L.A. County Targets Racial Gang War

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies working to end a deadly racial gang war in an unincorporated neighborhood just north of Watts have made 230 felony arrests and seized 130 weapons since April, Sheriff Lee Baca announced Friday.

The law enforcement push was made possible by a 57-member task force assembled to saturate a 3 1/2 -square-mile area between Florence Avenue and Firestone Boulevard where gang shootings had left more than 40 people dead and 200 wounded during an 18-month period.

The rise in violence, authorities said, dates to the beginning of last year, when a dispute over drugs between the Eastside Crips, a predominantly black gang, and Florencia 13, a Latino gang, escalated.

The Sheriff’s Department funded the task force with $1 million provided by county Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Gloria Molina, each of whom represents part of the area.

That money, which made it possible to shift deputies into the troubled area, has now run out, and the task force was disbanded at the beginning of the month. But sheriff’s officials said they believed that their efforts had defused racial tensions. More than 50 targeted gang members have been charged with murder, attempted murder or assault with a deadly weapon, authorities said.

Cmdr. Ralph Martin, chief of field operations for the area, said homicides were markedly down.

“We were having one every 48 hours; now it’s every 10 to 12 days,” he said, acknowledging that that number was still too high.

The effort must now be maintained by deputies assigned to regular patrol of the area, officials said.

Baca said a similar effort is planned for unincorporated areas near Compton, a city that has seen a 60% rise in homicides this year. It was unclear, however, whether money was available.

Martin said he had been in talks with Compton officials about increasing efforts there, but the cash-strapped city has said it has no money to add to the 72 deputies already under contract.

Areas of the county patrolled by the sheriff have seen a 30% increase in gang killings this year, compared with the same period a year ago.

At the same time, both the gang and homicide units have remained chronically understaffed, each about 10% under authorized budget levels, according to their captains.

The increase in homicides has been concentrated in three small areas of the county: Compton; Century Station, which includes the area where the gang war was targeted; and East Los Angeles.

From January 2004 through June of this year, Baca said, warring gang members in the Florence-Firestone area killed 44 people. About half of those killed had no gang affiliation, he said.

“Violence took a certain turn and became racial war,” Baca said at a news conference at sheriff’s headquarters, where he was flanked by confiscated weapons and photos of arrested gang members.

“They were going back and forth and killing innocent people on the street,” he said. “People were killed only because they were black or they were brown.”

Among bystanders killed, Martin said, “One was a 17-year-old boy on his way to work.... Two Hispanics were shot to death because they had a brown sticker on their car, and so they were executed.”

In the back of the room where the news conference was held, the wife and children of Gabino Lopez, 52, shot to death in February on his way home from a liquor store, sat quietly. Baca asked them to hold up Lopez’s picture -- noting that investigators believed that he was “targeted only because he was Hispanic.”

Last weekend, on the same street where Lopez was shot, a triple shooting claimed the lives of two teenagers, Pedro Gonzalez, 15, and Anthony Chairez, 17. Another person was wounded. The suspect in that incident was described as Hispanic, according to the sheriff’s officials.

Molina called the continuing violence in many communities “intolerable.”

“We’ve just begun,” she said of efforts to eradicate gang violence. “Gang wars are going to continue for some time because gangs are so deeply ingrained in some families.”

Underscoring her point: On display at the front of the room were oversize depictions of baby items found by deputies for sale on the Internet.

A bib read: “SouthSide Florencia PeeWee In Training.”