The Truth Also Falls Victim to L.A. Gang Violence

It is rarely noted that homicides, including gang-related homicides, have declined in Los Angeles by nearly 50% in the last decade. And despite an urban legend that local gangs went on a killing spree after the Rampart scandal shut down police anti-gang units, the truth is that there was no increase in gang violence in 2002.

These facts may be jarring for those who claim that we are threatened with a gang menace as never before. Certainly L.A. has more murders than most American cities. But the murder-capital-of-the-world image hides the fact that something also has gone right in the last decade, as measured in the decline of violence. “Sometimes I wonder if police really want to know,” says the dean of gang experts, retired L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy Wes McBride.

There is no dispute about the decade-long decline. But there is irresponsible promotion of the notion that gang violence recently surged because the Rampart scandal forced aggressive cops off the streets.

According to internal LAPD data for 2002, there was no increase whatever in gang-related homicides that year and only a 0.4% increase in gang-related arson and aggravated assaults.

There was a 10% increase in overall homicides that year during a period when 106 LAPD officers departed from precincts with higher murder rates than Bogota. Arrest rates for homicides fell to an all-time low in areas with the most killings, such as the 77th Division. But gang-related crimes and killings did not go up.

How can we make sense of these facts, which run so contrary to popular images?

If you press the police about what led to the drop in gang- related homicides since 1992, many will typically express the same war-on-gang mantras that have dominated policing going back to 1942, when the police pledged to take gang members “out of circulation until they realize that the authorities will not tolerate gangsterism.”

In truth, it is hard to know whether harsh policing has reduced gang violence or simply recycled it temporarily behind bars.

An unheralded -- and probably more important -- factor in reducing gang homicides is the changed behavior of gang members themselves, starting with the 1992 Watts truce and Latino peace efforts launched in MacArthur Park. That generation of homeboys, like traumatized war veterans, finally decided to stop killing themselves and instead tried to repair their lives and their communities.

In 1992, The Times reported that the fledgling Watts truce held despite rioting in which 45 people died, including three in Watts itself. Five years later, The Times noted that gang slayings over issues like turf and colors had “virtually disappeared.” By 1998, killings in South L.A. plunged to 233 from 466 in 1992, and gang-related homicides were down 36.7% compared with the previous five-year average. In 2002, during the public uproar about gang killings, The Times reported that the Watts truce was “still functioning,” if barely.

But the city authorities failed to give the truce the support it needed. When an earthquake struck L.A. in 1994, local and state leaders rebuilt stricken areas with steady resolve. But there was no such rebuilding after the social earthquake of 1992. A proposal to privatize urban reconstruction, called Rebuild LA, promised to invest $6 billion to create 74,000 jobs in five years. The organization didn’t last that long, folding four years later with only $389 million invested, most of it outside the riot zone. The irony was that there was a net loss of 50,000 to 55,000 jobs in South Los Angeles in the following decade.

The opportunity for a peace dividend in the inner city was squandered. It therefore should come as no surprise if a new generation of homeboys begins to secure their violent reputations on the streets, or if the non-gang homicide rates continue to rise as a measure of despair.

We need to deepen the search for peace, not war. Private-sector fantasies like Rebuild LA are bound to fail. If the government doesn’t help subsidize targeted inner-city development, it will need to subsidize more prisons.

More data need to be collected impartially. For example, the definition of “gang related” violence needs to be tightened. It now means anything from a collective war over gang turf to individual killings over sexual jealousy. The scale of gang violence is inflated as hard-core shooters are identified in the same police database as wannabes. Sheriff Lee Baca says much of the database is “junk.”

If we want to find real solutions to the problem of gang- related violence in Los Angeles, we’re going to have to ask ourselves some difficult questions: Are defenders of the status quo simply fanning people’s fears of gangs because it is easier than explaining why the police are making fewer homicide arrests and why there is so much police attrition in neighborhoods with the highest murder rates? Are the hard-line tactics in the “war” on gangs actually resulting in less community cooperation in solving homicides? Is violence acceptable as long as minorities are killing only each other?

Someone needs to answer.