Gangs in Los Angeles – a series of stories
Anti-gang battle needs more than just cops
Steve Lopez
Los Angeles
Times
January 19, 2007
The 204th Street gang was a no-show Thursday in Harbor Gateway. I was there to
personally thank members for their generosity in allowing African Americans to
walk down the street, but the Latino gangbangers were nowhere to be found.
Najee Ali, who had organized a little demonstration of love and unity, walked
around the neighborhood with me looking for a gang member he might recognize.
They were supposed to drop by and sign a document calling for an end to
violence.
"They don't want to show their face now," Ali said, attributing their reluctance
to the fact that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials were coming
later in the day to announce a crackdown on the gang by local, state and federal
agencies.
I went off on my own after a while, trying to find gang members. Call me naive,
but I wanted to see what they had to say about race relations, what sucked them
into gang life, what might get them out and why they thought it was OK to cordon
off sections of the city for their exclusive use.
I had no luck in the end, and Ali's news conference kind of fizzled too,
devolving into a discussion of whether the agreement he had with gang members
was a truce or a treaty and what it all meant in the end anyway.
"It ain't gonna work," 20-year-old Darren Brown told me. He was there because of
his friendship with the family of a 14-year-old black girl shot to death Dec.
15, allegedly by Latino gang members. "The people who called the truce are
nowhere to be seen," Brown went on, so it isn't worth anything.
We were across the street from Del Amo Market, which Brown said he had never
been inside despite living three blocks away.
Why not? I asked.
"Fear of getting shot," he said.
You don't have to work hard in this neighborhood to find a story that flips
things around the other way. Why do the black kids have to throw signs at people
and curse, asked a 35-year-old woman named Alva, who gave me a tour of recent
shooting sites and said two of the victims were Latino. And why did it take a
black victim to bring in all this heavy artillery from the police and the media?
Ali walked by with the family of the 14-year-old who was killed, and Alva asked
him why he hadn't invited the family of the slain Latino man to his ceremony.
Ali told her that family was welcome and so was every other family, and the
whole point of his being there was to bring people together.
It's a nice thought, but it's going to take more than a truce or a treaty to
stem the bloodshed in Harbor Gateway and across the city, and it's also going to
take more than the big guns and injunctions dragged out by the mayor and law
enforcement officials Thursday.
Gang violence is going up citywide while overall crime goes down. In the San
Fernando Valley, 2006 saw a 42% increase in gang-related crime. In Angelino
Heights, residents are still in mourning over the death of a 9-year-old girl hit
by a stray bullet last month, and law enforcement officials enraged them with
the news that gang members who fired the bullet that killed her are not culpable
because they shot in self-defense.
Go ahead and drop a hammer on the bad guys, says Connie Rice, who recently
completed a city-financed report that warned of gang violence spreading into
previously safe neighborhoods.
"But before you lower the boom, what you need to do is go in and let guys know
we've got exit ramps for you if you don't want that third strike," Rice said.
"We've got a bridge out. Job training. If you can't read, we can help. If you're
on drugs, we can get you off that."
Rice's report said the city's efforts are disorganized and under-powered, with
little accountability for 23 scattered agencies that spend $82 million in city
funds. Get it together, she said. Appoint a czar. Go after the toughest members
of the nastiest gangs. But don't expect much in the way of long-term success
until suppression is backed up by smarter intervention and prevention.
City Councilman Tony Cardenas agreed. The chairman of a committee on gang
violence called it the Hurricane Katrina of Los Angeles and said the city can't
expect state and federal officials to hand over money for intervention until it
gets smarter on its own.
"The situation is out of hand," Cardenas said. "Even firefighters and paramedics
are getting shot at, and the reason to point this out is that we have a broad
spectrum of victims we're talking about. It's not just poor people in poor
communities. Everybody's affected by this, and it's a war that's got to stop."
We've got 40,000 gang members and only 61 gang intervention officers, Rice said.
Is it any wonder the gangs are in control?
If indeed the violence spreads to previously safe neighborhoods, it'll put the
problem on everyone's radar screen. Maybe then we'll be interested enough to
discover that Rice is right when she says the cops can do only so much.
Although some gang members are sociopaths who need to be locked away for good,
many are products of economic, educational, cultural and social forces that have
destroyed families and communities. They grow up with absent dads and addicted
moms in places where the manufacturing jobs of yesteryear gave way to a service
economy that doesn't buy you a house and barely pays the rent.
"If you don't have a job for them, it's over," Rice said about what happens if
you're lucky enough to talk a kid out of a gang. "[Father] Greg Boyle is right.
The only factor that has ever substantially reduced crime by gangs is jobs."
She had a thought too on how to create them.
"You need a Manhattan Project to create violence-reduction jobs like the public
works jobs from World War II," she said, telling me Los Angeles has arrested
450,000 minors in the last 10 years and sent many of them off to prisons at
tremendous public expense. "You create jobs because it's a whole lot cheaper
than what we're doing now."
****************
Los Angeles names and targets city's worst 11 gangs
Mayor and police chief vow to pursue the groups with local-federal law enforcement teams. Experts question the strategy.
By Patrick McGreevy and Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
February 8, 2007
Launching a counteroffensive against organized street thugs, Los Angeles Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa and police officials took the unusual step Wednesday of
identifying the city's 11 worst gangs, then promising to go after them with
teams of police, federal agents, probation officers and prosecutors.
Facing 720 identifiable gangs with 39,000 members, the city's plan would target
the most dangerous groups, which total at least 800 members. Those gangs are
thought to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of mayhem.
The gangs on the list are believed to have committed 6% of the violent crime
that occurred in the city last year.
How many local and federal officers will be committed to the anti-gang push
remained unclear, however. And given the complexity of what has been a
long-standing social problem, some experts questioned whether the plan would be
any more effective than past police crackdowns.
Overall, serious crime declined in Los Angeles last year, but violent,
gang-related crime increased 14%.
Gang crime was even higher in areas such as South Los Angeles, where it
increased 25%, and a section of the north San Fernando Valley where it grew by
nearly 160%.
