Killing of children prompts latest L.A. gang crackdown

Jeremiah Marquez

LOS ANGELES — A 14-year-old girl was shot and killed by Hispanic gang members that police say were targeting blacks. A 9-year-old girl died after being hit by a stray bullet as two gang-bangers exchanged fire near her home.

A cop was wounded in a gun battle with a suspected gangster.

After another bloody run in America’s gang capital, Los Angeles police and politicians are promising one of the toughest crackdowns against gangs in city history.

“This is the monster, this is what drives people’s fears,” said police Deputy Chief Charles Beck, who oversees a South Los Angeles district where gang-related crime jumped 24 percent during the year ending in November 2006.

The effort, however, has met skepticism in the city that gave birth to some of the nation’s most notorious gangs, including the Crips, Bloods and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and currently has some 700 gangs with 40,000 members — about four for every cop.

“It’s too big, it’s too entrenched, it’s too intimately connected with the urban setup here,” Malcolm Klein, a gang expert at the University of Southern California, said of the gang problem.

“You can reduce it. But the idea you can somehow eliminate it is ridiculous,” he said.

Gangs have thrived for generations in Los Angeles, but the especially violent year caught Police Department brass off guard. As citywide crime rates continued to fall in 2006, gang-related offenses increased 14 percent — the first hike in four years.

In the San Fernando Valley, a center of growing violence, gang murders, assaults, robberies and other crimes jumped 42 percent.

As part of the offensive, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has appealed to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez for millions of dollars in anti-gang funds and for more federal prosecutors to pursue racketeering and other charges mostly used in the past against organized crime. Gonzalez has dubbed gangs one of the country’s greatest threats.

The mayor is also working with FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has assigned agents to an anti-gang task force in the San Fernando Valley to work alongside cops deputized as federal officers.

The LAPD, meanwhile, is creating a list of the 10 to 20 gangs believed to be responsible for most of the violence. Authorities vow to increase enforcement in afflicted neighborhoods, either by reassigning cops or paying overtime.

The officers will be armed with court injunctions forbidding gang members from assembling in certain areas; nuisance suits aimed at shutting down gang hangouts; and probation orders barring gang members from returning to their neighborhoods after their release from prison.

In some ways, the approach mirrors a multi-agency Boston campaign in the 1990s that resulted in a dramatic decline in gun violence and murder rates that became known as the “Boston Miracle.”

Past efforts in Los Angeles, however, have produced mixed results, leaving some residents leery about the new offensive.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Mario Corona, a former shot-caller for the Pacoima Criminals gang in the San Fernando Valley who now works to rehabilitate gang members.

The city has been hampered in the past by a lack of resources and changing department priorities, according to a city-funded report by civil rights attorney Connie Rice.

In the 1980s, an operation involving an anti-gang unit known as Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, swept up thousands of suspects in South Los Angeles.

But many of those arrested in Operation Hammer were never charged. The unit itself was later disbanded after scandals alleging police corruption.

Residents are demanding renewed action while trying to stay out of the line of fire.

Esteban Martinez, 41, who lives in the San Fernando Valley with his wife and four small children, is frightened by the gunshots he hears at night.

“Everybody is afraid, but they don’t speak [to police] because they are afraid to get into trouble with the gang members,” Martinez said. “I’m worried about my family.”

Martinez lives in a working class district of the valley known as Panorama City, where gangs are suspected of everything from intimidating witnesses to murder.

Two weeks ago, an officer searching a house in the area for wanted gang members was shot and wounded in the leg when a gang-banger opened fire through a closed bedroom door.

Nothing has outraged the city more than the gang slayings of innocent children. Last month, 9-year-old Charupha Wongwisetsiri was standing in her family’s kitchen when she was struck by a stray round from gang crossfire in Angelino Heights near downtown.

That came just five days after the shooting death of Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old black girl, as she was talking to friends in the Harbor Gateway area. Two Hispanic gang members who police said were intent on killing blacks were arrested.

“We should be able to live in peace and not fear that someone is going to attack us because of the color of our skin,” her mother, Charlene Lovett, said at a rally for peace after the killing.

Some residents worry that shifting more officers to gang duty will rob their neighborhoods of patrols and clear the way for more crime.

Alex Sanchez, a former MS-13 member who now runs a gang intervention program, said identifying the worst gangs could actually lead to more crime by sparking a competition for notoriety.

“It’s feeding the egos of gang members,” Sanchez said. “They’re all going to want to be on the top 10.”

In her report, Rice called for a plan to curb violence that would coordinate prevention, intervention and community redevelopment programs.

Others said nothing will change without more jobs and better education.

“Until we get those gangsters into real jobs, we are going to have a lethal ongoing problem, pure and simple,” said Jorja Leap, a social welfare professor and gang expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, who advises the mayor. “It will never change.”

(Associated Press)