Racial Attacks By Gangs Rising, L.A. Officials Fear

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For the most part, though, the role racial animosity has played in gang crime has gone unexamined, largely undocumented in crime statistics and often tamped down by politicians and law enforcement officials anxious about inflaming tensions.

That changed this month when Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Police Chief William J. Bratton and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca all spoke with unusual candor of their concern that an increasing number of gang crimes appear to be born out of racial hatred. In a few instances, the Los Angeles Police Department has identified Latino gangs they say are indiscriminately targeting African American residents in what appear to be campaigns to drive blacks from some neighborhoods.

A Times analysis of Los Angeles Police Department statistics gives a partial picture, with numbers available only in cases in which a suspect’s race is known.

The tracking shows that the vast majority of the most serious gang crime remains intra-racial: Latinos attacking Latinos, blacks attacking blacks.

Last year there were more than 2,700 black-on-black or Latino-on-Latino incidents compared with slightly more than 500 interracial attacks.

Intent is often unknown

Harder to determine is intent. Without an admission of motivation, and often without even a suspect to question, knowing why a victim was targeted by a gang member is difficult: Was it skin color? Did they or family members have direct ties to gangs? Was it just bad luck? Mistaken identity?

In cases where gang-related homicide, aggravated assault or robbery crossed racial lines, LAPD tracking shows an 11% jump in incidents from 2002 to 2006; from 213 to 240 black-on-Latino attacks; and from 247 to 269 Latino-on-black attacks. As those interracial crimes rose, intra-racial gang attacks fell by 23%, from 3,577 to 2,780.

In a city where blacks and Latinos make up 96% of known street gang members and often live in proximity, it would not be unexpected that the two groups account for the vast majority of interracial gang crime.

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Of the 13 attempted murders involving gang members in the west San Fernando Valley since July, 10 involved black victims and Latino suspects, Lt. Tom Smart said. In many cases, the black victims were not affiliated with gangs, he said.

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Latinos and blacks are not equally represented in either the city’s population or documented gang membership. About 49% of Los Angeles residents are Latino and about 10% are black, according to the most recent Census Bureau estimates.

Of the city’s estimated 39,000 street gang members, the LAPD reports about 56% are in Latino gangs and about 40% in black gangs.

Of homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies committed by black gang members, about 2 in 10 are against Latinos. About 1 in 10 of the crimes committed by Latino gang members are against blacks.

Even with an uptick last year, gang crimes remain far below the historic highs of more than a decade ago.

Geography, identity and money remain driving forces in gang crime far more than race, law enforcement officials said.

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Where violent crime takes place plays a major role in the relatively comparable number of interracial crimes committed by Latino and black gang members, despite blacks making up a much smaller portion of the population. A significant number of gang crimes occur in the Newton, Southwest, Southeast, and 77th Street divisions — an area of the city that generated 37% of violent crime citywide last year and still has a large black population.

Those who follow gang crime caution that statistics currently kept by law enforcement make it difficult to determine specific motivations for most crimes. In hundreds of cases even the race of the suspect is unknown.

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One recent case to draw national attention was the shooting death last month of Cheryl Green, 14. Green, who was black, was allegedly targeted by 204th Street Latino gang members because of her race.

Her shooting was one in a recent series of racially charged incidents in that neighborhood, where a decade ago the LAPD had won awards for cracking down on the 204th Street gang and a rival black gang.

Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger said the 204th Street gang isn’t like most other gangs in the city. “They have taken it to the extreme with utter hate. And they have become more extreme. Spraying ‘No N’s here’ on the walls,” he said.

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By the early 1990s, many South Los Angeles neighborhoods had become majority Latino, a population that has continued to grow in recent years.

Coexistence is strained

With that shift came changing gang boundaries. Alex Alonso, who studies gang territories in Los Angeles and runs the website streetgangs.com, said that though rival black gangs have traditionally had well-defined territories that do not overlap, Latino and black gangs had long coexisted on the same streets with little trouble.

As more and more areas changed from majority black to majority Latino — and conversely as blacks moved into traditionally Latino areas such as Harbor Gateway and parts of the Valley — open conflict broke out in some cases.

At the same time, Alonso said the underlying tensions were not openly talked about, with some politicians worrying that such dialogue might inflame racial divisions.