"Street gangs are responsible for the majority of all the murders in Los Angeles
and nearly 70% of all the shootings," Villaraigosa said Wednesday at a
previously scheduled international summit on gang issues in Universal City. "We
must work to address gang violence in a truly comprehensive way."
Although the police had identified certain gangs on occasion, especially when
they appeared to be involved in high-profile crimes, the LAPD historically has
not called out their names "because of the widely held perception that doing so
elevated the criminals' influence and standing in the gang community," the
mayor's plan says.
"This new strategy abandons the earlier posture and challenges these menaces by
exposing their corrosive behavior to the scrutiny of a more informed and
confident community," the plan says.
But Wes McBride, executive director of the California Gang Investigators Assn.
and a retired Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, said he was "not sure" that
identifying the gangs was a good idea.
"These guys keep the clippings, and I don't know if you can really say which are
the most dangerous gangs on any one day," he said. "It is the kind of
advertising you don't need."
McBride said he feared that some gangs would feel slighted if not named and
might try to up the ante with more violent crimes.
Najee Ali, a community activist and former gang member, said he also was opposed
to any ranking system. "The mayor and chief shouldn't be legitimizing the
gangs," he said. "To the gang members it is a badge of honor."
The list of targeted gangs includes the 204th Street gang in Harbor Gateway,
which is believed to be responsible for recent racially motivated attacks and
will be the subject of a special abatement effort. The list also includes Canoga
Park Alabama, whose members' recent violent acts have contributed to gang crime
skyrocketing 43% in the San Fernando Valley.
The other gangs on the list include 18th Street Westside in the LAPD's Southeast
Division; the Avenues gang in the Northeast Division; the Grape Street Crips in
the Southeast Division; Black P-Stones in the Southwest Division; the La Mirada
Locos in the Rampart and Northeast divisions; the Mara Salvatrucha in the
Rampart, Hollywood and Wilshire divisions; the Rollin' 40s and Rollin' 30s
Harlem Crips, both in Southwest, and the Rollin' 60s in the 77th Street
Division.
The Mara Salvatrucha gang has up to 50,000 members in six countries, but police
will focus on cliques that operate in a few local high-crime neighborhoods.
The LAPD already has shifted 18 additional officers to the 204th Street gang
turf and is expected to double that amount soon. Smaller deployments are
expected for other gang-infested neighborhoods.
An additional 50 officers will be assigned to a Community Safety Operations
Center in the Valley, which will analyze real-time crime data to rapidly and
strategically deploy officers, including high-visibility patrols, in
crime-ridden regions of the Valley.
The mayor and chief are set to formally unveil their plan at 2:30 p.m. today at
the Valley's Mission Community Police Station.
Most of the gangs on the list already have been hit with injunctions that
restrict their movements and ability to socialize, and some have been in the
crosshairs of local and federal authorities for years.
But Villaraigosa said that the new plan is not as piecemeal as previously, and
that the FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration, county probation agents, county and
city prosecutors, and the U.S. attorney's office have signed on to step up
pressure.
"We, the police, law enforcement, can do a great deal working collectively
together, with force magnification, to reduce this problem," said Police Chief
William J. Bratton on Wednesday.
But, Villaraigosa added, the gang-suppression plan was only the first step in
stabilizing crime-ridden neighborhoods. He said the city would later provide
prevention and intervention programs to keep young people out of gangs.
The chief acknowledged that with a police force already stretched thin and
expansion occurring slowly, he would have to redeploy existing officers to hot
spots in the immediate future.
McBride, the gang expert, cautioned that plans without resources often fall
short.
"Until everyone hires a bunch more cops, you are shoving sand in the wind," he
said.
In addition to releasing a list of targeted gangs, the LAPD has submitted the
name of a fugitive gang member for placement on the FBI's most wanted list and
will submit another name when the first fugitive is captured, officials said.
The submissions will come from the LAPD's own list of its 10 most wanted gang
fugitives, which also was released Wednesday. It includes Merced "Shadow"
Cambero, from the Avenues gang, and Kody "Monster Cody" DeJohn Scott, from the
8-Trey Gangster Crips.
Also, the plan includes the appointment of an LAPD gang coordinator, creates a
South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide Group, designates additional patrol officers
in gang territories to enforce injunctions and warrants, and proposes community
symposiums on gang awareness in affected neighborhoods.
Malcolm Klein, a professor emeritus at USC and a gang expert, said the city's
gang plan would appear to use a "tip of the iceberg" strategy.
"Targeting hot spots for gangs — that is not much different than the past,"
Klein said.
He also questioned the methods used to choose which gangs belonged on the worst
11 list.
"The level of violence generated by a gang makes sense to me. But the
interracial conflict [at the root of the 204th Street gang murders] is not
common, and shooting at police officers also isn't common. The last two are more
political than rational."
However, the idea of focusing on the most violent gangs was supported by Alex
Alonso, an academic who studies gang territories in Los Angeles and runs the
website streetgangs.com.
"What they did under [former Police Chief Daryl F.] Gates didn't work: Suppress
everyone. Now they want to be more focused on the most hard-core gang members,
that 10% who are really responsible for violence," Alonso said.
Experts suggest police crackdowns do only half the job. One plan calls for a mix of programs designed to 'hold and build' neighborhoods.
By Richard Winton and Patrick McGreevy
Times Staff Writers
February 11, 2007
Every few years, an act of gang violence rises above the rest, sparking outrage
across Los Angeles and vows to finally conquer the gang problem.
When Karen Toshima was killed by gang crossfire in Westwood Village in 1988,
then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates intensified Operation Hammer. The gang sweeps
yielded thousands of arrests but also generated much criticism about
mistreatment by officers.
The 1995 killing of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen when her family drove onto a
dead-end street in Cypress Park resulted in another gang crackdown.
When William J. Bratton became chief in 2002, he was faced with a string of 20
gang shootings — including the death of 14-year-old Clive Jackson. He declared
war on gangs, referring to them as domestic terrorists.
Last week, he and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared war again — the
inspiration this time the racially motivated killing of Cheryl Green, a
14-year-old African American, by members of a Latino gang in the Harbor Gateway
neighborhood.
The new crackdown — targeting 11 gangs — might suggest that the Los Angeles
Police Department is trying again where it has failed before.
