Tough Neighborhoods Breed a Love for Law Enforcement

The class sweetheart is Fatima Anda, always smiling, always sitting in front. Her baby son is named for a childhood friend, recently murdered.

Seated behind her is Diana Acosta, who had been to the funerals of four friends by the time she was 18. Nearby is Jesse Salcido, whose childhood friends were all in gangs. And there is Rachel Goytia, who thinks her father may have been the victim of a gang murder when she was 6, but she isn’t sure, because no one will give her a straight story.

They are classmates at East Los Angeles College, and they share a goal: to work in law enforcement.

It is a social phenomenon in tough Eastside neighborhoods. You see it in juvenile camps, high schools and colleges. I want to be a probation officer, they say, or, I want to be a cop. An East Los Angeles probation officer says half her offenders want to work in probation. At Bell High School, a counselor says law enforcement rivals teaching as the most popular career goal.

Some make it; most don’t. But the simple aspiration offers a glimpse of Los Angeles at its best and worst. Dreams of a life in law enforcement are a legacy of the violence that has touched the lives of a generation of young people, who are now hungry for redemption.

It’s like a morality play--a kind of revenge of the decent: Certain kids may spend half their lives acting friendly with the gang members down the street, avoiding fights and biding their time. But they’re coming back someday--as cops.

Fatima Anda, 21, explained it this way: “You came from here. You were raised here. You have to do something for your little brothers, your nephews, your neighbors.”

Like the Irish and Italians before them, Anda and her classmates represent the talented offspring of urban working-class immigrants, said criminal justice scholar Lawrence F. Travis. Like those predecessors, they are propelling themselves upward along a well-worn civil service path.

But the tough working-class background has gotten tougher. Gun violence, drugs and the spreading influence of the Mexican Mafia over the last two decades are big reasons.

Anda hit her mid-teens about the same time that homicides peaked in Los Angeles County. “The violence--you can’t forget it,” she said. “It’s always going to be with me.”

At the sheriff’s academy in Whittier, the training officers have a nickname for ambitious recruits from the rough side of town: “Sole survivors.”

Sgt. Bill Frio, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s recruitment division, said he sees potential applicants who say, “ ‘I lived in the inner city all my life, I’ve never done drugs and I’ve never been arrested.’ They want to go back and become a role model.

“Man, do we try to get that person,” Frio said.

The students are drawn to law enforcement by the promise of well-paying, secure jobs, the excitement, the power or the feeling that they could be better cops than the ones who hassled them.

They’ve seen cops screeching toward the open-air drug markets down the street or have known parole officers who helped a family members. They have often had “some experience with law enforcement . . . some kind of confrontation,” said Teresa Carreto, career advisor at Roosevelt High School.

Or perhaps law enforcement officers “are the only people who have been strong role models,” said Eastside probation officer Mary Ridgeway. “It’s sad. But it tells you something.”

For LAPD Det. Rudy Hernandez, such accounts bring a flash of recognition: “I was like these kids,” he said. “I came from the neighborhood--from Echo Park, born and raised. . . . I saw just constant violence.”

“You know,” he added. “I was hassled by LAPD, but I looked up to them. It’s hard to explain.”

Veteran Sheriff’s Deputy Jesus Anguiano, an ELAC alumnus, also recognized the environment. “The only positive role models I had were teachers, clergy and law enforcement officers,” said Anguiano, whose arm was once dislocated by neighborhood gang members. “I looked at them as something untouchable, something I couldn’t attain.”

Deputy Rudy Cortez, also an East L.A. native, recalled that he decided to become a cop at 17, when his brother took five bullets in a drive-by shooting--and survived. “I remember being so angry--not so much to get revenge, but angry enough to want to do something,” he said.

Anda, who wants to be a probation officer, is among 1,000 students earning certificates in the administration-of-justice program at ELAC, the fourth-largest program of its kind in the state. Criminal justice programs are among the most popular vocational specialties in community colleges and are usually second only to nursing in the number of certificates awarded.

ELAC’s program prepares students for jobs in probation and state parole offices, juvenile camps, jails and police departments, although the college has not completed a formal study of how successful its students are in getting jobs. What’s clear is the program’s popularity. It has about 1,000 students now, having grown by 150 in the last two years.

“My kids have seen the criminal justice system from the inside out,” said Patrick Hauser, the program’s chairman. “They want to be part of it.”

Anda and her classmates are so committed to it that they formed a justice club that tours jails and sponsors gift drives for children and visits to high schools.

