Only Law Enforcement Unity Can Meet Gang’s Threat

The first step in successfully fighting an ongoing criminal street gang enterprise, particularly one with lofty interstate and international designs, is to recognize it for precisely what it is. The 18th Street gang just chronicled in a three-part Times series is a case in point.

Since the 1960s, from its modest beginnings in Los Angeles’ Pico-Union area, the gang has grown to an estimated 20,000 members, who range north to Oregon, east to Utah and south into central Orange County. The most violent gang in the nation’s second-largest city delivers daily on shakedowns, drug sales, auto thefts, burglaries, street robberies and vandalism, according to police officials and others. The gang not only “rents” street space to dope peddlers, it deals directly with international drug cartels.

The 18th Street gang is a remorseless occupying army. Its influence is a heavy blanket over the turf where it claims hegemony, superseding the authorities and the hard-working immigrant communities that suffocate under its weight. And even as it chokes the life out of these neighborhoods, young gangbangers of “the 18” openly recruit children while the older members remain in the shadows. This criminal presence is of course unacceptable by any standard, and the kind of loose-knit organization that has thwarted police efforts to date is already shifting to far more coordinated activities.

Elsewhere, local and federal law enforcement agencies have put aside their usual jurisdictional squabbles to work together in situations like this. That was the case in Chicago and other Illinois areas when a 1960s gang evolved into the El Rukn Nation, a notorious drug distribution network. The fact that some of the prosecutions that took this gang down in the 1980s have been overturned is more a sign of federal bungling than the merit of the overall effort.

In another instance, the same kind of coordination of local and federal data and surveillance helped put crime kingpin Rayful Edmund III of Washington, D.C., behind bars for life for running a continuing street gang enterprise.

To date, that sort of “in it for the long haul” anti-gang effort has not occurred among law enforcement authorities here. Local police agencies fail to share information and are unwilling to commit resources outside their boundaries; this is always a problem in multi-jurisdictional Southern California. Federal law enforcement agencies have come in, but only for limited times. Meanwhile, the outlaw force gets nothing more than a bloody nose.

Bankrupt social suggestions for dealing with the problem abound, such as the foolish idea of barring the children of illegal immigrants from public schools. The 18th Street gang would rejoice over implementation of such a notion: Its young recruits are primarily disaffected youths.

The growth, greed and brutality of the 18th Street gang demand a coordinated local, state and federal response, one prepared to continue for months and even years if necessary. It is possible to break the power of this gang. There should be no hesitation in taking the legal steps necessary to do it.