Sudden, Dramatic Drop in Homicides a Pleasant Surprise

By JANET WILSON, GEOFF BOUCHER and DEXTER FILKINS

Dec. 15, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

The bloodiest wave of murder in Orange County’s history is receding.

After cresting at an all-time high in 1993, the killing ebbed slightly last year and the year before. As 1996 draws to a close, it is crashing.

Murders have occurred in Orange County this year roughly half as often as just three years ago, and are down by more than 30% from last year.

Even more striking are drops in juvenile and gang killings, which helped fuel a shocking rise in homicide in the late 1980s and early 90s.

“I don’t know if it’s a window or a lull, or it’s truly the end of the violence,” said Randy Pawlowski, who prosecutes Santa Ana gang cases. “Whatever it is, we’re happy.”

Only six Orange County teenagers have been committed to the California Youth Authority for murder this year, compared to 23 last year.

Gang killings have plummeted in Anaheim and Santa Ana, the two cities that bore the brunt of the explosion of street violence.

Anaheim did not have a single gang-related murder for 13 months, from October of last year until early November. For the first time since 1986, Anaheim police thought there was a chance for a “no-hitter”--an entire calendar year passing without a gang slaying.

But that hope was shattered on Nov. 10. A young man was shot dead at an Anaheim party, and three gang members--a 17-year-old and two 18-year-olds--were charged with the killing.

Still, it’s a far cry from the high of 17 gang killings just two years ago.

In Santa Ana this year, there have been 21 gang-related murders, less than half of last year’s 47.

The unexpected declines are all the more surprising, because law enforcement and hard-hit communities have been bracing for the opposite to happen. Authorities have been predicting that a surge in violent juvenile crime would accompany a sharp increase in the number of U.S. teenagers in the next century.

Whether the local drop in the homicide rate is due to a statistical fluke or a controversial arrest program designed to keep young gang members off the streets, or whether it’s the beginning of a more peaceful era with core changes in teens’ attitudes, is an open question.

No matter what the reason, the death toll is down dramatically, and a sense of relief is palpable.

“You can walk to the store at 8 or 10 at night, and nothing even happens to you,” said Gabriel Gutierrez, 15, of Santa Ana.

“We’ve only had two funerals due to gang violence this year that I can recall,” said Father Joseph Robillard of St. Anne’s Catholic Church. “I just think the Lord’s doing some great things here.” In 1993, at the peak of the city’s bloody turf wars, 12 gang funerals were held at the church in the span of just three months.

“Our admissions are way, way down,” said Sandra Truong, a social worker in the emergency room at Santa Ana’s Western Medical Center, where ambulances generally deposit the victims of gang violence from nearby neighborhoods. “It used to be once or twice a night; now it’s once or twice a month.”

In preparing this report and others to follow, The Times analyzed thousands of computerized records from the state Department of Justice, the county district attorney’s office and local police departments. Reporters also interviewed scores of police officers, teenagers, community leaders and others to examine who was killed, who was or wasn’t held accountable and what the future might hold.

The welcome decline in the homicide rate comes in the wake of a fearsome period of killing. The county’s murder rate began climbing in 1988 and didn’t slow until 1994.

In 1993, the most murderous year in Orange County’s history, police reported that one of every three murders was committed by a gang member. That year, 66 people died in gang violence, a 74% jump over the gang toll of 38 the year before, and a far cry from 1986, when the number of gang killings could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Even in 1993, however, Orange County was far safer than most of California. According to the attorney general’s office, the state homicide rate that year was 12.9 per 100,000 residents. For Orange County, it was 7.6 per 100,000.

From San Clemente in the south, where 17-year-old Stephen Woods was killed by a paint roller rod in a gang confrontation in 1993, to Seal Beach in the north, where 14-year-old Mario Luis Ortiz helped kill a gas station attendant the following year, almost every Orange County community was affected by the unprecedented wave of teenage gang violence.

The youngest victim was 1-year-old Steven Martinez of Santa Ana, shot dead on the sidewalk near his home on Feb. 25, 1993. The oldest was 82-year-old Cornelia Mitchell of Buena Park, gunned down in her yard on May 28, 1988.

But for young people, mostly Latinos and Asians in poorer areas, the increases were the worst. While just 15 whites of all ages were killed in gang violence, 252 young Latinos were. In Orange County as a whole, a gang victim is now 20 times more likely to be Latino, and twice as likely to be Asian, than white.

In the wake of the enormous wave of killings are a thousand dead, thousands more grieving family members, and more than 600 unsolved murders. And no one is willing to say the murder rate won’t soar again.

“The real question is to what extent is this just statistical balancing,” said James Fox, dean of the college of criminal justice at Northeastern University, who has analyzed juvenile crime for the FBI. “There are still way too many persistent problems that created this to begin with. You’ve still got 57% of all kids not under adult supervision after school. You still have way too many guns in the hands of kids. You still have way too much violence on TV.”

Prosecutors and young people alike say that while enough gang members have been killed or jailed to staunch the bloodshed, it could begin anew any time.