A meeting might include Ana Gonzalez, quiet and determined, who wants to work in parole. She narrowly escaped death in a drive-by shooting last semester, when a bullet grazed her skull.

There is Violet Gonzalez, 20, who remembers the cops who took her out of class when she was 12, her arms covered with bruises left by an alcoholic father. “They were so nice,” she said.

There is Joann Morales, the class clown, a brash but uncertain A student who remembers watching cops search for drugs in her family’s apartment in the projects. She knew where the drugs were, but the cops never found them, she said. “I thought, this is the perfect job for me.”

Their motive for pursuing law enforcement is like a drumbeat: “I want to help kids,” said Anda.

“I’m hopeful I can be the one to turn kids around,” said Acosta.

“I want to help kids,” said Morales.

Hauser, the ELAC program chairman, is a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy. He took this job thinking it would temporary.

What he didn’t count on is how starved the students would be for mentorship. “I wanted someone to guide me, show me,” student Johnny Ruano said. “Once I met him, I had that.”

A police officer who has worked with the group said: “I was kind of scared by these kids at first. They seem so lost.”

Hauser now has his hands full. His students, most of them the first in their families to go to college, are terrified of failing, or stressed out and short of money.

Some Respond to Clashes With the Law

Some are painfully needy, others almost eerily passive. Hauser shook his head, recalling when Ana Gonzalez was shot. She called him right away--to apologize for missing class.

A few students trace their interest in law enforcement to their own run-ins with the law. Alejandro Ruiz, for example, still has “Gage Boyz” tattooed across his neck. He went back to school after a close friend was shot to death.

He wants to be a probation officer, “mostly because I’ve been going to jail so many times,” he said. “I want to help kids . . . let them know I’ve been there.”

Hauser recalls taking students on tours of the county jail, only to have them spot friends being held there. Worse than that is when the guards see a student and murmur, “Hey--I recognized that kid. He was in here.”

But most of the students have avoided trouble. They are the kids you seldom hear about, the good ones from bad neighborhoods who never joined gangs and didn’t want to. They are bystanders, survivors, negotiators, lifelong experts at sizing up trouble. They pick their way through a minefield of peer pressure and poverty to get to college.

Mimi Case, a career counselor at Bell High School, calls it “choosing sides.”

Camilo Gonzalez, for example, the courteous and gentle class leader, is so profoundly clean-cut that even his mother is perplexed.

Gonzalez, a cousin to gang members, was raised poor in a tough part of East L.A., on a block where drugs were sold openly. But he never mixed with dealers, and--in what seems a pointed commentary on their lifestyle--he doesn’t drink or take drugs. Never has, he said.

Instead, at 19, he is supporting his widowed mother and two younger sisters alone. He does so while maintaining top grades in the program, serving as president of the justice club and standing out as one of the program’s most respected students.

The drama in such students’ lives is seen in a small measure of heroism, an ability to look at the partying and violence around them and simply to decide--as justice student Johnny Ruano once did--that they “just weren’t into it.”

Ruano is an East L.A. native who was raised by his grandmother. “My uncle’s in a gang, and everyone said I would grow up to be one of them,” he said. “But I saw what it is about--their little beer thing, their friends. All that is just trouble to me.”

Gabriel Gutierrez, a La Puente native and a new sheriff’s deputy, put it this way: His family “didn’t have a choice where we lived,” he said. “But we had a choice of what to be.”

The theme registered strongly with a number of ELAC students. “People pick what they want,” said Rachel Goytia, a quiet student who grew up in the Maravilla projects in East L.A. “I grew up on the bad side. . . . But I knew what I wanted and I stayed on the right side.”

“It is just your choice in life,” said Jesse Salcido, 19, a student from Hacienda Heights. “There’s a lot of good people coming out of this community. And they grew up with the same mess that everyone else did.”

Where Anda and her husband live, half a dozen branches of the Maravilla gangs clash amid a mosaic of mini-territories so complicated that she offers to draw a map to explain it.

Even in daylight, the place is a little menacing. Young men gather around cars or swoop back and forth on tiny low-rider bikes.

For a visitor, Anda points out the party houses on the block, graffiti on walls, the barred-up store where local gang members used to hang out until one of them “shanked” the owner and the store closed. “See?” she says of the gangs, “They don’t care.”

When Anda was growing up, the Mexican Mafia, organized in prisons, was attempting to control the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles. The multiple chapters of Maravilla united against the Mafia, leading to open warfare in Anda’s neighborhood--”green light” in gang parlance. There were fights and shootings. Anda took off her jewelry when she went outside. At night, the family lived in siege-like conditions.

