Anti-Gang Effort Strikes Personal Chord

It was 1988. Alex Acosta and his younger brother Roy had dinner at their parents’ East Los Angeles home. They talked sports.

Later that night Roy, 33, told Alex, 41, that he needed $125 for a night’s stay at a motel in Northern California, where he was moving. Alex gave it to him, but he knew better. He knew Roy was a gangbanger and that the money was for heroin.

Two years later, Alex got a phone call: Roy had been murdered in a gang dispute.

It’s a story Alex is still telling. He tells it as a civilian crime prevention specialist and crime analyst for the San Gabriel Police Department, and as the California Crime Prevention Officers Assn.’s recently named officer of the year.

Roy’s gang involvement is the center of Alex’s “Say No to Gangs and Drugs” audiovisual presentation, which shows pictures of Roy’s transformation from playful young boy to hardened gang member through clothing and hairstyles.

Earlier this week, Acosta told his story to an assembly of students at Jefferson Middle School in San Gabriel as part of their Red Ribbon Week observances.

Spurts of laughter interrupted the beginning segments of his speech, when Alex introduced a picture of young Roy with his dog. But the children began to sniffle as they listened to the story of Roy’s tumble from gangs to drugs to death. Alex told it in the third person, holding back a key detail--his relationship with Roy.

“I wait till I’m 75% into the story before I tell them who the guy I’m talking about is,” he said. “Then it turns real quiet. . . . Then they realize it’s not just kids in the barrios that are affected, but someone like me of professional stature.”

Acosta entered law enforcement relatively late in life, a couple of years before his brother’s death.

He had graduated from Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and attended trade school, where he studied advertising. That led to two decades of jobs in fields ranging from public relations to photography.

In his early 40s, looking for a community-service position, he became a dispatcher for the Montebello Police Department. After a year he began working in crime prevention.

“Being a dispatcher was stressful,” he said. “It was a multi-tasking job, not a people-oriented position. I resigned when I found out I couldn’t really help the public.”

He went to work for the San Gabriel police in 1995 as their first full-time crime prevention specialist, expanding the department’s neighborhood watch programs to 70 from two and increasing membership to 2,600 from 70. He has also established a Business Alert Network, now containing 326 people involved in business.

The Acosta brothers grew up in a low-income neighborhood that Alex describes as a place where mothers would hit their kids to the rhythm of sentences such as Don’t ever do that again. (“My mother had very long sentences.”)

But he also recalls a neighborliness that some find rare in Southern California today: When someone brought a tamale to your house, you returned the favor by taking him or her one.

Roy started hanging out with gangs when he was 12. With the boys’ father working long hours at a dairy plant, the brothers were often left to their own devices.

“Most Hispanic families talk at their kids,” Acosta said. “Parents don’t listen to what the kids’ problems are, so kids go outside of the home for attention. . . . I tried to get him out, and [the gang] wanted me to join too, but I said, ‘No.’ ” Roy’s gang membership “had a lot to do with our home life. Parents need to know what kids are doing.”

Acosta said he was not surprised when he got the call in 1990 that his brother had been found dead in the Sacramento area.

“His death was inevitable. Gang members live a violent life,” he said. “If my parents were aware of my brother’s involvement, they weren’t showing it. There’s a denial syndrome.” His mother would not talk about it, he said. “His picture was still on the mantel.”

The death encouraged Acosta to personalize his crime prevention message. Today, he says his only frustration is that can’t devote even more time to the crime prevention meetings, the grocery shopping for senior citizens, the talks to students, the spontaneous stops in his van to hand out coloring books to children on the street.

“I love people,” he said. “I like them too much.”