But it's more complex than that. Though gang crimes jumped 14% in 2006, they are
down significantly from the early 1990s and even more compared with the
mid-1980s. According to LAPD statistics, there were 7,714 gang crimes last year,
compared with 10,945 in 1995.
"What we are doing is no different than what we have been doing. As a Police
Department we have always been assertive, very aggressive in going at gangs,"
Bratton said. "What we are doing with this effort — it's more comprehensive."
But what some critics of the crackdown find familiar is the race to respond to a
killing that garners news media attention and public outrage — an approach they
say is not always comprehensive or effective.
"It is the same prescription every time they have a major event," said Malcolm
Klein, a veteran gang sociologist and USC professor emeritus. "Gangs are defined
as a crime problem and not a community problem. This is old fashioned
suppression in a new guise, and where is the proof that has worked?"
He noted that since 1980, when gang slayings topped 200 in Los Angeles, the city
has focused most of its gang response on policing.
A month ago, Connie Rice, director of the Advancement Project in Los Angeles,
produced a comprehensive plan for the city to overhaul gang intervention
programs and try to use means other than law enforcement to address its 39,000
gang members.
Rice proposes what she calls a Marshall Plan of sorts that would mix law
enforcement with gang intervention and job programs, community outreach and
newly created community oversight groups.
It would focus initially on 12 so-called hot zones around the city. Gang
prevention efforts now cost the city $82 million a year, but the report called
for as much as $1 billion to be spent over the first 18 months.
Rice said past LAPD gang suppression efforts have worked in some neighborhoods,
but only for a short time. The city, she said, has always failed to follow up
with programs to keep the gangs out.
"The surges of police activity work, and they may even work for months or
years," Rice said. "But eventually, three years later, another [gang] set comes
in."
She likened the situation to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, where troops quickly
routed the enemy, only to see a lack of proper planning lead to chaos.
"The LAPD knows how to surge and purge," Rice said. But "after the LAPD clears
out a neighborhood, we don't know how to hold and build."
Rice and Klein said the city's response to the Stephanie Kuhen shooting in
Cypress Park by the Avenues gang highlights the problem.
In the wake of the killing, the city created the L.A. Bridges after-school
program, but it has not done what was required, Rice said. The program budgeted
for $26 million last year reaches only 5% of gang members and 2% of children in
neighborhoods with high gang activity, and is not keeping enough young people
out of gangs, she said.
Cheryl Maxson, a UC Irvine criminologist and gang expert, said the problem is
that the LAPD can move much faster than gang intervention groups.
"The program community, the interventionists, are not able to mobilize as
quickly as LAPD, so law enforcement has taken the lead on gangs for decades,"
she said. "So the city goes with strategic suppression."
Bratton, however, is quick to point out that LAPD efforts over the last four
years have yielded results.
"In 2002, 2003 we had a similar initiative. [Before then] we had had three
straight years of growing crime in the city. Gang violence in particular," he
said. "We put in new resources. That year, we had a 23% decline in homicides
throughout the city. About 20% of that decline, over 100 fewer murders, were in
the South Bureau."
The latest plan calls for 200 extra officers to target the 11 gangs, a new South
L.A. gang homicide bureau and an LAPD gang coordinator.
Villaraigosa said the plan, which identifies gangs by name, represents a more
direct approach to the problem, learning from past mistakes.
"Part of what dynamic leadership is all about … is you are constantly evaluating
what works and what doesn't," he said, adding that he also wants to boost
gang-intervention programs.
The police crackdown has met with general support from community activists in
some gang-plagued neighborhoods, who say they have been begging the city for
years to make their areas safer.
But aggressive gang crackdowns have generated criticism in the past over
heavy-handed tactics.
Efforts in the 1980s were widely seen as excessive, symbolized by police use of
a tank-like battering ram to smash into suspected gang houses. In 1988, police
ripped apart apartments on Dalton Street looking for gangs and drugs — but later
admitted they had the wrong places.
A decade later, gang enforcement efforts were further tarnished by the Rampart
scandal. Caught in a dope-stealing allegation, then-Officer Rafael Perez
revealed that dozens of officers, many in the elite area gang unit, were making
false arrests, giving perjured testimony and framing suspects.
Then-Chief Bernard C. Parks, now a city councilman, disbanded the anti-gang
units. Subsequently, the U.S. Justice Department forced the LAPD and city into a
consent decree with oversight of the department continuing today. Tough rules
govern the gang units now in use, and there are audits and constant monitoring.
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Anti-gang efforts
Here are some defining moments in the Los Angeles Police Department's long — and
at times controversial — fight against street gangs.
• 1985: The LAPD started using a tank-like battering ram to
enter suspected gang and drug houses. The Times reported: "Police Chief Daryl F.
Gates was so proud of the event that he personally christened the new tank and
then rode inside it, while cameras rolled, as it did its dirty work."
• 1988: Eighty-eight LAPD officers stormed two apartment
houses at Dalton Avenue and 39th Street, near the Coliseum. The officers broke
windows, smashed walls, ceilings and furniture with sledgehammers and battering
rams and ripped out sinks and toilets. Apparently, they had the wrong
apartments. The city paid more than $4 million in settlements.
• 1988: The LAPD launched Operation Hammer, anti-gang sweeps
that resulted in tens of thousands of arrests. Many blacks and Latinos said the
effort amounted to racial harassment. On one night, officers in Operation Hammer
arrested 1,453 people — 1,350 of whom were released with no charges filed.
• 1994: In the wake of riots in 1992, several major gangs
agreed to truces, which appeared to reduce killings in some neighborhoods, but
in many cases the results were short-lived.
• 1995: The LAPD and other agencies launched what was
described as the "largest street gang crackdown of its kind in Los Angeles
history." In two weeks, only 69 people had been arrested by the 800-member task
force.
• 1997: Law enforcement agencies won a sweeping,
first-of-its-kind injunction aimed at the heart of the notorious 18th Street
gang's domain, a crowded and crime-plagued square-mile area west of downtown
where the group had emerged more than 30 years ago.
• 1998: Crime in Los Angeles dropped to the lowest level in
more than two decades.
