawed-off shotguns. They linked them to robberies and burglaries. They managed to put the nucleus of a dozen leaders behind bars.

Today, the gang remains a nuisance, with about half a dozen members vandalizing storm drains and park trees.

“They throw up their graffiti, but they do not do a lot of crimes,” says Los Angeles County gang prosecutor Tom Falls, who won a seat on the Covina City Council in 1992 with a vow to combat 18th Street.

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Front-Line Tactics

For many neighborhoods, it is too late for the kind of preemptive strike undertaken in Covina. As 18th Streeters in these communities would put it, the gang is “deep.”

But some measures could help authorities get a better handle on the problem, front-line law enforcement officials say.

They include:

* Multi-agency task forces empowered to enforce a wide range of local, state and federal laws, with the ability cross political boundaries.

* Regional and even national gang intelligence centers to help authorities track 18th Street’s spread and help identify at-risk neighborhoods.

* New requirements, similar to those mandated by the U.S. Justice Department, for police agencies to provide regular reports on gangs and gang-related crime.

* Better computer tracking of incarcerated and paroled gang members, and the assignment of parole agents to task forces and to border crossings with Mexico.

* State law reforms to make it easier to prosecute juveniles for violating probation.

Clearly, Los Angeles’ gang problem is too complex for law enforcement alone. Powerful social and economic forces--troubled families, poverty and lack of adequate prevention programs--have helped fuel the spread and violence of 18th Street and other gangs. But unless the criminal justice system does a better job, experts say, the problems will multiply.

As one 18th Street veterano puts it: “There’s a saying, ‘Bad weeds never die.’ ”

Times librarian Janet Lundblad contributed to this story.

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18th Street Scenes: Gunplay

Guns are in constant demand among 18th Street gangsters and are as easily acquired as a new pair of shoes.

“Everybody knows where to get some,” says 15-year-old “Baby Face,” showing off his new jet-black .22-caliber pistol.

Aiming the weapon across the Los Angeles River, he notes that it has a special 12-shot clip, loaded with hollow-point shells designed to tear human flesh.

This gun--nothing fancy, a mere day-to-day walking-around piece--was a bargain at $125, Baby Face figures.

It came “right out of the box,” he says, with “no murders on it.”

“Burned” handguns, those used in murders, are far cheaper to come by--just $25 or so--but they are risky because they can be traced by police, gang members say.

The cash for a gun can be raised in minutes, he says, by robbing just ‘one little come-upon,” or street victim.

One of Baby Face’s teenage homeboys picks up the gun and points it at his own head, finger on the trigger.

Someone decides to check the weapon. A round ejects from the chamber, tumbling to the cement. Everyone laughs about the “fool” who could have killed himself.

One gang member caps off a round toward the foul, rushing water in the deep channel at the river’s bottom. They come here for target practice, the gang members say, and use “floating pigeons’--bottles and cans--to improve their marksmanship.

“Every shot’s gotta count,” one teen says.

A short while later, Baby Face is arrested for possession of the firearm, after sheriff’s deputies respond to a fight between another 18th Streeter and a teenager at a nearby park.

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About This Series

Times staff writers Rich Connell and Robert J. Lopez and photographer Aurelio Jose Barrera spent eight months exploring the culture and violence of the sprawling 18th Street gang. They spoke with hundreds of members, victims and law enforcement officials for this three-part report.

* Sunday: Inside the gang, and the factors fueling its unparalleled growth.

* Monday: The devastation the gang has wrought on families and neighborhoods.

* Today: Law enforcement stumbles in its campaign to stop the gang’s advance.

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A Decade of Death

The spread of 18th Street’s violence is shown by 154 murders linked to the gang from 1985 to 1995. This only plots homicides within Los Angeles where the killers have been tied to the gang.

Source: LAPD