Gang violence in general, he said, has been a difficult topic for leaders hoping to promote their areas as good places to live.

He pointed to the situation in Highland Park, where the Avenues, a notorious Latino gang, in 1995 unleashed a six-year campaign to drive African Americans out of their predominantly Latino neighborhood.

Last summer, four of the gang’s leaders were found guilty in federal court of hate crimes. Three were sentenced to life in prison, and the fourth is scheduled to be sentenced Monday.

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In the absence of admissions from suspects, local leaders have been quick to downplay race as motivation. Last summer, when three Latinos, including a 12-year old boy, were killed execution-style by black suspects in South Los Angeles, Villaraigosa urged residents not to jump to conclusions, although police said the victims had no gang ties and no known enemies.

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Racism often downplayed

Fernando Guerra, a Loyola Marymount professor and director of the Center for the Study of L.A., said there has been little upside for politicians in talking about the racial overtones of gang violence. The instinct, he said, is to downplay racism as a cause, in part because “it’s not clear what the policy will be or even if there is a public policy that would work.”

One factor in racial street violence may be long-standing racial divisions in jails and prisons. Early last year , thousands of Latino and black inmates in Los Angeles County jails engaged in a series of fights over more than a week, leaving scores injured and two black inmates dead.

As felons go in and out of jails and prisons in the state with increasing frequency, some observers worry that the strict racial divisions learned behind bars are becoming internalized.

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One step to better understanding the role of racism would be for law enforcement agencies to track and make available to researchers information about specific motivations in gang crimes when known.

“When you’re talking about gang-on-gang violence, you ask, ‘How much of that is part of normal gang conflicts over drugs and territory?’ ” Maxson said. “The question is: ‘What is the role of racial conflict when you think of gang conflict?’ ”

A 14-year-old girl was killed by Hispanic gang members who police say were targeting blacks. A 9-year-old girl died after being hit by a stray bullet as gang members exchanged shots near her home. A cop was wounded in a gunbattle with a suspected gangster.

The soaring violence is prompting police and politicians to promise one of the toughest crackdowns against gangs in city history.

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However, the effort has met skepticism in the city that has an estimated 700 gangs with 40,000 members — about four for every police officer — and that gave birth to some of the nation’s most notorious gangs, including the Crips, Bloods and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

“It’s too big, it’s too entrenched, it’s too intimately connected with the urban setup here,” Malcolm Klein, a gang expert at the University of Southern California, said of the gang problem. “You can reduce it. But the idea you can somehow eliminate it is ridiculous.”

Gangs have thrived for generations in Los Angeles, but the especially violent past year caught police brass off guard. Citywide crime rates fell in 2006 but gang-related offenses increased 14 percent — the first hike in four years. In the San Fernando Valley, gang murders, assaults, robberies and other crimes jumped 42 percent.

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Autho rities promise to increase enforcement in afflicted neighborhoods. The officers will be armed with injunctions forbidding gang members from assembling in certain areas, lawsuits aimed at shutting down gang hangouts as nuisances and probation orders barrin g gang members from returning to their neighborhoods after their release from prison.

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“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Mario Corona, a former member of the Pacoima Criminals gang in the San Fernando Valley who now works to rehabilitate gang m embers.

The city has been hampered in the past by a lack of resources and changing department priorities, according to a city-funded report by civil rights attorney Connie Rice.

And a 1980s anti-gang unit known as Community Resources Against Street Hood lums, or CRASH, was disbanded after allegations of police corruption. Few of the thousands of suspected gang members in South Los Angeles were ever charged.

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Two weeks ago, an officer searching a house in the area for wanted gang members was wound ed in the leg when a gang-banger fired through a closed bedroom door.

Nothing has outraged the city more than the gang slayings of children. Last month, 9-year-old Charupha Wongwisetsiri was standing in her family’s kitchen when she was struck by a stray round from gang crossfire in Angelino Heights near downtown.

That came just five days after the shooting death of Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old black girl, who was talking to friends in the Harbor Gateway area. Two Hispanic gang members, who police said w ere intent on killing blacks, were arrested.

Alex Sanchez, a former MS-13 member who now runs a gang intervention program, said police moves to identify the worst gangs could instead lead to more crime.

“It’s feeding the egos of gang members,” Sanchez said. “They’re all going to want to be on the top 10.”

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