Anti-Gang Strategy Is Revamped

Police Chief William J. Bratton often says his goal is to make Los Angeles “the safest big city in America,” and has made reining in gang crime a central pillar of his leadership.

Now, he is rolling out his chief tool to attain that goal: new anti-gang squads of specialized officers deployed throughout the city -- the latest incarnation of a type of police unit with a troubled history in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Bratton’s revamped gang units are hitting the streets just as LAPD commanders report signs of increasing gang violence after a relative lull earlier this year.

The teams face a difficult challenge -- mounting a new assault against this trend, while at the same time avoiding the corruption that has tainted past LAPD gang units.

The units of old became magnets for criticism, and bred some of the worst civil rights abuses in the department’s history in the form of the Rampart CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) scandal.

Bratton, who bills himself as a tough crime fighter and a tough reformer, may find no part of the department in which these two aims collide as dramatically as gang units -- leaders in the charge against street violence, and yet still laboring in the shadow of Rampart notoriety.

The Rampart affair involved a group of gang officers in central Los Angeles who injured unarmed people, trumped up charges and stole drugs in the mid-1990s. Their misdeeds helped set the stage for federal oversight of the LAPD in an effort to ensure that suspects’ civil rights are protected.

Bratton’s solution, developed by Deputy Chief Michael Hillman, is new gang-impact teams -- “GITs” in the lingo of the acronym-happy Police Department.

The teams consist of uniformed gang officers, detectives and crime-analysis specialists who are required to work in cooperation with outside agencies and community groups.

Stronger Supervision

The new gang units are distinct from the old in two key ways.

For one, the teams get more supervision. A lieutenant has been added to teams in each of the LAPD’s 18 stations. For another, the teams are supposed to cooperate more with peers, colleagues and community interest groups.

In particular, uniformed gang officers are being paired with plainclothes detectives. Uniformed officers specialize in gathering information on gangs. The detectives at their sides specialize in planning stakeouts and stings to exploit the information.

It was no coincidence that the Rampart revelations were centered on a gang unit.

Later inquiries found that the self-protective culture of such units had helped foster misconduct: Too much independence from peers and too little supervision had propelled Rampart officers in their downward spiral.

To make matters worse, the target was a marginalized criminal class -- illegal immigrants and non-English speakers in many cases.

The reaction to the scandal produced new controls on gang officers, such as bans on confidential informants, new requirements for stakeouts and limits on tours of duty.

But with new constraints came new problems: Gripes soon surfaced inside the LAPD that the revamped gang units were too hamstrung to do any good. Gang officers now weren’t corrupt, the criticism went, but they weren’t arresting many people either.

Gang officers claimed the new rules fettered their crime-fighting efforts.

Their higher-ups countered that most of the problems stemmed from officers misinterpreting controls as prohibitions. Misunderstanding the reforms, they ended up limiting themselves more than required.

And at the same time, there were troubling signs that the department was still failing to clear up the very mistakes that helped breed Rampart-style corruption in the first place.

A report last fall found that long after Rampart should have taught them better, supervisors were going into the field to oversee gang officers on only one out of every three shifts.

Bratton has followed a middle road, increasing pressure on gangs while steering clear of Rampart-like problems.

LAPD officials say the teams achieve the sought-after balance. Better training, supervision and communication, they argue, will help ensure these new gang units fall prey neither to excessive zeal nor excessive restraint.

But some of the department’s longtime critics will be hard to convince.

“The problem always has been the LAPD culture and mentality,” said Steve Yagman, an attorney who represents clients alleging police abuse. “Until that undergoes significant change, simply changing the names of groups of officers is nothing but a publicity gimmick.”

Even supporters are wary.

City Councilman-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, for example, praised the concept for the new units, but cautioned: “The focus has to be violent gang members.... Not every bald-headed kid is a threat to public safety.”

Officers’ Morale Is High

In the first weeks of the new units, supervisors reported good results and high morale among officers. Officers were said to be working hard to collect intelligence through traffic stops and interrogations, or “debriefings” as the department calls them.

In one recent case, the routine debriefing of a youth arrested for stealing produced a key tip on a homicide the youth had witnessed. The tip surfaced partly because the gang officer interrogating him was also familiar with the gang homicide, so he knew the right line of questioning to pursue.

Making such connections across traditional investigative specialties -- robbery, narcotics, and homicide, for example -- is a central goal of the teams.

Several officers said they thought close cooperation with narcotics detectives would prove more effective in fighting gangs.

The idea is simply “to get our different people working together and sharing information,” said Lt. John Fletcher of the LAPD’s Special Operations Bureau.

“When it all works beautifully together, it is amazing what can develop.”

Difficult Challenges

The practical challenges of making the gang units work, however, remain considerable.

The teams are hampered by the same difficulties found in almost every other area of the LAPD.

For example, having too few officers means that patrol forces are being depleted to staff gang units. Supervisors often are saddled with paperwork. Communication from the downtown brass to field-level officers frequently goes awry.

And there is conflict between the need to standardize policies and the need to adapt them to local conditions.

These difficulties were in evidence as the gang-impact teams got underway in recent weeks.

In one division, for example, a lieutenant fretted over how to fill positions for career criminal detectives in the gang unit, unaware that the bosses downtown had cut that element from the program.

Although sergeants did seem to be in the field, new gang lieutenants reported being swamped with administrative duties. One said his contact with officers consisted largely of “waving goodbye to them at the end of the watch.”

But there were also incidents like the one in Central Division last month, in which gang officers doing gumshoe investigative work came up with tips key to solving a killing.

Working closely with detectives, the same officers quickly made an arrest.

That was good enough for Lt. Suzanna Bower, head of the gang unit there. She is confident that the new approach will work.

“This is where the rubber meets the road,” she said. “Now we get to do police work again.”