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| Monica Almeida/The New York Times |
| Sgt. Shannon Allen with gang graffiti in South-Central Los Angeles. Officials list 112,000 people as gang members or "wannabes" in the county. |
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — The afternoon that William J. Bratton was confirmed as police chief, a man was beaten to death in the South-Central section of this sprawling megalopolis.
Robbie Hanzy, an unemployed member of the Rolling 60's Crips gang, was killed by his brother Alton, also an unemployed member of the Rolling 60's, the police said. The fight, the authorities said, was precipitated by an afternoon filled with alcohol and by two men with nothing better to do.
The killing was the 97th homicide this year in this part of the South-Central neighborhood, a precinct of fewer than 12 square miles, population 185,000. It is by any standard, the bloodiest area in the West, infested with gangs, narcotics and armed teenagers. The area is on pace for 120 homicides this year, a 43 percent jump from last year and a 240 percent increase since 1998. The three-precinct South-Central area reported 197 homicides through Oct. 18.
Homicide in the city as a whole is up nearly 19 percent from last year. The reason, the authorities say, is the re-emergence of gang warfare.
"The Gaza Strip probably has more deaths, but this is a busy area, and the problem is gangs," said Detective Rudy Limos, the ranking homicide investigator in the 77th Station, which is within South-Central. "How you control it is beyond me."
Violent crime is rising around the nation after a decade of striking decreases, and Los Angeles is among the leaders. If things hold to form, this city of 3.8 million people will earn the title of the Murder Capital, succeeding Chicago.
A beleaguered citizenry has turned to Mr. Bratton, regarded in some corners to be the most innovative police executive since J. Edgar Hoover and in others to be a man of enormous ego who took too much credit for the precipitous drop in crime in New York City, where he was police commissioner for 27 months. At his confirmation hearing this month, Mr. Bratton seemed well aware that his stewardship of the demoralized and scandal-plagued department may very well be the standard by which his legacy is judged.
"This department will be my last police department that I will have the opportunity to work with and lead," Mr. Bratton told City Council members. "I would like to see it as the capstone of my career."
The circumstances he walks into here are the inverse of what he walked into in New York in 1994. The crime rate is skyrocketing, not inching downward, as it was in New York. The economy is busting, not booming. Federal, state and local tax money is drying up, and fewer officers, not more, are on the streets. At the same time, a steady stream of violent parolees is finding the way back to the old neighborhoods.
Moreover, Mr. Bratton takes over a damaged force that is operating under a federal consent decree that punishes overly aggressive officers. By many officers' accounts, the beat cop has virtually stopped working.
"Members of this department are demoralized," said Cmdr. Richard Roupoli, assistant commander of the South Bureau, which includes many poor and violent precincts of Los Angeles, including South-Central.
"We disbanded our gang units two years ago and then reinstituted them with new people without extensive gang knowledge," Commander Roupoli said. "At the same time, we've got multiple gang wars going on. The result are the murders we're seeing now."
When it was learned in late 1999 that a renegade gang unit, the Rampart Division, was planting evidence, racially profiling and, in some cases, unjustifiably shooting suspects, all gang units were disbanded, and the city accepted a consent decree that among other provisions uses monitors to weed out corruption and wrongdoing. In a few months, years of street intelligence was lost, along with the reassigned officers. A strict discipline system was put in place, and nearly 1,000 officers left to work elsewhere. A result, officers said, has been a steadily rising homicide rate.
"It stems from an oppressive discipline system," the commander of the robbery-homicide unit, Capt. James Tatreau, said. "Since Rampart, every complaint made, whether by a chronic complainer or nut, meant that it would follow a cop through his career and enter into the mix of promotion or special assignments.
"The cops' solution?" Captain Tatreau said. "Stop being a cop."
Mr. Bratton said his first priority after being sworn in on Oct. 28 would be ending the smile-and-wave approach to crime fighting. He said he wanted policing based on the so-called broken-windows theory. That idea holds that small quality-of-life crimes eventually encourage greater lawlessness. If graffiti and broken windows are tolerated, for instance, eventually prostitution and drug dealing and companion violence will find their ways to the street corners.
It is a concept that Mr. Bratton instituted with great success in New York, where the homicide rate once topped 2,200 a year, almost four times its current level.
It is hard to know whether the strategy can translate here. Los Angeles, sprawling over 463 square miles, is a city where community policing is often little more than the lights of a helicopter washing over bedroom windows. New York's five boroughs add up to 309 square miles. New York has 39,000 police officers for a city of eight million people, and Los Angeles has 9,000 officers for four million.
"You can only hope he's going to have some kind of effect," Detective Limos said. "Because we don't have many answers."
After a decade of declines in crime across the country, crime rates not only here but also in other major cities may have no place to go but up, said Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.
"It's a bad time right now," Mr. Travis said. "The economy is weakened. State and local budgets are tight, and that hampers overtime flexibility and new hires. There are 600,000 people coming out of prison every year. Four times as many parolees were released this year than 20 years ago. At the same time, transitional services are cut and people are dumped on streets."
The mix, especially here, is a witch's brew. Jobs are disappearing, and welfare changes are leaving marginal people in the lurch. Moreover, 1,000 people a year return to the city streets from prison after having been locked up in the get-tough-on-crime 90's. With violent unrehabilitated felons back on the streets and many officers heading for suburban work, the streets are volatile.
"If Bratton can turn it around in this climate, it says he's a great police manager," Mr. Travis said.
Mary Phipps, a grandmother from South-Central whose bedroom window faces a wall scarred with graffiti of the simmering war between Bloods and Crips factions said: "Things are out of control. First it's these gangs. And then it's the police out of control, and now it's the gangs again. There has to be someone to put it in balance."
At any given time in Los Angeles County, 112,000 young men and women are listed as gang members or "wannabes" in a database created by law enforcement officials.
As of Oct. 5, Los Angeles had 517 homicides compared with 436 last year. The police said 75 percent were gang related.
"If we could get rid of the gangs, we'd be living in heaven," Detective Limos said.
In the county, with more people and a seemingly endless sprawl, homicide is also increasing, but at a rate nearly three times slower than in the city.
"There is a whole latitude of policing within the law," Lt. Bob Rifkin, a supervisor in the gang unit of the County Sheriff's Department, said. "But society has to decide the balance between safety and civil rights. How much of one are you willing to sacrifice for the other?"
A gang member in Compton, one of 3,000 parolees there, laid out the thinking of the criminal mind in terms of the disarray in the Police Department, as opposed to the Sheriff's Department. "If you're going to mess around," he said, "it's better to do it outside the sheriff's area and in the Police Department's."
It is not as though the county is without problems, too. Take the case of Jose Sanchez, 19, who the police said had two things going against him. One was the telltale dead eye that he neglected to cover with a mask before he carjacked and beat a stranger and, second, the wisecrack smile that never left his face. Sheriff's deputies executed a morning raid against him and his crew, netting drugs and automatic weapons.
"I ain't afraid of prison and I ain't afraid of you," Mr. Sanchez said as he left his mother's house in handcuffs. "I was just on my way to school."
