**MUST READ* Time.com on the L.A. Gangs

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The Return of L.A. Gangs

With police in retreat and gangsters winning parole, mayhem returns to the streets

BY TERRY MCCARTHY

On a Sunday afternoon in July, 13-year-old Elizabeth Tomas was sitting at her bedroom window in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles. She was putting on her makeup when a bullet came through the window and hit her just above the left eye. Tomas, who had just started high school, was the innocent victim of a random gang shooting. After visiting her in the hospital, L.A.'s new mayor, James Hahn, put up a $25,000 reward for information on the crime. "If a young girl can't stay in her bedroom safely," he says, "we are in terrible shape."

Los Angeles is in terrible shape — again. The city's street gangs, which had been relatively quiet since the crack-cocaine epidemic of the late '80s and early '90s burned itself out, are back with a vengeance. After falling steadily from 1996 to '99, gang murders in the city increased 143% last year; 331 people died because of gang violence, in contrast to 136 in 1999. The violence got worse during the first half of this year, with a 23% increase in murders. Even as gang-related property crimes decrease — robbery is down 8.8%, carjacking is down 28% — other violent crimes are up. Felony assault by gangsters is up 9.7%, attacks on police officers are up 35.5%, witness intimidation is up 50%. In other words, there is less drug dealing and theft, more violence for the sake of violence. "It's a disturbing trend, and there's nothing I am going to be spending more time on," says Hahn, who has discussed the problem with President Bush.

Time followed one gang, the Playboys, off and on for three months. The Playboys, with several hundred members, are just one of 1,300 such groups in L.A., all of them stuck in a deadly spiral of violence that the justice system has not broken, though it has put tens of thousands of gangsters behind bars. Five members of the Playboys were shot dead in the past year — most of them in senseless turf battles with nearby rivals.

Criminologists point to two reasons for the city's upsurge in violence. First, veteran gang members jailed a decade ago during the crack epidemic are getting out of prison — and returning to reinfect their neighborhood with violent habits hardened and reinforced in prison. "The next generation of gang homicides is going to have a different construct [from the crack epidemic]," says Jack Riley, director of the criminal-justice program at Rand Corp. His research points to returning felons as a major reason for the spike in shootings across Los Angeles. "Locals in South Central and East L.A. think it is people returning from prison and trying to re-establish their authority," he says. There are 100,000 gang members in jail in California, and they are getting out at a rate of about 3,000 a month, according to the state's department of corrections. This year alone will see more than 30,000 veteran gang members back on the streets. Social workers call them "spoons" — people who get out of jail and stir things up.

Chino is a spoon. (Like other gang members mentioned in this article, he agreed to speak to Time on condition that his real name not be used.) At 29, he has been a Playboys member for 14 years. Many of his crack-war contemporaries are long dead. Chino, as a battle-scarred survivor, has earned special respect in the gang. In his spine are the fragments of a .38-cal. bullet from a 1994 drive-by shooting. A devil is tattooed on his back. He has shot at least two gang rivals, and he got out of jail this year after serving six years for firing at a cop from a stolen car. Younger gang members love to hear him talk about his time in jail — particularly the way the wardens made him take part in "gladiator" fights with other prisoners, which the guards would bet money on. Chino says he was singled out because he had shot at a cop, but the fights only made him tougher. And his exploits inspire young gang members to head into the night to prove their own toughness.

The second reason for the increase in gang violence is just as basic. As gang members like Chino are coming back to their old neighborhoods, the police — demoralized by scandal — are backing out of them. In the mid-'90s, the L.A.P.D. curtailed gang violence with some hard-nosed policing, spearheaded by tough crash (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units. But after Rafael Perez, a rogue cop from the L.A.P.D.'s Rampart division, was arrested in 1998 for stealing cocaine from a police warehouse, he implicated 70 antigang cops, alleging corruption, excessive force, planting evidence and falsifying testimony. In the end, eight cops were indicted; of these, four were cleared, three pleaded to lesser crimes, and one is awaiting trial.

As a result of his testimony — which helped secure Perez a plea bargain and reduced sentence, though its accuracy is a subject of intense debate — some 100 gang convictions were overturned. The city is facing as much as $125 million in liability claims stemming from the Rampart scandal.

