TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061592/06159928.000

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                                                                                LOS ANGELES, Page 36

Life in the 'Hood


After the riots, Crips and Bloods are keeping a fragile peace,
but membership is high despite a federal campaign to break the
gangs' hold on the slums

By SYLVESTER MONROE/LOS ANGELES


    "It feels like heaven," says Michael Broadnax, 26, of
South Central Los Angeles. A former member of the Bloods,
Broadnax did not dare venture into neighborhoods dominated by
Crips until factions of the rival gangs forged their remarkable
truce in the heat of last month's riots. "I can go to places
I've never been or even ridden through before," he says. "It's
like freedom." Those words are echoed over and over in South
Central these days, as residents marvel at the pact that has
brought relative peace to an area more accustomed to gunfire and
bloodshed than to handshakes.

    Despite claims that the truce was an effort to focus gang
fury against the police, there has been no evidence of
increased attacks on officers and there has not been a single
black gang-related homicide in L.A. since the riots. "They are
not coming together to organize against law enforcement," says
commu nity gang worker Charles Norman. "They are coming together
for mere survival because they have been to too many funerals."

    Others are more cautious. "If the gangs are maintaining
the truce because, as some say, they want to be a part of the
rebuilding of South Central L.A., that's a good sign," says
Sergeant Wes McBride, a member of Operation Safe Streets (OSS),
the gang unit of the L.A. County sheriff's department. "But if
it's so they don't have to cover their backs as much and can
become major dealers of narcotics, that's something else."

    Some of the skepticism exists because the truce does not
cover all Crips and Bloods factions. Nor does it affect the
city's more violent Latino and Asian gangs. One of the widest
and most organized peace efforts involves about 12,000 black
gang members in four Bloods and three Crips "sets," or factions,
within a 3.5-sq.-mi. area of South Central. The Monday after the
riots, their leaders came to Norman seeking his help in keeping
their peace. There were unity meetings between members of at
least 100 gang sets in housing projects and other locations.
Norman hopes the group that approached him will become a model
that spreads. "We know it's going to be difficult to sustain
the peace," he says. "But it's the answer to a lot of prayers
from mothers and grandmothers and other folks in the community."

    Truce or no truce, no one can deny that gangs are a
serious and growing problem. A 235-page report issued in May by
the staff of L.A. County district attorney Ira Reiner estimated
that the region has about 1,000 gangs with a total membership of
150,000. The study said gang-related homicides in the county
increased more than 200% between 1984 and 1991. While drugs and
gangs are intertwined, the D.A.'s staff concluded that most gang
members are not serious drug dealers. The report's most striking
claim was that half of all black males in L.A. County between
21 and 24 years old are involved in some kind of gang activity.

    That contention was sharply criticized by leaders of
L.A.'s black community and others, who questioned the accuracy
of the computerized police data bases that provided the numbers.
Noting that only 8.5% of all Latinos and less than one-half of
1% of young white men in that age group show up in the data
bases, critics complained that police authorities single out
young black men and stereotype them as gang members simply by
the way they dress and where they live. The police deny that
they indiscriminately enter names in the data bases and insist
that the numbers are an accurate reflection of the severity of
the problem. "We don't have to create gang members," says
McBride. "People are becoming too hung up on exact numbers. Even
if the number drops by 10,000, we still have a serious problem."

    Though the gang members have halted their internecine
bloodletting for now, police point out that they have hardly
become model citizens. According to the Reiner report, gang
members commit six times as many crimes as people from similar
backgrounds who do not belong to gangs. "Each one is a mini
crime wave, and together they are a major crime wave," says
Reiner. Opinions vary on what role gangs played in the riots,
but there is no doubt that they were involved. Several gang
members have been charged in the near fatal beating of truck
driver Reginald Denny. Last week 22 suspected members of a West
L.A. gang were arrested on charges of looting an estimated
$80,000 worth of high-tech equipment from a Korean-owned stereo
store during the upheaval at the end of April. "Were the gangs
involved?" says Reiner. "Of course they were, unless they were
home with the flu. Were gangs the instigators of the riot?
There's no evidence of that. This was not a gang riot, but it
was a riot gangs participated in."

    Gang members admit that they used the riots for their own
ends but refuse to take responsibility for them. "Gangs get
blamed for everything that happens," says Randy ("Bird")
Strickland, 21, a leader of a South Central L.A. gang not
participating in the truces. "Gangs are bad, true enough. But
if everybody stopped gang-banging right now, there'd still be
crime." Strickland says gang members, like many other South
Central residents, were outraged over the acquittal of the four
L.A.P.D. officers tried for the videotaped beating of Rodney
King. "They just kicked us right in the face with the Rodney
King verdict," Strickland says. "And we wanted to voice our
opinion in the only way we knew how, and that was to make some
noise. It was the only way people would listen to us."

