The Heat's Off
With police morale and numbers down, L.A. gangs have a free
pass--and they know it. The result is a big increase in homicides.
By CELESTE FREMON, Celeste Fremon is
the author of "Father Greg and the
Homeboys."
In this season where much attention is
focused on counting the dead in far-off
places like Israel, the West Bank and
Afghanistan--all important reckonings, to be
sure--perhaps it is time that we also begin to
consider the dead closer to home, where
there is an alarming spike in gang homicides.
Since January 2000--when the murder toll
really began to climb--through March of this
year, we have buried 780 victims of gang
violence in the city of Los Angeles, most of
them young. If the trend continues, the
figure will hit 1,000 for the three-year
period ending in December 2002--a 100%
increase over the previous three-year
period. Among the reasons that have been
cited for this rash of deaths are the
breakdown of gang truces in South Los
Angeles and disarray in the leadership of the
Mexican Mafia, which once exerted control over most Eastside gangs.
Those who work directly with at-risk youth believe that the reasons
are far more fundamental. Ending gang violence, they say, involves a
tri-pronged approach of prevention, intervention and suppression.
Prevention means giving the younger kids alternatives so that they
never join gangs in the first place. Intervention involves helping gang
members redirect their lives using strategies like jobs, education and
mentoring programs. Suppression, the task of law enforcement, ideally
keeps everyone involved alive until the other two approaches can kick
in.
Father Gregory Boyle, executive director of Jobs for a Future and
Homeboy Industries, simplifies the equation even further: "You need
heat and light." Light comes from organizations like Boyle's that
specialize in providing hope for kids to whom hope is foreign. Heat is
a
respectful, dignified vigilance provided by appropriate policing.
Of late, the necessary "light" has gotten harder and harder to come
by. The aftermath of Sept. 11 ate up donations to most nonprofit
gang-intervention programs at the same time California's economy
took a nosedive. Unemployment figures began to climb, with
joblessness for inner-city youth climbing the highest. Yet, if we are
experiencing a crisis of light--which experts like Boyle say we are--the
crisis in the heat department is of even more calamitous proportions.
A quick example: The Hollenbeck Division of the LAPD serves a
15.2-square-mile area of East L.A. that, over the last decade, has seen
the highest level of gang activity in the city. Under normal
circumstances, according to division insiders, Hollenbeck operates
with a baseline of about 150 officers. After the Rampart scandal
broke, officers weary of being painted with the Rampart brush fled to
outlying police forces like those of Montebello, Santa Ana, Burbank
and Anaheim, leaving Hollenbeck, its staff reports, with only 86
officers. Officially, the LAPD contends that the number is far higher.
But privately, officers say official numbers are inflated by such
methods as counting officers on permanent sick or disability leave.
Anecdotal observations from residents in the Hollenbeck area and
others in L.A.'s poorest and most crime-ridden communities support
the officers' assertion that the department has a huge staffing
problem.
"It used to be you'd drive down the street and you'd see a car every
few minutes," said Jose Corrales, 24, a former homeboy who currently
attends Rio Hondo College. "These days you hardly see a car, and you
never see them in the housing projects. A lot of my homeboys who are
still out on the street are glad at the lack of police presence. But I'm
the father of two little kids now, so I want enough officers out there
to protect and serve."
The effect of the drop in policing can be best quantified by comparing
Hollenbeck's murder rate with that of unincorporated East Los
Angeles, an area with around half the population (128,000 to
Hollenbeck's nearly 200,000) but virtually the same demographics.
The main difference is that unincorporated East L.A. is served by the
L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which is operating with a full
complement of officers in all units. Overall, countyside East L.A. had
five homicides last year, while Hollenbeck had 38--or nearly five times
the murder rate per capita.
Matters are exacerbated by the intensified demands made on the
department since Sept. 11 and by recent city budget cuts. "So now,
when things get bad, cops don't roll out the way they used to because
there's so little money for overtime," said one detective. He recalled
a day last year when there were four homicides in one division. "On
two of them, paramedics had to be called to remove the bodies
because we didn't have enough officers to protect the crime scenes."