“Everybody’s laying low right now, waiting for friends to get out of jail,” said Raul Posada, 18, who lives in the heart of Santa Ana’s worst gang territory. “It could start up again overnight.”

Orange County’s gang and juvenile killing rates mirror national trends.

From 1988 to 1993, the number of juvenile murders in the U.S. climbed at such a shocking rate that it stunned sociologists, law enforcement and community leaders nationwide. In 1993, a young person 18 or under died from gunfire every 90 minutes, according to the Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund. Gunshot wounds were the leading cause of death for all males under 18 that year.

Now, while experts are still searching to explain the rise, the numbers are falling.

This summer, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno announced that the number of juvenile homicides, while still high, was off by 15% in 1995. In Orange County, the decline last year was even greater--34%.

In California and elsewhere, one explanation for the decline could be that it’s a lot harder to be an active gangbanger than it was five years ago. Tough new laws are on the books, sending juveniles to adult prison for murder, and stiffening penalties for drive-by shootings and other gang-related crimes.

Like Boston and New York City, the cities of Santa Ana and Anaheim have managed to put a real dent in juvenile and gang-related crime, including homicides. The common tactic being used here and in the East Coast cities is a unique method of “quality of life” policing, involving joint probation department and police programs that make aggressive, constant arrests for minor infractions.

“We’re locking up the killers before they kill,” said Bryan Brown, head of the district attorney’s contingent in the joint police, probation and prosecution TARGET program (for Tri-Agency Resources Against Gangs Enforcement Team). “If active gang members come out on probation and they sneeze, they’re going back to jail. And they’re going to stay in jail until they don’t feel like shooting anymore.”

A case in point is that of Rosalio Felipe, 20, otherwise known as Shadow, of Santa Ana’s violent South Side gang. He was recently sentenced to three years in state prison after he was caught spray-painting his gang name on a Santa Ana wall.

Felipe had been arrested several times before--including in 1995 for possession of a firearm, for which he received a six-month jail sentence and three years’ probation. At the same time, he was arrested for possession of an explosive. Prosecutors had to drop the explosives case after reluctant witnesses refused to testify. But he was still on probation for the first gun charge.

When he was arrested for vandalism in April, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, which at most carries a light jail sentence. But TARGET prosecutor Marc Kelley argued in court that Felipe was a dangerous, weapon-toting felon who had violated his probation, and showed he had no intention of abandoning his street ways when he scrawled his name on the wall. A judge agreed, terminating Felipe’s probation and sentencing him to the full three years on the original firearms charge.

Santa Ana’s TARGET unit placed 196 active, violent gang members under active surveillance in 1996. More than half of them are behind bars as the year ends. One investigator compared the concerted effort to jail violent gang members to the penalty box in hockey--the most violent offenders are “taken out of the game.”

Boston, a city of 700,000, has a nearly identical program placing probation officers in police squad cars. The city has not suffered a single juvenile homicide this year, and the last juvenile killing with a firearm was 18 months ago.

“The idea is to stop the little stuff, so they don’t get to do the big stuff,” Boston Sgt. Margot Hill said.

Boston has far less entrenched gangs, and never suffered crippling gang or juvenile killing rates. But New York City, with 7 million people, has had similar success with aggressive “quality of life” and parole violation arrests.

Murders by teens aged 15 to 19 declined 27.6% in 1995 in New York City, the most recent year for which juvenile felony figures are available. In 1996, shootings across the city are down 22%, and weapons arrests are declining, while misdemeanor arrest are up. Again, police credit the practice of watching and locking up potential bad guys on smaller charges, from playing boom boxes too loud to riding a bicycle on the sidewalk.

“It would be nuts to think they melted their guns down into pretty sculpture. They’re just not carrying them on the street,” said Michael Farrell, deputy police commissioner for planning and policy. “But if they’re not carrying them, they’re not going to shoot and kill.”

On a recent Friday night, probation officer Rick Borkowski scaled an outdoor flight of steps, two heavily armed Anaheim police officers behind him. They rounded the corner on a barren veranda and got their man.

“Ricardo, hey! Where you going?” demanded Borkowski as he grabbed the 15-year-old’s arms and pulled his hands behind him and the officers began a methodical search.

“To the store for cigarettes for my sister, that’s it, that’s it,” pleaded the teen.

“What’s this?” demanded the officers, retrieving a beeper and a neatly written list of names from the youth’s pockets.

“It’s my sister’s,” replied Ricardo. Nevertheless, they were taking him in--to his home. On the way, an officer began laughing. The list consisted of girls’ names and phone numbers.

“Can’t fault a man for that,” said Anaheim gang squad investigator Dave Vangsness.

Within minutes, Borkowski was discussing homework and a part-time job with Ricardo and his mother. The city’s TARGET unit was making its rounds, checking to make sure active gang members were where they belong--at home.

Ricardo was under 60-day house arrest for assault, allowed out only to go to school or work. The team visited two more homes--one boy was out, but with his mother. The other was nowhere to be found. In spite of his mother and younger brother’s pleading, he was gone for the night. On a “Junior Good Citizen” award he won two years ago, he has scrawled his gang tag.

“He’s officially on the lam. Next time I see him, he’s going back to jail,” Borkowski said.

