Hahn Seeks Court Order to Curb 2 Gangs

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn on Monday announced the filing of a court injunction to severely restrict the activities of two Harbor City gangs accused of terrorizing and intimidating residents of their neighborhood.

Hahn alleged that 30 people named in the court papers have helped turn a working-class community near the Port of Los Angeles into a “24-hour-a-day drug dealing hell and a battleground where violence frequently erupts.”

Hahn told reporters at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division that “these two gangs pollute the entire neighborhood.”

The proposed injunction marks the first time that such a measure has targeted two Los Angeles gangs at the same time. The court order also is the first sought by Los Angeles authorities since a corruption scandal erupted in the LAPD’s Rampart Division.

Two injunctions in Rampart have been suspended because dozens of gang members were accused, in part, on the basis of sworn declarations from anti-gang officers caught up in the growing scandal.

Hahn said he was confident that the Harbor City injunction would be approved by a Superior Court judge at a January hearing. Prosecutors, he said, have developed an overwhelming amount of evidence from a number of different sources, including police, residents and crime data.

“Rampart was a special situation,” Hahn said. “That’s not the situation here.”

Among other things, the proposed injunction would bar the 30 reputed members of the Harbor City gang and Harbor City Crips from associating in public with their alleged cohorts. The injunction targets a roughly half-square-mile area bounded by Western Avenue, Pacific Coast Highway, Lomita Boulevard and Vermont Avenue.

Hahn, the first candidate to officially announce that he is running for mayor in 2001, has said he plans to use his stance of being tough on gangs as a cornerstone of his campaign.

He insisted Monday, however, that the injunctions “have nothing to do with politics.”

Crime--especially gang violence--has decreased dramatically citywide in recent years. Indeed, LAPD data on gang-related crimes through September 1999, the latest information available, show nearly a 60% drop this year in the Harbor Division where the injunction is being sought.

Nonetheless, political analysts say that combating crime is among the central issues in the minds of city residents. Successful candidates, they note, have to persuade voters that they are tough on crime.

“As a candidate for mayor, you better have some good vision in this area and good experience,” said political scientist Fernando Guerra, head of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. “Clearly, Jimmy Hahn is going to have the ammunition to use this issue.”

Although their overall effectiveness has been questioned, civil injunctions against alleged gang members are a popular legal tool pioneered by Hahn’s office nearly a decade ago. Since 1987, city prosecutors have been granted more than half a dozen injunctions in neighborhoods from the San Fernando Valley to South-Central Los Angeles.

The most ambitious were the two court orders against 18th Street gang members in the Rampart Division. The injunctions named about 150 reputed gangsters in one of the city’s most violence-plagued areas.

Both injunctions, however, have been put on hold by Superior Court judges while authorities investigate officers from the anti-gang squad known as CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). Some of the officers allegedly shot suspects, framed one man, beat another, stole drugs, falsified evidence and covered up misconduct.

In light of the accusations against the Rampart officers, the American Civil Liberties Union has called on the city to put a hold on all injunctions while the investigation runs its course.

Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director for the ACLU of Southern California, said Monday that the group was considering legal action to stop the Harbor City injunction.

“It’s very disturbing that the city is implementing new gang injunctions when the full story on the how the CRASH units operate has not come to public light,” Schroeder said.