Furthermore, officers on the street have become reluctant to
intercede in gang-related affairs. "Right now there is almost no
proactive enforcement," said Mary Ridgway, gang consultant and
probation supervisor for the L.A. County Probation Department. "For
one thing, morale is terrible because, after Rampart, Chief [Bernard
C.] Parks set up a complaint system that didn't distinguish between
bogus complaints and real ones." Officers across the board complain
that post-Rampart discipline has become chaotic and arbitrary. It is,
officers say, as if Parks admitted that the department had cancer but
instead of surgically removing the malignancy he gave the entire rank
and file chemotherapy--then wondered why everybody got sick.
"The LAPD is an organization that relies on pride and esprit de corps,"
said Ridgway. "And that's completely broken down. As a result, there
are whole numbers of cops that rarely make arrests, rarely make
stops. They just ride around and wave at people. It's really gotten
that bad."
This is not to suggest that the LAPD should return to the awful old
days when Rafael Perez and company were planting guns on suspects
and beating the living daylights out of homeboys. However, when the
underregulated anti-gang CRASH units were dismantled, it was widely
hoped they'd be replaced by a system that involved seasoned officers
who got to know the neighborhoods they served. Instead, Ridgway said,
"when the new gang unit was formed, the selection criterion was such
that it all but eliminated officers with prior gang experience. So
suddenly you had no knowledgeable cops working gangs, no one who
knew the players and relationships."
"With gang policing, knowing the players makes all the difference,"
Boyle says. An emblematic example of this principle was demonstrated
at 8 p.m. March 5 when Cesar Gomez, 21, was shot four times in the
chest, once through the heart, in the doorway of the Aliso Pico
Recreation Center in front of 100 kids and parents who had gathered
to watch a girls basketball tournament.
Gomez was shot by two rival gang members who had been seen by
various residents loitering uneasily in nearby Pecan Park throughout
much of the day. Experts like Ridgway contend that an officer who
knew the players would probably have seen those two homeboys in the
park, known they didn't belong there and asked them to leave--or
better yet, searched them and found that they were carrying guns.
That same hypothetical officer also might have stopped by the
basketball game and realized that Gomez was an active gang member
conspicuously in enemy territory and thus a dangerously provocative
target, especially in a gym packed with moms, dads and kids. But if
there were officers patrolling the Pico Aliso housing project that day,
they did not know to do any of the above.
"And it's going to get worse," said Ridgway, "because when Parks
formed the new gang unit, he stipulated that officers can only be in it
for three years." Since most officers on the unit joined in the spring
of 2000, come next March or April their time will be up. "And we'll be
back to square one again."
Light and heat. Remove either and the cost becomes unacceptably
high--as in the case of Ronny Brock, whose older brother joined a gang,
while Ronny, 19, did not. Instead, he worked through most of his school
years in Boyle's office, graduated from Roosevelt High School, then
went straight to the Marines and was sent to Afghanistan right after
basic training.
At the beginning of February of this year, Ronny flew back to the U.S.
and was reassigned to Camp Pendleton. Before reporting for his new
duty, he returned home to his mother's house in Boyle Heights where,
on Saturday, Feb. 9, mom and son spent most of the day talking. Ronny
told her he wanted to seek out his father, a man he hardly knew. "I
want my dad to see what I've become," he said. That night he went to
visit his girlfriend. Then, at 1 a.m. Sunday, he was walking home along
Breed Street. Three guys approached him with the ritualistic question
that often precipitates violence: "Where're you from?"
Ronny was standing on the sidewalk outside his mother's bedroom
window when he answered. "I'm from nowhere," he said, his tone light
because he was still in a good mood. The three homeboys didn't believe
him and so pumped a stream of bullets, like a flock of tiny mean birds,
into his body. He died on the sidewalk before his mother or the
paramedics could reach him.
Heat and light. Ronny Brock had entered the light. The boys who shot
him hadn't. Would more heat on the street that night have saved him?
There is no actual way of knowing. But the question haunts.
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