Skepticism and Hope at Crossroads of Drug War

Jaded at the age of 17, Jose isn’t very hopeful when he hears that police are pledging to rid his Southwest Los Angeles neighborhood of the “cancer” that gangs have inflicted on it.

“Even if they try and clean up the gangs, this stuff’s still gonna happen,” he said, his teenage friends nodding their heads in resignation as they hung out Saturday afternoon on a graffiti-ridden street corner. “They’re still gonna come by and shoot, and you’re still gonna have the drive-bys and the gangs. It’s never gonna end. That’s the way it is here.”

Such is the cynicism of Cloverdale Avenue, ground zero in a new anti-gang push announced Saturday by law enforcement officials against the infamous 18th Street gang.

Buoyed by a recent state Supreme Court ruling that validates civil liberties restrictions in the fight against gangs, city officials are seeking an injunction against at least 18 suspected gang members who have allegedly terrorized a small, five-block-long neighborhood in the shadow of the Santa Monica Freeway east of Culver City.

If a judge signs the injunction, suspected gang members would be barred from even being seen together publicly in the targeted area. It would also be illegal for them to act as “lookouts” for other gang members, harass and intimidate residents, use vulgar or abusive language or engage in a host of other activities.

But as television crews trolled through the neighborhood Saturday to film its boarded-up houses, some young men in the area insisted that the initiative is only the latest blow in a pattern of official harassment and brutality against anyone who even looks like a gang member.

“This is bull----. It sucks,” said Efrain Moreno, a 30-year-old painter who is named in the complaint as an active member of the 18th Street gang but says he dropped out of the gang several years ago.

“If you’re bald-headed and you’re Latino, then you’re automatically in a gang,” he said. “It’s just police harassment. You can’t even stand here any more without them getting you for [being a] public nuisance.”

City Atty James K. Hahn’s request for the injunction, filed Friday, portrays a neighborhood at war against one sub-group of the 18th Street gang, regarded as the largest gang in Southern California with an estimated 20,000 members.

Gang members “fire guns at members of rival gangs, members of the public at large, and randomly into the air in order to show their ‘bravado’ and mastery of their ‘turf,’ ” the complaint says.

Thick notices of the requested injunction were served Friday night on all but two of the 18 suspected gang members--”the baddest of the bad,” as Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker characterized them at a news conference outside the Southwest Division station.

Despite protests from civil libertarians, the state Supreme Court ruled in January that cities can enact broad restrictions on suspected gang members as a legitimate way to fight crime. Los Angeles and several Southland communities have obtained similar injunctions in the past decade. Hahn’s office said it had been awaiting the Supreme Court decision before seeking another injunction.

A hearing on the request for the injunction is set for April 15 in Los Angeles Superior Court. If successful, Kroeker said the LAPD intends to do a detailed, empirical study of criminal patterns in the Cloverdale area to determine whether it is working. “If it doesn’t pay off, we’re just spinning our wheels, and we’re not going to do that,” he said.

Some neighbors were cautiously optimistic Saturday--if a little bewildered by all the sudden attention.

Irma Garcia, 28, who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, spent the afternoon outside on her front lawn, right next door to a boarded up home with smashed windows and years-old gang graffiti. As children played at her side, she said gang activity seems to have lessened in the last few months as police have mounted a greater presence on the streets.

Drug-pushers seem scarcer, and the cholos--as she calls the gang members--”don’t really bother us. But the shootings scare you. You never know if there’ll be a drive-by shooting or what,” Garcia said.

The climate, said Jose and his teenage friends, who didn’t want their full names in the paper, means they cannot even walk around in fashionable baggy clothes without the risk of being hassled by police or shot at by gang members. They are not sure that a piece of paper with a court stamp on it will change anything.

So what do they want? Said 16-year-old Hugo: “I just want to get out of here.”

Anti-gang Zone

Law enforcement officials are targeting a small Southwest Los Angeles neighborhood in a new anti-gang initiative, seeking a court order that would prevent suspected gang members from congregating within certain boundaries.