April 11, 2002
Los Angeles Street Wars Grow Deadlier
By GREG WINTER
LOS ANGELES, April 10 — Danny Rodriguez rolled his tongue over the metal stud in his lower lip, palmed a fortune cookie from the bowl in front of him and shook it in his fist like a pair of dice.
"I bet this says I'm going to die in two weeks," said Danny, a 17-year-old gang member, forcing a grin.
He came pretty close a few weeks ago. Some boys from outside the neighborhood crashed a party in Cypress Park, just down the street from his home in northeast Los Angeles. Glares gave way to insults. Next came the guns. Bullets struck three of Danny's friends. When the melee ended, one boy from the rival gang lay dead.
"He should have known better," said Danny, shrugging his shoulders. Sympathy is too scarce to waste on strangers, he explained.
To the alarm of a city already hardened by a history of street wars, gang killings, after picking up pace significantly over the last two years, are mounting at an even faster rate this year. If the surge continues, the casualty count would be one of the highest in a decade.
In the first two months of 2002 alone, there were 63 gang-related homicides, more than triple the number for the same period two years ago and almost double the average over the past five years. Though the official statistics for March have not yet been tabulated, officials say the gang murder rate was equally high, leading residents to rally for cease-fires and spurring a volley of recriminations in the Los Angeles Police Department over who or what is responsible.
After starting out at a relatively mild pace in the early months of 2000, the number of killings built up momentum toward the end of the year, with a total of 331 deaths. The accelerated pace continued, reaching 346 killings by the end of 2001, and has only quickened since then.
Much of the blame for the rising violence has fallen on Chief Bernard C. Parks, whose request for a second term was denied on Tuesday by the Los Angeles Police Commission, in part because of gang problems.
But many current and former gang members say there is another reason for the rise in violence, one that has little to do with the police: Truces between gangs, forged and maintained over the last decade, are unraveling. New gang members carry with them only dim memories of the devastating violence that prompted the creation of the pacts in the first place.
"Unfortunately, people my age and younger, they're not worried about people killing each other," said James Scott, 21, a member of the Bounty Hunters, one of the many subsets of the Bloods. "As long as it's not them dying, they're not losing any sleep over it."
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Struck by the gangs themselves to quell a surge of killings in the early 1990's, the truces range from informal cease-fires to signed treaties, some of which have lasted as long as a decade. Communities have reinforced the peace, often using government money to hire former gang members as mediators who push for dialogue when tensions flare.
But even some longstanding truces have begun experiencing strain. With an air of celebration last April, gang leaders dragged a conference table into the middle of a street in the Watts neighborhood to expand a nine-year-old treaty between Crips and Bloods. The pledge they signed condemned the "barbarous acts that have outraged the conscience of mankind." Since then, however, gang-related crimes in the area have increased more than 43 percent, according to police statistics.
There are similar stories across the city. Tenuous truces in northeast Los Angeles have snapped. Even relatively solid treaties among West Side gangs — in Culver City, Venice and Santa Monica — have ruptured.
"Right now, there is no truce anymore," said Manny Lares, a gang member who runs Barrios Unidos, a group in Santa Monica that tries to stop gangs from fighting.
The surge in violence stems from a confluence of factors, but perhaps none so tangible as the troubles plaguing the police department, whose officers are steadily migrating to other, quieter cities in the surrounding suburbs of Orange County. After years of scandal, the department is having a difficult time bringing in new recruits.
"We're finding it hard to attract people to our business," said John Michael Cota, a Los Angeles police detective who specializes in gangs.
As the size of the force shrinks, the pipelines into gang life are open. Every year, more than 1,000 parolees return to Los Angeles, often with few job prospects and little commitment to truces struck in their absence.
There are also serious economic issues. Gang violence fell in the 1990's, in some measure because of California's booming economy, and the jobs it brought to Los Angeles's most depressed communities. But the recent downturn hit these neighborhoods with particular force, and the recovery has been slow. While the city's unemployment rate of 6.4 percent in February was only slightly above the state average, the jobless rate in many neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent is twice as high.
"We have people calling us all the time for work, but we don't have the jobs available for them," said Alex Sanchez, a former gang member now with Homies Unidos, a gang intervention group. "It makes it really difficult to sustain these truces."
Some Los Angeles officials go further, blaming the city's inattention in the late 1990's, when gang violence dropped sharply while the economy was booming. With gangs out of the news, the city made little effort to embark on initiatives that have helped keep youths out of gangs: after-school programs, job-training classes, drug treatment services.
"We really didn't step in with enough resources," said Jitahadi Imara, the Los Angeles County Probation Department's juvenile division chief, saying "the failure to do that is probably the most significant factor" in the current killings.
Now that the city is grappling with a $250 million deficit, gang prevention programs face an even more uncertain future. "We're not sure what's going to happen," said John Chavez, director of the Los Angeles Bridges Project, which finances the city's gang intervention agencies.
Schools find themselves stretched particularly thin, with tight budgets and a student body that grew 15 percent in the last decade.
"Kids in gangs, they're kind of the result of our negligence in the school district," said Henry Torres, an administrator for the Unified School District's after-school programs.
In the city's continuation schools, where children with troubled academic careers go, the school day ends in the early afternoon. After that, students are often on their own.
As the violence intensifies, some former gang members say that the groundwork for a lasting truce is unexpectedly being laid. Killing has reached the point where all but a few have grown weary of it, prompting gang members across several generations to resume talk of cease-fires.
"It's going to get worse before it actually gets better," said Aqeela Sherrills, who helped forge a truce between Crips and Bloods 10 years ago. "But what gives me hope is that people are constantly coming back to the table."
For his part, Danny Rodriguez has become tired of gang life, which he took up for protection when he entered high school.
Quitting is another matter, though. If he manages to scrounge up the money to have the tattoos taken off his arm, there is still the problem of living down the block from fellow gang members who might not be willing to let him leave.
"I just got myself into something that's hard to get out of," he said.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
