Pillars of Society, Steeped in Gang Life

A new and highly specialized gang has taken hold in Orange County, claiming turf in the heart of Irvine.

They don’t flash hand signs or wear baggy street clothes. In fact, one member sports a distinctly highbrow bow tie. But they have become a force bent on making their mark--at least within the occasionally cutthroat world of academia.

This gang is composed of social scientists based at UC Irvine. They come from various disciplines--sociology, anthropology, criminology--but they all share a special interest in the study of violent street gangs.

Within the past two years, UCI’s School of Social Ecology has attracted some of the country’s leading gang experts, including its new dean, C. Ronald Huff, editor of the text “Gangs in America.”

Counting Huff, the Irvine campus now has a faculty of four gang specialists. A fifth, UCLA’s James Diego Vigil, an anthropologist who chairs the National Center for Gang Policy, is expected to join the team next year following his stint as a visiting professor at Harvard University.

UCI now ranks as one of the nation’s two leading centers for gang research, along with the University of Missouri in St. Louis, said John Moore, director of the Florida-based National Youth Gang Center, which tracks such research nationwide. For the most part, the rest of the academic work on gangs is being done by scattered specialists and through “single-project deals,” he said.

Irvine’s gang researchers now constitute a “critical mass,” said Huff, who was named dean in 1999, returning after 23 years to the campus that gave him his first teaching job. Creating a team of specialists helps attract top people in the field, he said, and they in turn help attract more money for further research.

Specialties Among Specialists

Cheryl Maxson, a nationally known expert on youth violence, comes to UCI from her alma mater, UCLA, which had built its own reputation for gang research. There, she collaborated with professor emeritus Malcolm Klein, the world’s foremost gang investigator.

In keeping with Social Ecology’s emphasis on applied science, Maxson’s current research has broad implications for how society responds to gangs. With various government grants, she is busy assessing the impact on communities of civil gang injunctions (court orders that prohibit gang members from congregating), evaluating the effectiveness of one juvenile probation program, describing patterns of adolescent violence in Los Angeles, and identifying factors that make kids join gangs or keep them out.

Maxson is also working on a project called Euro-gangs, a groundbreaking collaboration between U.S. and European researchers to study the scope and nature of street gangs in 12 European countries. The group hopes to create a uniform system for comparing crime data from city to city, something we still don’t have in the United States, where gang studies were pioneered back in Chicago during the 1930s.

Rounding out the UCI team are veteran faculty member James W. Meeker, a sociologist with a law degree who supervises a system for tracking gang-related crime in Orange County; and George Tita, who specializes in the community context of crime and in computer systems for mapping crime hot spots. Tita is continuing work on a program to reduce gun violence in L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, and on a 20-year look at homicides in Watts.

Becoming a hotbed for gang research may not fit UCI’s image as a tranquil campus in conservative Orange County. But this new powerhouse of expertise can help local police better understand, predict and prevent outbreaks of street violence.

And a new wave of gang activity is bound to come, the experts say. In Los Angeles, crime stats show that an upturn may already be underway.

In Orange County and across the nation, gang-related crime has been declining for several years following a frightful peak in 1993 and 1994. Experts say several factors contributed to the gang retreat: an improved economy, a police crackdown combined with intensified community outreach, a changing drug market and the aging of the group most likely to commit gang crimes: young men ages 15 to 25.

Advice to Kids: ‘Resist Politely’

But a new crop of potential recruits is coming of age, a sizable cohort of wannabes known as the echo boom. Do the new demographics augur another cycle of gang violence?

“The proof will be in the pudding,” cautioned Meeker, director of the Orange County Gang Incident Tracking System, a crime database operated by UCI and the Orange County Chiefs’ and Sheriff’s Assn. “The next five years will be interesting.”

The university’s new team won’t just be monitoring the trends from the sidelines. They plan to continue putting research into practice, a policy that has distinguished the School of Social Ecology since its inception.

Huff, who holds a doctorate in sociology from Ohio State University, where he was director of the Criminal Justice Research Center for 20 years, calls it “high-quality scholarship in the public interest.” In other words, no ivory-tower theorizing for this gang team. They believe research should help society solve its problems.

“We will be a valuable resource for the state and the nation,” Huff told me when I visited his office this week. “We want to make sure our research is used.”

Huff recently completed a major study that found, contrary to popular belief, that young people can resist overtures to join gangs without serious reprisals. His advice to youngsters: “Resist politely.”

His research also found that early intervention is critical to saving gang wannabes from a life of crime and incarceration. There are brief windows of opportunity for diversion: at 13 before actually joining the gang and getting arrested for the first time for property crimes, and during the ensuing two years before they graduate to more serious crime.

“In criminal justice, we tend to react when it’s too late,” said Huff, president of the American Society of Criminology.

UCI first teamed with local law enforcement on a gang data project after the county’s 1994 bankruptcy. Hurting for money, police departments turned to the university for help in maintaining a countywide database on gang-related crime, which predated the state system called Cal-Gangs. As a bonus, police brass believed the trained researchers would lend credibility to the collected data and analysis.

Lull Also a Time to Act

That early alliance formed the nucleus of what has become the full-blown research group that will move into new campus quarters in the fall. Huff sees his gang specialists soon operating as a formal research center on youth violence.

“That’s super,” said Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters, who heads the gang steering committee of the chiefs association. “There’s a lot of research nationally, but the more local and specific it is to our area, the more beneficial it will be for law enforcement. It could be nothing but a tremendous asset to us.”

Walters, who spearheaded the alliance with UCI for the tracking system, said gang data are a strategic tool for police, an early-warning system. If the echo boom does lead to an increase in gang activity, the chief said, “we don’t want to be operating in the dark.”

And society should not respond to the problem only in times of crisis, Walters and the researchers agreed. Gang policies should be preventive, not just reactive.

The problem is that the money dries up before interventions can be tested, said Meeker, who also studies issues of access to justice for the poor. With no alarming newspaper stories or public clamor, government agencies forget about gangs and go on to fund the next political problem of the day. Even police departments balk at investing in data collection once the gang problem subsides.

And what does it say to young people, asks Meeker, if their neighborhoods get money for recreation and after-school programs only in response to crime waves? Must they misbehave to get the services they should have anyway?

“It can be frustrating when the focus is on the current crisis rather than long-term planning,” said Meeker, who along with Walters has applied for funds to study how well anti-violence programs have worked in certain communities.

Public agencies “put money in solutions,” he said, “but they don’t reserve any to find out if they work.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesdays and Saturdays. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.