• 1999: The Rampart scandal erupted, with accusations of
criminal behavior by members of the LAPD's anti-gang detail.
• 2002: Mayor James K. Hahn and Los Angeles Police Chief
William J. Bratton announced an "all-out assault" on the city's street gangs,
with plans to use the same tactics that crippled organized crime to pursue gang
members.
**********
L.A. housing project stuck in a cycle of violence and distrust
Residents feel caught between the local gang and the police officers that battle it.
By Paul Pringle
Los Angeles Times
February 16, 2007
School was out, and the municipal gym jumped with the wholesome noise of girls
and boys slapping basketballs onto the hardwood. Then came the clatter of a
helicopter overhead.
"LAPD — you see?" said Jose Saucedo, in a voice too weary for his 18 years. He
stood at the gym door, eyeing the police chopper as if it were a storm cloud.
"What's the reason for the helicopter? Why?"
The simple answer is that the gym sits in Ramona Gardens, an Eastside housing
project that has seen countless confrontations between the police and its
home-grown street gang, Big Hazard. The cycles of seething standoffs and bursts
of violence stretch back generations and have defeated every effort to bring
lasting security to the neighborhood.
Caught in the middle are Saucedo and his fellow ballplayers, along with about
2,000 other folks determined to lead normal lives in the sprawl of
barracks-like, World War II-era masonry buildings.
Some say they feel under siege more from the police than the gang, because of
what they contend are heavy-handed tactics, a characterization that the Los
Angeles Police Department disputes.
"Growing up here is as close as you're going to get to living in a police
state," said Jose Navarro, 29, a USC doctoral student from Ramona Gardens.
Earlier this month, the routines of residents were disrupted again after a
reputed Big Hazard member died in LAPD custody. The death of Mauricio Cornejo,
31, who was arrested in the project, ignited yet another round of
police-brutality accusations and countercharges of gang intimidation.
Two people said they saw officers beat or kick Cornejo in the head. The LAPD
denies it and cites a preliminary coroner's examination that found no signs of
serious head injuries. The police also say they are often targeted by Big
Hazard. The gang has at least 260 members, including those in prison or living
outside Ramona Gardens, and has connections to the Mexican Mafia, according to
the LAPD.
Twice since January 2006, the police say, gunmen have fired at patrol cars in
Ramona Gardens, with bullets narrowly missing officers.
"Every time we walk away from our car, it's going to be vandalized," said LAPD
Capt. William Fierro. "I just don't know how to get the roots of that gang out
of there."
None of this surprises housing experts. They say that Ramona Gardens, squeezed
by railroad tracks and the San Bernardino Freeway, has become a field laboratory
for housing policies gone wrong and that any solution would require razing the
buildings and starting from scratch. The city's oldest project, Ramona Gardens
opened in 1941.
"It has outlived its useful life," said Rudy Montiel, executive director of the
Los Angeles Housing Authority, which runs the project. Rents for the 497
residences are based on income and can be as little as $50 a month.
Montiel said Ramona Gardens typifies a failed model, because it piles poor
families on top of each other and is separated from the surrounding community —
hothouse conditions for predatory crime. He said the old Aliso Village project
nearby was in similar distress until it was replaced with a combination of low-
and middle-income housing. That could ultimately be Ramona Gardens' fate, he
said, although there is no specific plan for such an undertaking.
"This is an area that has been neglected for years," said City Councilman Jose
Huizar, whose district includes Ramona Gardens. He pledged to begin meeting
regularly with residents.
A litany of ills
The project has witnessed shootings, a thriving drug trade, shakedown
schemes that victimized delivery and bus drivers, apartment squatting by gang
members and street skirmishes that rained rocks and bottles on police, according
to the LAPD.
Last week, as tensions mounted over Cornejo's death, the threat of more mayhem
charged the air. About 100 riot-equipped officers rolled into Ramona Gardens to
disperse a group of 40 to 50 Big Hazard members — some of whom were drinking
beer and smoking marijuana — and residents holding a curbside carwash to pay for
Cornejo's funeral.
Because the gang members melted away without incident, LAPD officials declared
the operation a success. But it left mixed emotions among residents. As police
prepared to pull back, Fabian Puente, 21, who was born in Ramona Gardens, walked
onto Lancaster Avenue to applaud them. "These officers are just doing their
jobs," he said. "We are living in our houses like prisoners."
Many other residents declined to answer a reporter's questions or even give
their names, seeming to show that they were afraid of the gang, the police or
both.
The most vocal complained that the police stopped them for nothing and issued
jaywalking tickets to teenagers heading home from school. Several accusations
were directed at an officer assigned to monitor Big Hazard.
Miguel Jurado, 18, who grew up in Ramona Gardens, said the officer recently
ticketed him for riding his bicycle without lights.
"He told me I looked like a gang member," said Jurado, a carpentry student who
added that he doesn't belong to a gang and has never been arrested.
Fierro said the police do not detain residents without probable cause, and
he defended the lead gang officer. He also dismissed a common belief in the
project that rookie officers are deployed in Ramona Gardens as part of their
training.
But Fierro acknowledged that there might be truth to an assertion that officers
do not have enough contact with residents to quickly judge who is and isn't a
troublemaker. "That bothers me, and I want to see if we can change that image
that we have," he said.
Fierro and other police officials said they had been making strides in that
direction — last year, an LAPD team played residents in a basketball game —
until Cornejo's death.
On Feb. 3, LAPD spokesmen say, officers tried to apprehend Cornejo, but he led
them on a foot chase and tossed away a .45-caliber pistol.
They say Cornejo, a wanted parolee, then fought with officers and was struck
with a baton on an arm and leg. After he was handcuffed, Cornejo continued to
kick at the officers, according to Lt. Paul Vernon. At the LAPD's Hollenbeck
station, Cornejo developed breathing problems, and the police called paramedics,
Vernon said. Cornejo was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
Two women have said they saw the police strike Cornejo in the head and body
after he was handcuffed, and a third woman said she saw officers drag him
through a station hallway and kick him. The police say that is untrue.
Complete autopsy results are pending.