Los Angeles chief of police Bernard Parks dissolved the crash units in March 2000 and in their place set up Special Enforcement Units, which operate under severely limited rules of engagement. Morale fell to an all-time low, and many cops left for police departments in other cities. It was only a matter of time before the L.A.P.D. began to lose its grip on gangs. "Immediately after the dissolution of crash, there was a lull," says detective Chuck Zeglin, a gang specialist who has 18 years' experience in the L.A.P.D.'s detective-support division. "Then a lot of the more hard-core gangsters came to believe we were not going to be as proactive as before, and they went a little crazy."

Chino is as hard-core as it gets. In jail he learned how to make a tattooing needle, and a recent afternoon found him sitting in a small apartment in Highland Park inscribing a bunny design on the shoulder of Guapa, a 19-year-old female gang member. As Chino worked, he talked about the thrill he got from shooting at people when he was younger. "After a while I really wanted to see myself hit someone," he said. "That is how intense it became in my relationship with my gun. So I walked up to some guys and shot them. It was a real rush." Like many veterans who have put in jail time, Chino thinks the younger gang members don't know how to behave on the streets. "The neighborhood is more dangerous now because the young homeboys are not looking out for each other," he said. He mentioned Lucky, one of the dead Playboys, who was shot and killed on a street corner last summer while talking on a pay phone. "Nobody was there to watch his back, so this guy could just walk up to him from behind and shoot him," Chino said. The two gang members in the room nodded silently as he talked. Chino went outside to smoke a joint. As he looked out over the roofs of the low-rent housing, his brow furrowed. "Sometimes I think I could have finished school and gone to college, but then I think, No — if I did it over again, I would be more careful, try not to get busted, make more money from drugs but have more organization. That's what I learned in prison." He has thought about getting a job, but the tattoos on his neck and face are an instant red flag to potential employers. "It's hard to change," he added. "Society pushes you back into the same pile of s___ you came out of. Back into the 'hood, drinking, kicking and selling drugs to a bunch of young kids, preparing them to take your place."

Chino's terms of parole barred him from returning to the Playboys' territory, around the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Fedora Street in L.A.'s Rampart district, but he quickly reappeared at his old haunts anyway. He set about goading some of the younger homeboys to "put some work in" for the gang. That usually meant getting stoned, then driving a car through a rival gang's neighborhood while shooting out the window. Word got back to the parole officer that Chino was out causing trouble, and the police did a parole search of his house and found a gun. In May, Chino was back in jail — but not before he had communicated the "rush" of shooting to other gang members.

For the younger gangsters, the shootings are like a game. And with the cops pulling back, the game has only one rule: Kill or be killed. On a Saturday night in the Playboys' neighborhood, three young gang members are hanging out — Rowdy, Spotter and Mad Dog. Spotter has taken a sniper's position with a rifle on top of a building overlooking Pico. Rowdy is down at the corner with a Beretta handgun in a pocket of his baggy pants, and Mad Dog is standing in the street, flashing gang signs at passing cars and looking to draw fire from any rival gangster who might be passing.

"That is what you call bait," says Spotter with a laugh, looking down the sights of the rifle. He whistles a warning to his homeboys on the street. A black-and-white comes into view, doing a slow lap around four or five blocks, up Pico, across Mariposa, down and back around. Then it leaves. The Playboys laugh at the departing cops. Two years ago, crash teams were all over them, jumping out of their patrol cars to search them for weapons and drugs, getting them to pull up their shirts to show their tattoos, pumping them for information about shootings. These days the cops barely engage. The night before, Rowdy had spray-painted a two-story design of PBS, the Playboys logo, on the front of a building on Pico. It took him nearly three hours — from 2:30 a.m. to past 5 in the morning — and in that time not a single police car came by to stop him.

Nobody got shot that night, so a little later the gangsters sit on the porch of a house on Fedora, drinking beer, smoking weed, listening to Eminem and swapping stories of jail, women, guns. Little Boy is bragging that he has scored a huge settlement for a false-arrest report filed by Perez, the central figure in the Rampart crash scandal. They laugh about that. Little Boy will blow the money in a year, they think. Already he has bought an SUV and a wide-screen TV on credit.

