The Heat’s Off

In this season where much attention is focused on counting the dead in far-off places like Israel, the West Bank and Afghanistan--all important reckonings, to be sure--perhaps it is time that we also begin to consider the dead closer to home, where there is an alarming spike in gang homicides.

Since January 2000--when the murder toll really began to climb--through March of this year, we have buried 780 victims of gang violence in the city of Los Angeles, most of them young. If the trend continues, the figure will hit 1,000 for the three-year period ending in December 2002--a 100% increase over the previous three-year period.

Among the reasons that have been cited for this rash of deaths are the breakdown of gang truces in South Los Angeles and disarray in the leadership of the Mexican Mafia, which once exerted control over most Eastside gangs. Those who work directly with at-risk youth believe that the reasons are far more fundamental. Ending gang violence, they say, involves a tri-pronged approach of prevention, intervention and suppression. Prevention means giving the younger kids alternatives so that they never join gangs in the first place. Intervention involves helping gang members redirect their lives using strategies like jobs, education and mentoring programs. Suppression, the task of law enforcement, ideally keeps everyone involved alive until the other two approaches can kick in.

Father Gregory Boyle, executive director of Jobs for a Future and Homeboy Industries, simplifies the equation even further: “You need heat and light.” Light comes from organizations like Boyle’s that specialize in providing hope for kids to whom hope is foreign. Heat is a respectful, dignified vigilance provided by appropriate policing.

Of late, the necessary “light” has gotten harder and harder to come by. The aftermath of Sept. 11 ate up donations to most nonprofit gang-intervention programs at the same time California’s economy took a nosedive. Unemployment figures began to climb, with joblessness for inner-city youth climbing the highest. Yet, if we are experiencing a crisis of light--which experts like Boyle say we are--the crisis in the heat department is of even more calamitous proportions.

A quick example: The Hollenbeck Division of the LAPD serves a 15.2-square-mile area of East L.A. that, over the last decade, has seen the highest level of gang activity in the city. Under normal circumstances, according to division insiders, Hollenbeck operates with a baseline of about 150 officers. After the Rampart scandal broke, officers weary of being painted with the Rampart brush fled to outlying police forces like those of Montebello, Santa Ana, Burbank and Anaheim, leaving Hollenbeck, its staff reports, with only 86 officers. Officially, the LAPD contends that the number is far higher. But privately, officers say official numbers are inflated by such methods as counting officers on permanent sick or disability leave.

Anecdotal observations from residents in the Hollenbeck area and others in L.A.’s poorest and most crime-ridden communities support the officers’ assertion that the department has a huge staffing problem.

“It used to be you’d drive down the street and you’d see a car every few minutes,” said Jose Corrales, 24, a former homeboy who currently attends Rio Hondo College. “These days you hardly see a car, and you never see them in the housing projects. A lot of my homeboys who are still out on the street are glad at the lack of police presence. But I’m the father of two little kids now, so I want enough officers out there to protect and serve.”

The effect of the drop in policing can be best quantified by comparing Hollenbeck’s murder rate with that of unincorporated East Los Angeles, an area with around half the population (128,000 to Hollenbeck’s nearly 200,000) but virtually the same demographics. The main difference is that unincorporated East L.A. is served by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which is operating with a full complement of officers in all units. Overall, countyside East L.A. had five homicides last year, while Hollenbeck had 38--or nearly five times the murder rate per capita.

Matters are exacerbated by the intensified demands made on the department since Sept. 11 and by recent city budget cuts. “So now, when things get bad, cops don’t roll out the way they used to because there’s so little money for overtime,” said one detective. He recalled a day last year when there were four homicides in one division. “On two of them, paramedics had to be called to remove the bodies because we didn’t have enough officers to protect the crime scenes.”

Furthermore, officers on the street have become reluctant to intercede in gang-related affairs. “Right now there is almost no proactive enforcement,” said Mary Ridgway, gang consultant and probation supervisor for the L.A. County Probation Department. “For one thing, morale is terrible because, after Rampart, Chief [Bernard C.] Parks set up a complaint system that didn’t distinguish between bogus complaints and real ones.” Officers across the board complain that post-Rampart discipline has become chaotic and arbitrary. It is, officers say, as if Parks admitted that the department had cancer but instead of surgically removing the malignancy he gave the entire rank and file chemotherapy--then wondered why everybody got sick.

“The LAPD is an organization that relies on pride and esprit de corps,” said Ridgway. “And that’s completely broken down. As a result, there are whole numbers of cops that rarely make arrests, rarely make stops. They just ride around and wave at people. It’s really gotten that bad.”

This is not to suggest that the LAPD should return to the awful old days when Rafael Perez and company were planting guns on suspects and beating the living daylights out of homeboys. However, when the underregulated anti-gang CRASH units were dismantled, it was widely hoped they’d be replaced by a system that involved seasoned officers who got to know the neighborhoods they served. Instead, Ridgway said, “when the new gang unit was formed, the selection criterion was such that it all but eliminated officers with prior gang experience. So suddenly you had no knowledgeable cops working gangs, no one who knew the players and relationships.”

“With gang policing, knowing the players makes all the difference,” Boyle says. An emblematic example of this principle was demonstrated at 8 p.m. March 5 when Cesar Gomez, 21, was shot four times in the chest, once through the heart, in the doorway of the Aliso Pico Recreation Center in front of 100 kids and parents who had gathered to watch a girls basketball tournament.

Gomez was shot by two rival gang members who had been seen by various residents loitering uneasily in nearby Pecan Park throughout much of the day. Experts like Ridgway contend that an officer who knew the players would probably have seen those two homeboys in the park, known they didn’t belong there and asked them to leave--or better yet, searched them and found that they were carrying guns. That same hypothetical officer also might have stopped by the basketball game and realized that Gomez was an active gang member conspicuously in enemy territory and thus a dangerously provocative target, especially in a gym packed with moms, dads and kids. But if there were officers patrolling the Pico Aliso housing project that day, they did not know to do any of the above.

“And it’s going to get worse,” said Ridgway, “because when Parks formed the new gang unit, he stipulated that officers can only be in it for three years.” Since most officers on the unit joined in the spring of 2000, come next March or April their time will be up. “And we’ll be back to square one again.”

Light and heat. Remove either and the cost becomes unacceptably high--as in the case of Ronny Brock, whose older brother joined a gang, while Ronny, 19, did not. Instead, he worked through most of his school years in Boyle’s office, graduated from Roosevelt High School, then went straight to the Marines and was sent to Afghanistan right after basic training.

At the beginning of February of this year, Ronny flew back to the U.S. and was reassigned to Camp Pendleton. Before reporting for his new duty, he returned home to his mother’s house in Boyle Heights where, on Saturday, Feb. 9, mom and son spent most of the day talking. Ronny told her he wanted to seek out his father, a man he hardly knew. “I want my dad to see what I’ve become,” he said. That night he went to visit his girlfriend. Then, at 1 a.m. Sunday, he was walking home along Breed Street. Three guys approached him with the ritualistic question that often precipitates violence: “Where’re you from?”

Ronny was standing on the sidewalk outside his mother’s bedroom window when he answered. “I’m from nowhere,” he said, his tone light because he was still in a good mood. The three homeboys didn’t believe him and so pumped a stream of bullets, like a flock of tiny mean birds, into his body. He died on the sidewalk before his mother or the paramedics could reach him.

Heat and light. Ronny Brock had entered the light. The boys who shot him hadn’t. Would more heat on the street that night have saved him? There is no actual way of knowing. But the question haunts.