They Rule by Fear Right Here at Home

Perhaps if the young man who shot Marquese Prude had been wearing a turban and shouting “Allahu akbar!” we’d be more inclined to respond to the teenager’s death with the kind of moral outrage it deserves.

Maybe it’s not enough that a 13-year-old boy doing his homework at the neighborhood park is gunned down by a garden-variety thug, for no other reason than because he is there.

Or maybe we’re so preoccupied with foreign terrorism these days, we don’t realize the threat posed by urban terrorists in our midst.

We’ve got the “evildoers” overseas in our sights, yet we sometimes seem blind to the evil-doing on our own streets.

Marquese was sitting in the lobby of the rec center in South Los Angeles’ St. Andrew’s Park--where he went every afternoon to study, play ball and work with neighborhood kids--when a suspected gang member walked into the building and opened fire.

Marquese wasn’t a gang member or a troublemaker. “He was an outstanding kid,” said LAPD Homicide Detective Rudy Lemos. “Intelligent, with a lot of promise. He didn’t just play sports; he tutored the younger kids, on his own time. You look at him, you think, ‘This could be my son or yours or somebody’s little brother.’”

Police have no motive, Lemos said. “Marquese was just the first person [the gunman] saw. This youngster’s killing was nothing but an evil, hateful act by gang members ... who terrorize the community,” Lemos said. “Why we continue to tolerate them, I don’t understand.”

The dictionary defines terrorism as the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate a group of people. That would make Los Angeles street gangs a sort of home-grown Taliban, controlling behavior in the neighborhoods they rule through fear and intimidation.

They dictate what colors you can wear--red or blue can get you killed in some places--and what streets you can walk down. Children are kept inside, even in daylight, because drive-by shootings have claimed so many young lives. And whole families sleep on the floor at night, lest errant bullets blast through windows and find them in bed. Those who dare challenge gang members or report them to police risk being put to death.

In the three months since Sept. 11, almost two dozen people have been killed by gang members in the LAPD’s 77th Division, the city’s most dangerous. “Yet life goes on,” Lemos said. “We’re so vigilant about whether the terrorists are coming here to strike again. But for God’s sake, look at what the gangsters are doing already in our neighborhoods.”

But the area around St. Andrew’s, near Western and Manchester avenues, is not everybody’s neighborhood, and we are notoriously self-centered when it comes to fighting crime. We tend to get aroused only when a threat lands close to home or the victims resemble someone we know.

In 1988, when young ad writer Karen Toshima died in gang cross-fire as she strolled through Westwood, an alarmed citizenry woke up to the threat of gang violence and demanded that police do something. Authorities convened a “gang summit,” tripled police patrols and added $6 million to law enforcement coffers.

Seven years later, the killing of blond, blue-eyed toddler Stephanie Kuhen--shot by gang members as she slept in the back seat of the family car, when her parents made a wrong turn down a Cypress Park alley--tugged at our heartstrings long enough to shake loose millions more for gang prevention.

In the meantime, hundreds of other innocent victims died, barely registering a blip on our radar screens. Like Celeste Reyes, a 3-year-old shot as she played in her Rancho Dominguez living room. Seven-year-old Evan Foster, caught in gang cross-fire at an Inglewood park, where his mom had just signed him up for basketball. And, just days before Marquese was killed two weeks ago, 16-month-old Bryan Tolentino, was shot in the head as he sat strapped in his car seat in the family van.

And now, after years of declining rates of gang crime, the death toll is rising again. “We used to average 130 to 140 homicides a year, just in the 10 square miles of 77th Division,” said Lemos. “Then it went down to as low as 50. Now, it’s climbing again. There have been 75 gang killings this year, up from 66 at this time last year.

“We have to look at this for what it is,” he said. “It’s a kind of urban terrorism, and it can spread like a cancer if it’s not stopped.”

We can think of this as somebody else’s problem, something that happens only “down there,” just as we once thought of terrorism as something that happened only in other countries to other people.

Or we can consider gang violence “a profound social malady that has to be grappled with ... something that affects us all.” That’s what Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas called it, when he brought a stunning assemblage of political firepower to Marquese’s neighborhood last week. Mayor Jim Hahn, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo--they all turned out to walk the streets and meet with neighbors at a community rally.

It’s hard to say whether this shooting will prove to be one of those turning points that raises the profile of gang violence, pushes us to try to turn the tide. But we cannot proceed as if nothing has happened. Call it terrorism or evil or a social ill; now is not the time to let gang members hide.

Sandy Banks’ column runs on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes .com.