Using an unusual combination of intimidation and baby-sitting, along with revamped school policing programs, Anaheim, home of “The Happiest Place on Earth,” has seen its gang homicide rate plummet 65% in 1996.

Not everyone is convinced that zealous law enforcement programs are the reason for the decline, or are a positive long-term solution.

Joseph McNamara, former chief of San Jose Police Department and now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, believes the drop in juvenile and gang homicides is probably due more to the stabilization of the drug trade.

“We don’t have enough prisons to lock up everybody. The cops feel it is working, but . . . that’s part of working as a police officer.”

Chris Brown, former gang member and professor of criminal justice at Chapman University, said the drop in street killings is related to a truce called among gangs by la Eme, the so-called Mexican Mafia.

“The Mexican Mafia let it be known that they had to stop drive-by killings because they were interfering with the drug business,” Brown said.

Police agree that la Eme may have tried to stop the slaughter, but note that even though undercover videos in 1992 show key leaders ordering gangs to stop drive-by shootings, the next year saw the highest number of gang homicides ever.

Others say even if the hard-nosed, dragnet approach is working for now, there is a long-term risk.

“Police are going way overboard,” said Fox of Northeastern. “What kids need is for someone to educate them while they’re still willing to hear what a teacher or a preacher or other authority figure has to say, before they just give up on themselves.”

Santa Ana Boys and Girls Club program director Larry Mireles said while the police have done “some good . . . a lot of kids are really angry with them.”

That anger cripples police investigations, and could fuel renewed violence as younger kids become teens and are recruited by hard-core gang members. Alan Crivaro, senior deputy at the public defender’s office, finds it ironic that police who in the past had “little interest in these poor neighborhoods are now all over them, photographing and following every kid they see, because they got some federal grant money to go in there.”

Defense attorney Marshall Schulman, a former prosecutor, said that while harsh measures were necessary to counteract gangs, if police go too far with youths in general, “they risk creating a wall that will not be easily torn down.”

Sgt. Kelley agreed certain police officers, especially younger ones, can go overboard in their treatment of young male teenagers.

“If you go out and treat everybody like a piece of garbage, generally speaking they’ll respond in kind,” Kelley said. “Today, they’re a suspect you’re talking to. Tomorrow, they’re a victim, or maybe a witness, and you want them to talk to you.”

On the other hand, Kelley said, teens who dress in baggy jeans, shave their heads, sport tattoos and hang out on street corners have no one to blame but themselves for being stopped and questioned.

“If you walk like a duck, talk like a duck, and act like a duck, you’re probably a duck,” he said. “If you saw me out front of my house wearing a white sheet and hood, you’d probably think I was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Police say that while many older, hard-core gangbangers are behind bars, younger kids are forming new groups and so-called party crews. The question is whether they will graduate to gangs and murder. There are some indications that gangs are less fashionable than they used to be.

But even if fewer of today’s kids are inclined to kill, there’s a catch. With the number of teenagers expected to bulge significantly in the next 20 years, even if the rate of killing declines, there could still be another sharp increase in murders and other aggressive crimes.

Santa Ana already has the lowest median age of any Orange County city. The number of 15- to 19-year-olds countywide is expected to swell from 153,000 in 1995 to 247,000 by 2010, according to the state.

Whatever the future holds, there is still the grim aftermath from the peak killing years.

“Yes, I know the numbers are down. That doesn’t make any difference to me,” said Regina Lewis, whose youngest daughter, Mary, died after being stabbed 12 times by a member of a gang called the Orphans.

“My daughter is dead. I go bring her flowers once or twice a week, that’s it. I think about her all the time, 100% of the time. I will never get over it.”

Today: A wave of murders that pushed the county’s homicide rate to all-time highs is receding. Even more striking is the decline in juvenile and gang killings, which fueled the overall rise.

Monday: A colder, more random type of homicide is stumping investigators at a rate Orange County has never seen. Only half of murders are now being solved--a 43% drop since 1981.

Tuesday: A lull in the killing gives police investigators hope they can begin to make a dent in a mountain of unsolved cases, where the dead have been denied justice and their survivors still suffer the lack of closure.

* NEW GENERATION OF GANGS: Culture of violence is losing luster for at-risk youth. A52

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Murder Less Frequent

After peaking in 1993, the number of murders has declined sharply in Orange County over the last three years. Much of the upswing in the late 1980s and early ‘90s was due to significant increases in gang-related homicides. Declines in gang killings have also paced the overall decline in local murders. The trends:

Total Murders

1996*: 106

****

Gang-Related Murders

1996*: 40

* As of Dec. 12

Sources: California Department of Justice Supplemental Homicide Reports 1991-1995, Orange County Coroner Homicide Report 1996, county police agencies

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Gang Killings

Santa Ana is ground zero for gang killings in Orange County, having been the site of about two-thirds of those 354 homicides since 1981:

Jurisdiction: Number

Anaheim: 40

Brea: 1

Buena Park: 6

Costa Mesa: 5

Dana Point: 1

Fountain Valley: 1

Fullerton: 3

Garden Grove: 30