    There is little hope that police action alone can contain
or eliminate the gang problem. After leaving the problem
largely to local authorities for the past two decades,
Washington is rejoining the fight. But with 5 of every 6 federal
antigang dollars going to police and prosecution, some say the
effort is seriously misdirected. This year, for example, the
Justice Department will spend most of its nearly $500 million
gang budget on law enforcement, while the Department of Health
and Human Services has disbursed only $40 million on prevention
and early-intervention programs since 1989. And the FBI's
announcement last January that it was reassigning 300 agents
from foreign counterintelligence to antigang efforts raised the
question of how effectively a handful of ex-cold warriors can
function in gang hot spots. In L.A. last February, 22 FBI agents
were redeployed to join an existing 12-man gang squad.

    Despite the presence of specialized gang units in every
L.A. County law-enforcement agency, gang membership has more
than tripled since 1985 and gang-related homicides have
increased from 271 to 771 last year. Gang members account for
an estimated 40% of the 22,000 inmates of the L.A. County jail.
According to Reiner, Hispanic gangs have been 60 years in the
making and black gangs 30. "The one thing we have to come to
grips with," he said, "is there isn't a five-point answer that
is going to get rid of the gang problem in five years. If it
took 30 years for the black gangs to reach this point, it's
going to take the next 15 or 20 or 35 years to really have an
impact on the problem. There is no immediate solution to the
problem of 150,000 gang members in L.A."

    Yet what works is no great mystery. In its 1992 report,
L.A.'s Interagency Gang Task Force recommended greater emphasis
on prevention, early intervention, juvenile justice reform and
education in schools. ``You need a strong law-enforcement
component," says Michael Genelin, who has headed the L.A. County
district attorney's hard-core gang division for seven years.
"But you also need a community component to get at the root
cause of the problem."

    Though there is now widespread agreement that gangs are a
social and economic problem and prevention is as important as
punishment, funds for programs to keep kids out of gangs and the
criminal-justice system are still hard to find. "You don't need
to spend five of every six dollars on suppression," says Steve
Valdivia, who runs L.A.'s Community Youth Gang Services Project
with a budget of $1.8 million. "If you spend two of every six
on prevention, the results square themselves over time." The
idea, he says, is to treat gangs like a "social disease" for
which there are prevention-oriented, educational and economic
cures.

    One is to replace the things that are missing in
gang-ridden communities. "No more than 10% of any gang are
hard-core, shoot-'em-up, hope-to-die criminals," Valdivia says.
"But you won't find the Boy Scouts in South Central L.A. Most
kids join gangs because that's what there is to join." And, like
diseases, gangs can be contagious. According to University of
Southern California gang expert Malcolm W. Klein, in 1961 there
were 23 cities with known street gangs nationwide. Today there
are 187. Practically every state has some kind of gang problem.
Nor is it limited to inner-city areas of major urban centers.
Gangs can be found in suburban cities with populations as small
as 5,000.

    The spread of gang activity to cities across the country
is part of the reason the FBI is reinforcing its antigang
effort. Bureau officials believe that, in conjunction with local
police, they can use federal laws like rico and Continuing
Criminal Enterprise statutes to attack drug trafficking and
other organized-crime elements of gang activity. "Many of these
gangs are very heavily involved in drug distribution, and we
have a lot of experience in the drug business and a lot of
expertise in organized crime that will transfer very well into
this effort," says Charlie J. Parsons, special agent in charge
of the FBI's L.A. regional office. "The FBI is not going to
solve the drug problem, and the FBI is not going to solve the
gang problem, but I think we can contribute."

    Skeptics argue that the FBI and other federal agencies
have been oversold on the connection between street gangs and
organized drug distribution. The Reiner report strongly
downplays that link, and most local police authorities agree.
"If you could eliminate the narcotics problem tomorrow, you'd
still have a significant gang problem," says Deputy Chief
Bernard C. Parks, a former L.A.P.D. gang coordinator, now
commander of the department's central bureau. "And if the next
day you eliminated the gang problem, you'd still have a
significant crime problem."

    Most members believe that gangs will survive no matter
what law enforcement does. Joseph ("Downer") Cardenas, 16, a
member of a South Central Chicano gang, was charged last week
with felony assault with a shotgun. (He has denied the charge.)
He recently asked his 11-year-old brother whether he wanted to
be a gang banger. He was happy to hear the boy say no. Yet the
chances are better than even that the youngster will follow in
Joseph's footsteps. Joseph didn't want to be a gang banger
either, but he followed the path paved by another Cardenas
brother, Juan, 19, who is serving a seven-year term for
attempted murder.

    "I wouldn't have been like my brother, and I don't want my
little brother to be a gang member," Joseph said after his
arraignment. "But I was born and raised in South Central, and
gangs are all that I see. That's the only alternative I've got,
and I have to take what comes. It's pitiful," he says. "A lot
of people die, and it keeps going on. But it's like a ball
rolling and rolling. There's no solution to it. There are just
always going to be gangs."