History repeats itself
The recriminations over Cornejo's death are history repeating itself at
Ramona Gardens. Eleven years ago, a crowd pelted officers with rocks and bottles
after the police shot a suspected gang member to death. In 1991, a similar
eruption occurred when a sheriff's deputy fatally shot an unarmed gang member,
who authorities said had assaulted a second deputy with a flashlight.
Each time, residents said the police and sheriff's officials had ignored
harassment complaints and were out of touch with the community.
The residents do not downplay the presence of Big Hazard. But many say the gang
members, for better or worse, have family ties with those on the right side of
the law.
The police insist that Big Hazard bullies residents into silence, while dealing
drugs and committing robberies.
"Ninety percent of the people in there are good, hard-working people," said LAPD
Deputy Chief Cayler Carter. He said the department has resolved to "take that
community away from the gang and give it back to the people."
Carter and Fierro said the 2006 shootings at two patrol vehicles were on their
minds when they marshaled a military-strength convoy to break up the carwash
last week.
Current and former gang members say the police exaggerate the danger. Gabriel,
42, who asked that his last name be withheld, said he joined Big Hazard at age
12, has served multiple prison terms and has been employed under the table since
his 2004 parole.
He said Big Hazard does not prey on residents. "It could be better, but it's a
nice community," he said the day after the police operation.
Gabriel said that he expected the police to constantly eye him, if only because
he is thoroughly branded with gang tattoos, but that the LAPD hassles too many
innocents.
"These kids see it," he said, gesturing to the youngsters at the gym.
He said he followed his father into the gang, but the family had its triumphs: A
brother is a civilian worker for the Sheriff's Department, and a sister is an
apartment manager. "You can emancipate from this," Gabriel said, "but it takes a
lot of discipline."
Discipline pays off
Navarro, the USC doctoral student, had the discipline. At the carwash, he
wore a pullover from his alma mater, UC Berkeley, and told of being reared at
Ramona Gardens by his aunt, Maggie Aguilar, who helped keep him out of the gang.
"I'd have kicked his butt," said Aguilar, whose daughter, Kristy Alvarez, is
Lincoln High School's reigning homecoming queen.
Navarro, who was a friend of Cornejo, said the police use the gang label to
"dehumanize" young people in the neighborhood. "There's little difference
between me and the so-called gang members," he said.
He was standing on Lancaster Avenue as the third day of the carwash wound down.
As it grew dark, Navarro chatted with another childhood friend, Gerard
Hernandez, 27, remembering happier times. Hernandez once visited him at
Berkeley, Navarro said.
On this night, he said, Hernandez joked about someday attending Harvard.
Half an hour later, Hernandez was shot near the gym and staggered out to the
street. He died at the hospital.
Fierro said that Hernandez belonged to Big Hazard and that the killing was
gang-related.
Gang mayhem cripples big area
Thousands stranded, schools locked down as notorious group battles the LAPD after a drive-by killing.
By Richard Winton, Susannah Rosenblatt and Andrew Blankstein
Los Angeles Times
February 22, 2008
A drive-by attack followed by a wild shootout between gang members and police
shut down dozens of blocks of Northeast Los Angeles for nearly six hours
Thursday afternoon, stranding thousands of residents, keeping students locked in
their classrooms and leaving two people dead.
Veteran L.A. Police Department officials described the bizarre midday shootings
-- and the widespread disruption they caused -- as highly unusual even in an
area known for gang activity. It left the neighborhood littered with shell
casings and its residents fearful.
Police blamed the incident on the notorious Avenues gang, which has cast a wide
shadow over districts north of downtown L.A. for decades and continues to be
active despite several high-profile attempts by authorities to shut it down.
The violence began around noon when a 37-year-old man police described as a
bystander was shot more than a dozen times by suspected gang members as he held
the hand of a 2-year-old girl. He later died. The toddler, apparently picked up
by a passerby and carried to safety, was not wounded. As the gunmen drove off,
witnesses told police, several pedestrians who apparently knew the victim opened
fire on the car.
Minutes later, police attempted to stop suspects driving in a white Nissan sedan
about 10 blocks away. Three men jumped out of the car, and at least two of them
fired weapons at officers.
A man wielding an AK-47 rifle was killed by police as they returned fire,
authorities said.
Another suspect was wounded and later found hiding under a car, where he was
still holding a semiautomatic handgun, law enforcement sources said. Police said
he is expected to recover.
But it was a massive manhunt for the two remaining suspects that shut down
dozens of streets in Cypress Park until police arrested one of the men about
5:30 p.m. The other is believed to have driven out of the area, police said.
As police swept through the neighborhood, parents waited anxiously for word
about their schoolchildren and other residents remained either stuck inside
their homes or kept back by police barricades.
"My son is trapped over there and I can't get him," said Christine Schmidt, 37,
who was inside her home near Drew Street and Avenue 32 when she heard the
gunshots. Her son was one of the students locked down at Washington Irving
Middle School.
"I want my son," she said.
During the search, SWAT team members took position and patrol deputies went door
to door with dogs in a neighborhood Police Chief William J. Bratton called the
"heart and soul" of the Avenues street gang, whose roots there date back more
than 50 years.
As the search dragged on, Washington Irving Middle School students kept on
lockdown were fed lunch, allowed bathroom breaks and kept in touch with parents
by cellphone. Also locked down were Fletcher and Aragon elementary schools and
Cal Charter.
An automated phone service notified parents of the lockdown status, which was
not lifted until about 6:15 p.m.
Hundreds of residents gathered along sidewalks and on freeway bridges, waiting
for police to allow them back into the neighborhood.
Juan Soto awoke at home to the sound of helicopters and police cars. His car was
in the area blocked by police and he had no way to get to his job.
"My boss is not going to relieve me," said the 31-year-old.
Near the scene of the shootings Thursday, Bratton described a neighborhood
terrorized in recent weeks by gang violence.
"Gangs that have been here for generations have been going at each other,"
Bratton said during a news conference, referring to the Avenues and Cypress Park
gangs.
Since the beginning of the year, authorities said Avenues gang members are
suspected in at least six homicides. Northeast Division, typically far from the
most violent in the city, already has eight homicides this year, more than any
other, police said. At that rate, the division would far eclipse last year's
total of 18.
Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz said that while the area has gang problems, the level
of violence in the last few weeks is "unheard of."
In the last month, police said, about a third of the 60 aggravated assaults in
the area this year have been connected to Avenues gang members.
The Avenues gang has cast a long shadow in these poor, largely Latino sections
north of downtown L.A.
They gained national attention in 1995 when a 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen was
shot and killed when her family made a wrong turn into a Cypress Park alley.
Two years ago, the gang was again in the news when members were convicted on
federal hate crime charges for violently trying to drive black residents from
the area, a prosecution authorities hoped would hobble the gang's activities.
But law enforcement officials on Thursday described an active and dangerous
enterprise, still operating from its well-known base of operations on Drew
Street.
Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said plainclothes officers in the area had gone to
the location Thursday because they believed that possible suspects in the
drive-by shooting would soon return.
"There's been a rash, an uptick, of shootings in the past few weeks," McDonnell
said of the neighborhood, which is just north of the junction of the 5 and 2
freeways and densely packed with apartment buildings, small bungalows and
warehouses.
Within minutes of reports of officers being shot at, a massive police presence
had descended on the area. Los Angeles SWAT officers were in position by 1 p.m.,
authorities said. The location is only a few blocks from the LAPD's Northeast
Station on San Fernando Road.
More than four hours after the confrontation began, a body covered by a white
sheet was still visible in the street. An AK-47 lay nearby.
Neighbors stood in front yards and looked down from balconies, some snapping
photographs.
Neighbors said one home in the area had been a subject of frequent police
activity.
On Wednesday night, one neighbor said police officers were at the house.
The 35-year old man, who lives in the apartment building next door and asked not
to be identified because of fear of reprisals, said he then heard shots Thursday
about noon.
"It's been happening since last night," he said. "It's been getting worse and
worse every single day."
The shootout and police activity unnerved others as well. About a dozen
residents were evacuated by police and stood waiting for hours in a nearby
carport.
Norma Rodriguez, 45, said she was turned back when she tried to pick up her son
from Fletcher Elementary School.
"We can't go anywhere," said Rodriguez, who lives in Eagle Rock and works as a
private caregiver. "I'm worried. Right now at this point, I know he's inside the
school, but I don't want him to be scared. There are police cars everywhere."
****************
A gang's staying power
Entrenched for years in Northeast L.A., the Avenues continues to defy the forces of law and gentrification.
By Joe Mozingo, Sam Quinones and Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
February 23, 2008
The young men who rule Drew Street have survived countless convictions,
injunctions, evictions and deportations.
Over the years, they have called themselves the Cypress Assassins, the Pee Wee
Gangsters, the Brown Crowd Youngsters. They are as much clan as gang, deeply
interconnected by family, with decades in their Glassell Park neighborhood.
Police have tried to crush them for years, but for all the law enforcement
rained upon the shabby two blocks of wrought-iron fences and stucco apartments,
homeboys still command the street, as evidenced by the wild shootout Thursday in
Northeast Los Angeles. The gun battle, which followed a drive-by attack near an
elementary school, prompted police to shut down dozens of blocks, stranded
thousands of residents and left two people dead.
The Drew Street crew is just one clique of the notorious Avenues gang that has
tenaciously retained control over a wide swath of Northeast L.A., defying both
the forces of gentrification and heavy crackdowns by police and federal agents.
The gang, deriving its name from the avenues that cross Figueroa Street, took
root in the 1950s and has wreaked havoc ever since. The insignia tattooed on
many members' bodies speaks to their virulent history: a skull with a bullet
hole, wearing a fedora.
The city attorney hit the Avenues with a gang injunction in 2002, making it
illegal for known members to congregate or ride in cars together throughout much
of Highland Park, Glassell Park, Cypress Park and Eagle Rock.
And in 2006, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles won hate-crime convictions against
five members for a murderous campaign to force African Americans out of their
turf.
But even though the Avenues' presence in many neighborhoods has diminished in
recent years -- currently, there are about 400 members -- it remains one of the
most powerful gangs in the city. And it retains strong ties to the Mexican
Mafia, known as the Eme -- a dominant force in California prisons.
"They are fully entrenched in the northeast community," said U.S. Atty. Thomas
P. O'Brien, who led the hate-crime case and prosecuted members of the gang
earlier in his career, as a deputy district attorney. "This is one of those
older street gangs that are generational. You have youngsters who are 10 or 11
years old jumped in to the same gang claimed by their grandfathers."
The Drew Street clique is run by five interrelated families, police say. The
layout of the small neighborhood -- cut off by San Fernando Road, backed up
against Forest Lawn Memorial Park -- serves as a perfect redoubt.
The area has long been a source of income for the Mexican Mafia, as Avenues
members have taxed local drug dealers and paid a cut to the prison gang,
according to Tony Raphael, author of "The Mexican Mafia." A prominent member of
the Eme, Javier "Gangster" Marquez, grew up on Drew Street, and drugs from
Mexico would land there before being distributed. Raphael said a recent uptick
in violence stems from a renewed push by the Avenues to collect taxes from
smaller gangs in Cypress Park and Glassell Park.
Police said the Thursday shootout began when gang members opened fire on
36-year-old Marcos Salas near Aragon Elementary School as he held the hand of
his 2-year-old granddaughter. The girl was whisked away, but Salas later died.
As the gunmen drove off, several people who apparently knew the victim started
firing at them.
Minutes later, police converged on Drew Street, 10 blocks away. They pulled over
a white Nissan sedan, and three men jumped out and opened fire, police said. The
officers fired back, wounding one man and hitting another, who was wielding an
AK-47.
Daniel Leon, 22 -- a heavy in the Drew Street crew -- died on the asphalt he and
his brothers ruled. The wounded man, Jose Angel Gomez, was taken to a hospital
and is being held on suspicion of killing Salas. Another gunman, Guillermo
Ocampo, was later caught by police and booked for investigation of murder.
Police identified all three as members of the Avenues.
Leon was one of 13 children of Maria Leon, who lived at 3304 Drew St. until the
city shut down the home last year with a narcotics abatement lawsuit. City Atty.