Since the police offensive on crack in the '90s, the Playboys deal mostly in marijuana, which doesn't have crack's high profit margin or lethal side effects. Drug fashion has moved on, and the days have passed when multiple dealers hung out on side streets in the Playboys' territory selling to crazed addicts. Black gangs are still heavily involved in drugs, but Latinos, who make up 60% of L.A.'s 100,000 gangsters, are far less so.

The Playboys' principal rivals are the 18th Street gang and Mara Salvatrucha. Each continually invades its rivals' territories, which are often only a few city blocks away, spraying their graffiti on walls, sometimes doing drive-bys. Each attack prompts retaliation, as violence feeds on violence. Inevitably, innocent bystanders like Elizabeth Tomas get hurt.

No wonder the rise in Los Angeles gang violence is starting to attract attention from gang-suppression units in other parts of the country. "As goes L.A., so goes the rest of the country," says Ron Stallworth, a former gang-intelligence coordinator for the state of Utah. "Whatever is fueling the rise in killings there will soon infect the rest of us."

The infection process is already under way. To avoid the mandatory 25-years- to-life sentence under California's three-strikes-and-you're-out law, gang members with two convictions have been moving out of state. "We are arresting people in Spokane and finding they are gangsters from L.A. who have also been arrested in Oregon and Seattle," says Sergeant Michael Yates of the Spokane, Wash., police department.

But with crime rates down in many jurisdictions and city budgets under pressure, some antigang forces are being reassigned — and the gangs are quick to take note. El Paso, Texas, a city that saw 300 drive-by shootings in 1993, had reduced that number to 14 (just one of them fatal) by last year. Early this year, during the city's mayoral campaign, the candidates debated disbanding the five antigang units and reassigning the 30 officers to regular patrol duty. Within a few months, there were two fresh gang murders, a spray of new gang graffiti on city walls, and a new sense of entitlement among some gangsters. "When we went to arrest the gang members, they said we had no right to be there because we had been disbanded," says Mary Lou Carrillo, a gang-intelligence officer with the El Paso police department.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the rapid rebound in Los Angeles gang murders, say cops and other gang experts, is that aggressive policing alone will never break the cycle of gang violence. Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works in gang-infested Boyle Heights, says the antigang strategy developed in California and copied elsewhere "is bankrupt. You have the three-strikes law and jail and so on, but you can't terrify a kid into being hopeful about his future." Many cops agree. "We don't need new laws," says Sergeant Wes McBride, founder of the California Gang Investigators Association and a 28-year veteran of antigang policing. "We have a penal code a foot thick. You can't just work gangs with police suppression. You need prevention and intervention programs too."

But whenever Chino gets out of jail from his latest weapons-possession charge, he will still have nowhere to go but the gang neighborhood, nobody to hang with but his homeboys — and nothing to do but shoot at his enemies.

"A gangster is someone with no fear and no goal," says Manuel Romero, a former corporal in the Marine Corps whose brother is in the Playboys. "If you fear something, you will try to move away from it. If you have a goal, you will try to go towards it. They don't go anywhere."

As the spike in murders in Los Angeles shows, the gang nightmare is back. Gangs, it turns out, can take more beatings and lock-down time than any humane society is prepared to deal out. And it is the 13-year-old girl putting on makeup by her bedroom window who has to pay the price.

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http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/gangs/index.html

Don’t think for one minute that this is a unique ‘Los Angeles’ problem. You should pay attention now because this is the social disaster that will bring this country to its knees.

Just My Opinion



-- Just (my@2.cents), August 29, 2001

Answers

These people will continue to act like they do, kill, be killed or end up back in prison. It's too bad we don't have an island to send them to to live out their lives like the English did when they sent criminals to Australia. The babies born in these areas should have a chance to grow up away from there so they don't grow up with the same mentality.

I remember about 15-20 years ago when L.A. gangs tried to establish themselves in Seattle, the Blacks here didn't want them around, neighborhoods were not a war with each other, so they were chased out and ended up going to Tacoma where they created a little L.A. It has been cleaned up quite a bit. It would be helpful if the media-movies, TV, and especially music companies didn't glorify the gang mentality. But anything for a profit right?

Maybe we will get lucky and California will have an earthquake that causes L.A. to fall off into the ocean.

-- Cherri (jessam6@home.com), August 29, 2001.


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