Anda volunteered at the local probation office. She was one of the few people on the block who dared call the police.

She picks up a picture of herself with a bunch of high school girlfriends, and points to each in turn: “She just got out of jail, facing grand-theft auto charges. So is she. This one dropped out in 10th grade; this one’s homeless.” She gives a short laugh. “Nice group of friends, hmm?”

She pulls out a funeral program for her friend, Fernando, killed at 20. Even in grief, she sees absurdity in it. He was tattooed with the gang name ‘213,’ the Eastside’s former area code, she recounts dryly. “We used to say, ‘Are you gonna change to 323?’ He hated that.”

Anda insists that none of this leaves her angry. Once, some cholos beat up her father on his way home from work. Afterward he told his children: “You can’t stay mad at a person. You have to help them.”

Most of the students in ELAC’s program are Latinos, and for them, law enforcement offers new opportunities. Over the last decade, the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department have come close to parity with the ethnic compositions of the areas they serve.

Of the street-smart young recruits from neighborhoods like Anda’s, who want to patrol the very places they came from, Lt. Mike Smith said: “There is always a group of ‘em in every class.”

Smith, who is head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Academy, said, “They are sophisticated, older than their years. They have decided not to hang out with the [gang members] on the block and have an innate sense of right and wrong.”

Good cops, he added.

Many Have Trouble Getting Police Work

Many ELAC students are the very sole survivors that police agencies say they are looking for: sincere, street-smart, fluent in Spanish. Nonetheless, they often have difficulties getting into police work.

Prior drug use and criminal convictions occasionally hold them back. But more often, the causes are mundane. Class leader Camilo Gonzalez, a seemingly ideal police candidate, missed a couple too many reading-comprehension questions on the sheriff’s Civil Service exam.

Shy Rachel Goytia--good student, community volunteer, and lifelong athlete--became tongue-tied in her LAPD interview. Diana Acosta passed the Civil Service exam easily, then lost her nerve and has put off going back to interview. Fatima Anda owes thousands of dollars on credit cards dating from her pregnancy, and since police agencies screen out applicants with debt, she gave up on being a cop.

Jesse Salcido, a police cadet and club leader who writes poetry, also says he can’t apply because of debts; he helped out his parents after his dad lost his job.

They will get other opportunities. But their troubles shed light on the tricky task police agencies face in selecting recruits.

Several law enforcement sources said young people who grew up around gangs or drug dealing make better cops. They are better at coping with the urban environment and have more common sense.

But if the best cops come from places where kids are more at risk of crime and gang involvement, so do some of the worst problems.

Rafael A. Perez, the most prominent of the disgraced officers in the unfolding LAPD Rampart scandal, has offered a life story strikingly similar to those of some ELAC students: He has recalled watching drug deals on the streets of Philadelphia as he grew up and wanting to be a cop. Another fired officer, David Mack, grew up in Compton and was allegedly in a gang.

Local police agencies, although they are desperate to hire new officers, disqualify more than 90% of police applicants. Drug use and lying are big reasons.

Now, in response to the Rampart scandal, the LAPD is seeking ways to be more selective. The department may adopt polygraph tests, which the sheriff’s office has used for years.

But beyond this, drawing too strict a line on drug experimentation or gang membership would screen out too many people, argues the LAPD’s Frio. Within limits--such as excluding felons or hard drug users--common wisdom is to weigh each case individually. “Do they have [a] gang tattoo in hand that kept them safe when [they] walked to school? We won’t disqualify them for that,” Frio said.

Travis, the criminal justice scholar, said too much emphasis on qualifications is misplaced. More important is the culture within police departments, he said.

Recruits are so heavily socialized by their departments that their previous differences tend to disappear. That’s why academics call police an ethnicity unto themselves--and why police corruption knows no sociological bounds, he said.

For the same reasons, whether from slums or suburbs, idealistic recruits are likely to end up cynical, criminal justice experts say.

Some youth workers agree. Carreto, the advisor at Roosevelt High School, said she tries to dissuade her students from going into law enforcement. She thinks some are unrealistic about it and said she knows a few who have been disappointed.

But Hernandez, the LAPD detective, swears he hasn’t lost the dreams that first brought him to the department.

He came on the force wanting to help kids, he said, “and I still do to this day.”

Anda doesn’t reflect much on her motives. “Sometimes I feel like I need to be, like, this superhero,” she said. “Because I feel sometimes that nobody else cares. I don’t really see a lot of people doing things for this neighborhood.”