Rocky Delgadillo called the home the gang's "mother ship." More than 40 arrests
were made there in 2006, and the city attorney was attempting to ban Daniel Leon
from the neighborhood before he was killed.
His family is one of the five that control drug sales in the area, LAPD Deputy
Chief Sergio Diaz and other sources said.
"This clique is bound by close family ties," said Diaz. "It goes back
generations."
Like hundreds of residents in the neighborhood, the Leons originally hailed from
the village of Tlalchapa, in Guerrero, Mexico, neighbors said.
That shared history breeds loyalty. Several residents interviewed Friday said
they supported the Avenues. "I've been here 25 years and they've never
disrespected me," said Modesta Hernandez. "On the contrary, they protect us.
They help us."
They depicted the police as hostile and corrupt, and several said the shooting
of Daniel Leon was unprovoked, although one neighbor said he clearly saw Leon
raise the assault weapon at the officers.
Leon had a history of violence. He was arrested for killing a drug buyer at the
house in 2004 and was ultimately convicted of being an accessory to murder. In
2005, he was arrested in a case in which prosecutors alleged "he brutally beat
and robbed a 43-year-old man . . . as his wife looked on." The wife would not
speak to prosecutors out of fear of retaliation.
This fear is the continuing obstacle in authorities' attempts to break the
gang's grip. Witnesses don't believe police will protect them. And gang members
who flip on their brethren are instantly "green-lighted" -- marked for
execution.
David "Mousie" Cruz testified in 2001 against an Avenues member who was accused
of taking part in the killings of two black men. Cruz was then deported to El
Salvador, where he was stabbed 22 times in retaliation, but he survived.
FBI Special Agent Jerry Fradella recalled trying to pressure the least culpable
defendant in the hate-crime case to testify against his codefendants in exchange
for leniency. Fernando "Sneaky" Cazares was known to have been inside a van
listening to a police scanner while other defendants carried out a killing
outside. But he wouldn't betray them.
"He was loyal to the end," Fradella said. "And he got triple life just like the
other guys."
Compounding the problem, potential informants often cannot envision a life after
snitching -- no longer safe in their neighborhoods, which are often all they
know of the world. And in prison, they would have to be held in protective
custody.
"They're just so unfamiliar with whatever else is out there, they want to stick
to what they know," Fradella said.
The silence is unbearable for the victims' families. Luisa Prudhomme's son
Anthony was shot twice in the head as he lay in bed in his apartment in Highland
Park on Nov. 3, 2000. He had no gang affiliation and worked at a Pier 1.
His slaying was part of the hate-crime case that led to the conviction of the
five men. But the actual shooter is still at large. Police believe they know his
identity, but no one will talk.
"I want the person who murdered my son to be brought to justice," Prudhomme
said. "The guy who pulled the trigger. He used a pillow, but he must have gotten
some of my son's blood on him. He knows what he did. God knows what he did."
****************
Who'll stop the gangs?
L.A.'s crime plague is a complex social ill that requires more than just beefed-up law enforcement.
Tim
Rutten
Los Angeles Times
February 27, 2008
Gang violence is to Los Angeles politics as the weather is to conversation:
Everybody talks about it, and nobody ever does anything about it.
Policing occasionally provides a temporary surcease, as it did last week when a
drive-by murder next to a grammar school playground and a subsequent shootout
between heavily armed gunmen and Los Angeles Police Department officers
paralyzed parts of two neighborhoods northeast of downtown for hours. Early
Wednesday morning, a police sweep apprehended 19 alleged gang members and seized
guns and drugs.
But though the department is willing to take on gang violence where it becomes
particularly virulent, treating this solely as a policing issue is a bit like
asking the overextended, understaffed LAPD to engage in an endless game of Whac-a-Mole.
There were 200 officers involved in Wednesday's predawn sweep -- and anyone who
knows just how few cops are on the city's streets at any given moment also knows
what that kind of diversion of force means.
The problem's sheer scope makes it clear that it won't yield to a solution based
entirely -- or even mainly -- on law enforcement. People who believe most of the
statistics thrown around during debates over gangs usually are the sort who
respond to e-mails from Nigeria with their banking information. Still,
conservative analysts estimate that as many as 40,000 people belong to the 700
or so gangs in the city of L.A. Countywide, there may be as many as 1,200 gangs
with 80,000 members. The material cost of their criminality may be as much as $2
billion a year; the human toll in lives lost or deformed defies calculation.
Every few years, our political establishment runs out of ways to look away and
begins demanding another study, a fresh approach, a new initiative. First came
an assessment of Los Angeles' anti-gang efforts commissioned by the City Council
and written last year by civil rights attorney Connie Rice.
She's one of those civic activists who is both principled and shrewd, but the
report is a dead letter. It's more than 100 pages long and demands new programs
by the carload. Essentially, it advocates what it calls a citywide Marshall Plan
with a price tag of more than $1 billion. (At one point, the report estimates
that the programs required to get the gangs off one South Los Angeles high
school campus, Manual Arts, would cost more than $50 million.)
Even if the city and state were not in the grip of a budget crisis, there is no
chance that sums of that size ever will be available to assist a group of people
who probably are less popular than the Taliban among L.A. voters.
Meanwhile, City Controller Laura Chick this month issued her own audit of
ongoing anti-gang efforts. She doesn't see a need for any new funds, but she
wants to reallocate money from some programs and consolidate all of them under a
single anti-gang czar, who would report directly to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
He likes the idea, as do Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Police Chief William J.
Bratton.
Chick's proposal, however, is unlikely to go any further than Rice's because
it's opposed by Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs the Ad Hoc Committee on
Gang Violence and Youth Development. "They're recommending that the intervention
and prevention programs basically be put in the mayor's office," he said, "which
is a policy matter first and foremost that should, and will, be vetted through
the council." In other words, economic and political stalemate as usual -- and
another chance to avert our collective gaze.
Meanwhile, consider these facts -- as reported by Times staff writer Sam
Quinones -- concerning Marcos Salas, the 36-year-old man whose killing touched
off last week's lockdown of much of northeast Los Angeles. He was one of eight
sons brought to Los Angeles from Arizona as children by his impoverished
farmworker parents. Marcos dropped out of high school, joined the Cypress Park
gang and went to prison twice -- once on a drug charge, once for attempted
murder while on parole.
Since getting out, he'd reportedly tried to stay out of gang activities,
spending time with his partner, their six daughters and two granddaughters.
Salas, like many ex-cons, was unemployed, supported by his partner's welfare
check. He had his 2-year-old granddaughter by the hand when he was shot dead
outside the grammar school where he'd gone to walk one of his daughters home.
For Marcos Salas, gang membership was simply the apex on a pyramid of social
pathologies that made up his troubling and -- for others -- troublesome life.
We no longer can afford to either sentimentalize or demonize the thousands among
us caught up in choices and circumstances like those with which Salas lived.
Most of all, we cannot go on looking away.
**********
Los Angeles park lights send gang activity into the shadows
Steve Lopez
Los Angeles Times
July 9, 2008
History is not on his side.
The odds are his mortal enemy.
And summer weather is sure to bedevil him, stirring rage and heating the ammo.
But the Rev. Jeff Carr is cruising L.A. in his Honda hybrid on a Saturday night,
firm in the belief that he is chipping away at the seemingly intractable urban
travesty of flying bullets and falling bodies.
"It's not undoable," he says of the challenge he took on nearly one year ago,
when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa looked up at the blond, 6-foot-3 preacher and
asked him to be his gang czar.
"I hate being called the gang czar," Carr says.
Why's that?
"This is not a war on kids."
In fact, the official title is director of gang reduction and youth development,
and Carr is showing me one of his latest attempts at both. In the Summer Night
Lights program, eight parks in high-crime areas around the city are being kept
open several hours later than normal, until midnight in some locations, from
Wednesday through Saturday.
"Four to midnight is the most violent time in our city, from Fourth of July to
Labor Day," Carr says.
He knows parks can be gang-banger clubhouses, so there's a risk in keeping the
lights on and throwing open the gates. But there's a greater risk when kids have
nowhere to go. Five summers ago, he points out, when one city park was kept open
late, the crime rate around the park fell.
That's why Carr, ordained in the Church of the Nazarene and devoted for years to
youth services in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., hooked up with the school
district, the Recreation and Parks Department and other agencies to organize
activities at the parks.
It wasn't easy in an era of budget shortages. He had to pass the basket at
several nonprofits -- Ahmanson, Annenberg, Eisner, Hauptman, Weingart, Wells
Fargo, California Endowment, LA84, Wellness Foundation -- raising nearly $1
million to pay for the whole thing. And he had to get the LAPD to step up
patrols around the parks.
But the genius of the plan was to recruit 10 youngsters between the ages of 17
and 20 to work at each park this summer for a stipend of about $2,600.
"They're kids who could be either victims or perpetrators," he says as we arrive
at Cypress Park.
All 10 of the hires are wearing gray Youth Squad T-Shirts, and so is Carr, who
shakes hands and asks how it's going.
From what I could see, not badly.
On this Saturday night, the local Neighborhood Council has lent a giant-screen
TV, and in a lovely old-world tableau, several neighborhood families are
gathered for an outdoor movie. In the distance, teens are surfing concrete waves
in the skate park while still more ricochet around the ballpark.
I grab one of the Youth Squad kids, 17-year-old Yovani, and ask what he makes of
the scene.
It's a lot better than the alternative, he said. "In five minutes," he says of
the neighborhood he lives in, "you could be in a gang."
He was a graffiti artist, he tells me, and he knew where that could take him. So
he jumped when Carr's recruiters came around.
"I joined because I was always going to get drawn into that," he says of the
criminal forces. "Nobody fights now. Everybody shoots."
Earlier, on this very night, Yovani says, he saw a banger come by, take a look
at all the lawful activity and walk away.
"Thank you," Carr tells the Youth Squad when we leave for another park. "You
guys are doing good work for our city."
As we tour three parks, Carr and I chat about the death of middle-income jobs,
the failures of the schools, the perils of the culture, the armies of absent
dads and all the other nightmares that make his mission so difficult.
"I just love kids," he says, telling me he's well aware that he's in a job in
which he's more likely to be damned every time a gun is fired than he is to be
praised when there's silence.
In the toughest neighborhoods of the city, Carr likes to say with optimism, 85%
of the kids never join a gang. The mayor's office has just taken full control of
the city's formerly fragmented and often inept gang-reduction programs, and Carr
says that will mean tighter controls and more accountability for outside
agencies.
When we head down to Mount Carmel Park, at the intersection of two warring
South-Central gangs, Carr tells me there have been two shootings in the
neighborhood in the last 24 hours. Inside the gym a basketball game is underway
as midnight approaches, with Youth Squad employees and neighborhood kids
squaring off.
"All these kids are at-risk," gang interventionist Pee Cavitt says.
He watches from the sidelines as Carr joins the game and uses bulk, an aging
athlete's only advantage, to rattle in a couple of baskets. The kids razz him
with whoops of surprise.
Cavitt tells me he can't remember seeing anyone from City Hall spend so much
time in the neighborhood.
Carr shows up not just to brainstorm and to deputize good citizens, but he tries
to visit the scene of every gang-related murder so he can sort out the dispute
and help prevent endless rounds of retaliation.
When a kid lies dying in the street, Carr tells me, no matter who he is, he "was
created in the image of God" and "should be treated with respect. Someone should
be there to represent the mayor's office."
When five youths and three adults were shot near a South-Central bus stop in
February, Carr raced around trying to catch up with victims.
At County-USC he bumped into a father who told him his daughter had just been
shot, and then he came upon the 12-year-old girl.
"I saw her on a gurney, sitting up. A 12-year-old girl. She gave me a blank
stare. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she wasn't crying.
"I said, 'I'm sorry, but it's going to be OK.' "
"What do you tell a 12-year-old girl who just got shot in the arm? I asked her
name and told her I work for the mayor's office, but I'm a minister too. I said,
'Do you mind if I pray?'
"Whenever I'm up against the bureaucracy, I remember the face of that
12-year-old, and I push more. Whether it's keeping parks open at night or
anything else, don't tell why we can't do it.
"Tell me why we can."